Local author hopes to make publishing industry more accessible – Suncoast News

SPRING HILL — The moment every writer dreams of is seeing their book in print on the shelves of a major bookstore or local library.

Sure, you can write something and convert it to an “ebook” format, then sign a deal with Amazon to sell it, and you get a pittance for every sale, but there’s still something to holding a physical book in your hands and reading it.

Sarah J. Nachin of Spring Hill is a writer who has started her own publishing imprint, Chamber Court Publishing, and she’s eager to get her most recent novel and the works of other eager writers into the hands of those who love books.

“The Ghost of Sarey Jane” is Nachin’s latest book, which she describes as a kind of “Romeo and Juliet story” set in Appalachia in 1916. Sarey Jane, a farm girl, falls in love with Billy. There’s a problem: their families have been feuding since the Civil War. They run away and set in motion numerous events.

Nachin won’t tell any more. You’ll have to read the book to find out what happens.

The young-looking 73-year-old sat in a Dunkin’ recently, sipping a coffee and talking about her fascinating life. She grew up in a military family, she said, and has been, well, everywhere. The pride in her voice is evident as she describes her father, Edward Smith, whose service in the Army Air Forces in World War II and in the independent U.S. Air Force spanned 30 years.

He rose from the bottom, she said, as a ball turret gunner on B-17 Flying Fortresses on combat missions over Germany, then went to weather school and become a forecaster, and retired at the rank of Chief Warrant Officer 4.

“He had all the privileges of an officer, but with none of the responsibilities,” she said with a smile.

According to Air Force Magazine (“The In-Betweeners,” Nov. 1, 1991), the Air Force stopped appointing warrant officers in 1959, but those already in the service could stay at that rank.

The last Air Force warrant officer retired in 1980, the article said.

Nachin’s first book came out in 2001 and was titled “Ordinary Heroes: Anecdotes of Veterans.” The 32 stories in the book begin with a story close to her heart: her father’s. But sadly, it’s incomplete.

Long after he died at 82, she said, she found a spiral notebook with his writings, including the beginnings of a narrative of a young man heading off to war in Europe via various stops in the U.S. for training.

His story ends on a morning in July 1944, with his troop ship setting out for Europe and the war. “He never finished it, that I know of,” Nachin wrote in a postscript.

A reunion of her late father’s bomb group in September 2000 and a meeting with a veteran of that group inspired her to interview veterans of World War II, Korea, Vietnam and Desert Storm, and get their stories in print.

She had begun writing in school and loved writing essays, poems and songs.

“Even when you had an assignment in school to write an essay or composition, I really got into it,” she said. “I went above and beyond because I really enjoyed it.”

Her parents would sit down with her and give suggestions on how to write her essays.

She also read, and added, “I think in order to be a good writer you have to be a good reader.”

In 2018, Nachin published what she calls “a humorous travelogue with elements of fantasy” titled “The Odyssey of Clyde the Camel,” based on a trip to Europe that she took in 2014 with her two grandchildren, and the resulting humorous misadventures. 

“It’s 90% fact, with a few embellishments,” she said. “It can be enjoyed by children, as well as adults.”

For a time, she worked in advertising for the old “Hernando Today” newspaper, and then for a local publishing company. 

She occasionally writes freelance pieces for the Hernando Sun newspaper, she said, and sometimes covers news events for that paper.

“The Ghost of Sarey Jane” came to Nachin “totally out of the blue,” she said.

She had read “southern” genres and said that’s probably where her ideas came from.

“My book is Southern Gothic, so it has some of those features, but I try to put a positive spin on things,” she said. “I call it a 20th-century ‘Romeo and Juliet’ tale, with a touch of ‘Macbeth’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’”

It’s less a tragedy than a “bittersweet romance,” Nachin said, and it tries to teach some life lessons about prejudice, class distinctions and the culture of that time. There is a discussion and study guide at the end, making it ideal for school and book clubs, she said.

Getting a book published probably is the hardest part of writing for people. Nachin joined a Facebook group and learned what she’d have to do. The members would critique each other’s query letters and pitches, and she said that was helpful.

“I did send query letters out to a couple of agents and a couple of publishers,” she said, “and I got some nice rejections.”

She didn’t want her book coming out with “Amazon Publishing” or Kindle Publishing,” so she did some research and found out that the name “Chamber Court Publishing” was available.

She became a publisher herself and now is helping someone else write a book, she said.

A traditional publisher will change things, she said, and if you get an advance, you have to sell a lot of books to make up the advance.

Getting published can take years and you usually need to be a well-known or a celebrity, and then a “ghost” often writes the book.

Nachin has started working on a prequel to “The Ghost of Sarey Jane,” she said, because one piece of advice she got was that “to be really successful and make money, you need to have a series that sells.”

She could build stories around the other characters, so this first prequel will be the story of Sarey Janes’s parents.

“I’m working on a historical novel that takes place during the 1960s and ’70s,” she said. “I call it a cross between ‘The Quiet American’ and ‘Forrest Gump.’”

It’s about a female journalist who covers the Indochina War in the 1950s, and then events in the U.S. through the 1960s.

Her work now is not just about publishing her books, she said.

“I want to give people a means for publishing their books to where it would have a mark of legitimacy and it would be professionally done,” she said.

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