Author, Wayne Glenn

The first two years of Glenn’s life, he live in Jamesville, MO (Stone County.) His fathers bought a place in Christian County in 1949, Glenn‘s current home.

Beginning his writing career in his mid 20’s he states, "I’ve written some pamphlets, history of the Glenn family (genealogy) and things like that which were not real books, so really just last year is the fist book that I did, "Mid the Hills"

Aside from his book, pamphlets and family genealogy, he’s wrote 13 articles, "A Look Back At The History Of Nixa."

"I’ve done a few other articles other times on other subjects, but Nixa history is my hobby and my profession. I did a series of articles primarily just kind of renewing some of the things that were in the first book I did that would be documented for the people who read the newspaper that didn’t buy my book and give people an idea of what my book was about."

Currently, Glenn is not writing other articles for the newspaper.

Glenn’s new book, "A Photo History of Nixa and Vicinity," just came out August 2002.

"I love history, I taught history, and I enjoy researching. I’m not really a writer I’m a researcher. I can spend hours in a place like the library doing research. I consider interviewing people to be a research, so I enjoy talking to people, asking them questions and getting feed back and hopefully using things people say for ideas you can do something with later but a love of history is why I enjoy writing."

"I think its good to keep writing. People have to have an interest in writing. Because preserves the culture! There’s nothing wrong with computers, e-mail, and certainly nothing wrong with the internet, but I hope people will continue to use paper, glue, and books as a method of getting the word out on whatever it is your wanting to promote or whatever it is that you’re interested in. I hope we don’t get away from well-written works and in my case that relates to history. I think it’s almost to the point to where people hardly even read newspapers or anything traditional. They just use the screen."

Publishing, "To make money you have to have a publisher. But if you want your book to come out sooner and only care to break even, then, self-publishing is the way to go. Talking with people from writers groups will give you many helpful hints on sending to a publisher who, "pays on publication," and who, "pays on acceptance." Vanity publishers will try and flatter you by saying, " you’ve done wonderful work" and they want to publish your work, yet charge you tons of money to publish and editing is more expensive and is extra. But you do all the work in selling and things yourself. If you go through the proper procedures and everything goes good, it doesn’t take very long to become published. If you have the money, time, and you self publish and you are actually done, you can have your book published in a month. But again, that also depends on if you’re paying them or they are paying you. Sometimes, a publisher can have your finished manuscript and it can take them years to publish it into a book. Also depends on if you have patients to wait for the publisher to publish your manuscript into a book. An estimated cost to self publish for an example of a manuscript of about 224 pages with 600 pictures, (black and white because color is more expensive), is about $8,000 for 1,000 copies. You pick out the color and graphic you want for you cover of your book when you self publish. You can choose soft or hard cover as well but hard cover is more expensive. Again, it depends on your amount of pages and pictures. You need to have an outline of your book, so you’ll know where you’re at and you have to have limitations. Decide on the width of your book, pages, pictures, etc. You can easily end up with a 300-page book when you only can afford to do 100 pages. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and anticipation if you have something kind of established as to what your restrictions are and then you wont have to sweat it on the cost. Maybe expensive, but you’ll pretty well know what its going to cost you. Suggestion: Go around and take bids on what it would cost you by telling publishers what you have and take the cheapest bid. They will tell you why their company cost more and other things."

Pictures, "With computers today, most of them help out the pictures to be more clearer. Especially if they are really old pictures. Some pictures maybe hard to come by. A lot of people who lived in the hills were really poor and could not afford to have many pictures taken. Whereas, Germans and other European people came here could afford to have more pictures taken. Some even didn’t take care of them, so, they’ve been destroyed or families had a lot of kids and gave them to each kid with them rowing up and going into all different directions. Its not really anybody’s fault or doesn’t say anything abut their families background, but some chose not to have photo’s taken."

Editing, "I depend on the person at the publisher who does the layout for my books. She is a retired schoolteacher. Best way to get editing done and making sure your research on the town (s) accurately, is to find someone who is very familiar with that town and ask them to look it over your work on that town to make sure you have everything included in that chapter about that town. Tell the person about your book and politely ask them if they’d cared to look over that part of your book to make sure everything is right. You might want to also include them in your book giving them a little credit by saying something about them helping you on that chapter. A library who is older and has worked for a long time would be a good reference to get advice on who to talk to in the town (s) your writing about."

"I don’t think a publisher will judge a book that you’ve written on size but on content. They will decide on how much information you have on each chapter and their size, (meaning pages). You’ve got to have self-discipline. The type of sizes that you can go with would be, the size of a world almanac or pamphlets or even go to an actual book size."

I would like to say, thanks Wayne Glenn!

StoryWriter1976@aol.com