Write Now Literary Book Tours is pleased to be coordinating a book tour for author Joanne Otto. This is a two-month book tour for her books: The You-Song and Daughter of Jerusalem. This tour will run June- July, 2018.
Introducing Joanne
Website: http://joanneotto.com/
The You-Song celebrates, in a way young children can understand, the unique and vital place each of us occupies in God's world and encourages them to fill their place in it with joy. Written by a teacher who's helped many children overcome reading challenges, "The You-Song" is user-friendly, consisting of words that are either familiar or easy to decode. Lavishly illustrated with nearly 50 heart-warming photos, it's also fun to read aloud to pre-readers.
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
About the Book
Daughter of Jerusalem" takes its 21st-century readers on a journey back to the first-century world of a young rabbi named Yeshua—better known to us as Jesus. Mara, the young heroine of this story, gets to mingle with the crowds who come to hear him teach during his visits to Jerusalem and, finally, to meet him face to face in a brief, life-changing encounter—one that comes at no small cost to herself. For middle-grade readers who want to use the book as a springboard for deeper study, there are Bible references and questions on each chapter, as well as a glossary. For others, the story itself will be the full journey.
Genre: Christian Fiction
Would you share a little bit about yourself with us today?
I’ve seen myself in lots of different roles—as a teacher of English and foreign languages, as an academic language therapist helping dyslexic children learn reading and writing skills, as an enthusiastic singer and piano accompanist, as an avid student of the Bible, as a wife, mother and grandmother. But until recently I hadn’t envisioned myself as the author of a book.
Why do you think it took so long for the idea of writing a book to take hold?
Even though I’ve enjoyed writing and took several excellent writing courses early on, I made the mistake of thinking of writing too much as a personal accomplishment rather than simply enjoying the process of being a channel for the ideas that were coming to me. So when an essay and a short story I’d submitted for publication met with a negative response—or no response at all!—I let myself become discouraged.
There were other reasons as well. I was preoccupied with raising children. More importantly, I hadn’t yet had the life experiences that prepared me to write these books. And from a purely practical standpoint, an independent route to first-time authorship has not been available until relatively recently.
How does it feel to you to be a published author?
A bit like sending the children you’ve loved and nurtured off to school for the first time! My books are my babies, and, like most mothers, I delighted in the early stages of their development. They often surprised me in the amazing process of becoming what they were meant to be.
But the time inevitably came when, if they were to fulfill their purpose, those “babies” had to be released into the big wide world, where others might or might not approve of them. Perhaps the most difficult step I took in launching them was to send them to KirkusReviews for an unbiased assessment of their merit. The day I found those reviews in my email was one for celebration. My babies had passed the test with flying colors!
Why have you decided to republish the books five years after they first came out?
So that they can bless a wider audience. It’s been enjoyable getting enthusiastic feedback from friends and acquaintances who’ve read them, but outside my circle of acquaintance, they’ve been reaching relatively few readers. When I heard that LaShawn Dobbs of Divine Purpose Publishing had expressed an interest in them, I felt the door was opening to a divinely provided opportunity to make them accessible to more people.
Are you currently working on another book?
Not at present. My books weren’t written because I wanted to become an author. They both seemed to have a life beyond me. It felt as if I were being demandedto write them—as if my own purpose could not be fulfilled withoutwriting them. Unless another book comes to my thought as a clear imperative, these two may end up being my only book “babies.” Time will tell. But meanwhile I’ve enjoyed writing essays and poetry. Writing is always important to me as a way of processing ideas.
Purchase Link: http://amazon.com/author/joanneotto
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