TN: This isn’t the first book you’ve worked on, right? You also worked on a children’s book during COVID-19?
BT: Yeah I actually did a book called Judee and Jon’s Mask with a lady by the name of Meco Isadore. We co-wrote it together. She approached me about doing a children’s book, like a year and a half ago, and she had a character named Judy. And she told me “I want to have a guy character,” I don’t know, she’s trying to get me to do it, I’m just listening to an idea and she said “Your dad’s named John, right?” And I said, “Yeah my dad’s named John” and she said “You ever thought about having a character named Jon? We’ll just take the H out…” And True Vine Publishing is what we went through.
And what was good about that was, writing a children’s book, you get your rhyme scheme together, get your illustrator, and then you get your publisher. And that was a way more easy process than this, but… even though having a book book is different than a children’s book, I kind of got to see how the process went.
The editor at True Vine Publishing, me and him sort of developed a relationship. I don’t know how it goes when you’ve got “world-renowned” book publishing companies, like Michelle Obama’s books, I didn’t get my book published through them. But I didn’t want to, I wanted to get the full process. (The editor) told me, “Trust me with your book, I’m not gonna rip your book up. I’m not gonna make it sound like I think it wants to sound, you know what you want to say. I just ask you why you’re saying certain things.” And in the process, man, I mean, obviously, my book is on my website, BenTroupe84.com. But my book is at Target, it’s at Barnes and Noble, Books A Million, it’s at Kindle, it’s at Google.
And that’s all True Vine. That’s what they did for me. And I asked him, I said, “Dude, do everybody’s books go to Target?” He goes “Absolutely not.” He says they gotta want to purchase your books. It’s a truly humbling experience. Because the kid in me, I get my children’s books. And now, the adult in me obviously, I get to kind of have two sides of the coin.
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