Author Videos

Pete Liebengood


Transcript:

Xlibris Author Pete Liebengood Talks about His Book, Accidental Droning


My name’s Pete Liebengood and I’m the author of Accidental Droning. I wanted to write something . . . I knew I wanted to start writing novels. I didn’t really have a subject. I was searching for something and then a neighbor of mine—we were having lunch one day, and he started talking to me about his drone.

I said, “Drone? You’re an adult just like me, my same age. What are you doing with a drone?”

He said, “I’m having a great time flying it”.

So I thought to myself: Drones. . . that’s a good subject. ‘Cause it’s current and controversial.

Accidental Droning is about a guy who has a hobby of flying a drone and accidentally captures a video of a woman being murdered by being tied up, gagged, and thrown into a pool and drowned. So he’s between a rock and a hard place and therein leads to a lot of misadventures.

It’s “mystery light”, I’d call it. If I can get a LOL (laugh out loud) from a reader—that’s what I’m trying to accomplish.


Self-Publishing with Xlibris

I have recommended Xlibris to several other authors actually. I think their biggest strength is probably in their marketing. They have every way of marketing a book that I could think of. Unless you’re just doing it for a complete hobby and don’t care what your sales are, then that’s one thing. But if you do, you need to go to a company that has some experience and some successful history in marketing what it is that you have written.


Seeing His Book in Stores

I convinced a Barnes and Noble store here in my hometown to purchase some books. And what was really exhilarating was to actually go into the store, go to the new fiction shelf, and see the book there. Five copies of my book. That was the highlight—even more than getting it in the mail was seeing it in Barnes and Noble.



Author Pete Liebengood on Self-Publishing Multiple Books with Xlibris


I decided to self-publish to expedite the process because I had tried in the past the standard, old-school way of getting published—by trying to find an agent, an agent trying to find a publisher—and I have been told that it could take two to three years and I didn’t want to wait that long. I wanted to get my book out there and get an idea where I stood as a writer and I can do it in much less time than it would take to do the standard route. I got feedback from readers and reviews from professional review companies that basically told me, “Yeah, you can write”.

Self-publishing with Xlibris

I have recommended Xlibris to several other authors actually. Simply because of what I think is a very professional approach to the whole idea of self-publishing and marketing. I must have been asleep in school—in high school and in college—because I’ve written all my life in television news. That’s a different kind of writing. It’s a dot, dot, dot for expression, for reading, for narrating a script. Xlibris has an editing service too. And when I first got my first draft back, and I saw all of this red down the side worth in corrections—one after another, page after page after page . . . and it’s all punctuation. We got it fixed. It just took a lot longer than I thought. Now I’m kind of used to seeing the red.

Reaching Goals as a Published Author

I want my readers, in every book that I write, to be entertained. That’s the primary goal. If I can get a LOL (laugh out loud) from the reader—that’s what I’m trying to accomplish.

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