by Ken Raybuck

Watershed Books is a wonderful and magical place located conveniently in downtown Brookville, PA, my hometown. I am not kidding when I say that. It is certainly magical to me because I never dreamed in a million years that I would be writing a blog, (and this is my first one), for a bookshop in my little hometown. And I certainly never imagined that I would be writing this as an author, to help them promote my attendance at a book reading on July 10th. The book reading is especially wondrous and exciting, because it is for books that I wrote. Writing even one novel was something I would not have calculated when I was ten years old, when I first set foot in Brookville’s Northside Elementary School. Now, I have written three complete novels and have sold over five hundred books.

All of this is so unimaginable to me. You know why? Because I was that kid in my second novel, SWORD, (the character Sammy Kane), who got lost on his way to the next class. I was the kid who could not find his way. Sammy Kane did find his way and so did I, but it was not an easy road to adulthood. My books could only be written based on life experiences, partly my own, along with the life experiences  of others I heard about. We all have stories to tell. I wish everyone would write a book. We need to leave something behind. You do not have to be the number one bestseller, you just need to start writing.

I have always written a journal. It is nothing at all like my books. It is “just the facts mam”, but the act of writing something down every day prepared me for writing a book. Writing is indeed a tedious task. You need to keep at it. Each book I wrote took a year. Editing was the hardest part and the least fun. I got help from many beta readers as I went along and could not have done it without them.

Publishing is so simple with Amazon. Do not get hung up on that. Pay for a professional editor. The biggest challenge is selling. Luckily, I had no major goals about that. My singular challenge was publishing my first book at the outset of a pandemic. No one was going anywhere! Facebook saved me and I thank my FB friends for reading my books and encouraging me to continue. Now, we are seemingly done with the pandemic, or at least living our lives within it, and Watershed and other venues provide me with an opportunity to share my books with even more people.

If you want to find out more about Sammy Kane, Grant Miller, or “Randy”, grab one of my books. There is a little bit of Ken Raybuck in all of them! My novels are pure entertainment and take you on journeys through the minds of some young men who dealt with extraordinary circumstances. If you start to think you know what is going to happen next, you are not reading Ken Raybuck’s book!