UPDATE 5-19-2002

This webpage contains historical information about the Megan Martin website and the book.

When I put this page out here you can see how young Laura is in the picture, about 10 years old.  She is the one who inspired me and begged me to help her write this story.  She chose the characters and helped me figure out what the plot should be about then helped me with advice as I wrote the story.  

3-10-2002

Stay tuned to this site and the news page for more information and updates.

 


The Adventures of Megan Martin

To learn more keep reading on down the page.

To see high res pictures click on title beside picture.

Please visit the new Megan Martin News page.


 

The Medallion Mystery

Begins.

   Megan Martin and her friend May Lynx were considered average teenage girls. Megan was an attractive 15-year-old with shoulder length blond hair. She had a pet cat named Scratches that she loved and an older brother who she could have lived without. The girls lived in the city, went to school, played with their friends and loved to solve an occasional mystery. The girls didn’t realize this year’s vacation to the farm would drop the ultimate mystery right into their laps in a most unexpected way.

   In the summer Megan liked to spend a week or two with her grandmother in the country. Megan’s grandfather, a part time archeologist and farmer, had died under mysterious circumstances leaving some questions unanswered. He had told his wife that he had made provisions for their future but his untimely departure prevented him from explaining.

   Megan’s grandmother had sold many things around the farm just to pay the mounting bills. To complicate things, she had borrowed money from a Farmer’s Trust bank and was being pressured by a greedy land developer to sell out to him. It was only a matter of time before she was forced to sell the farm and move to a smaller more economical housing facility, better know as the old folk’s home. For her the home would be a certain death sentence and she would fight and pray as long as she could.

   Megan loved her yearly trips to the farm and this year she was allowed to bring her friend May Lynx with her. May had never spent any time on a farm before and everything to her was an adventure. Her curiosity over the old barn led the girls to discover an antique music box hidden in the barn loft. Inside the music was a letter from Megan’s grandfather along with a rather large solid gold medallion with some curious markings on it. It was the key to a mystery that both he and his own father had failed to solve. Now it was Megan’s turn.

   Megan and May tried to decipher the symbols on the object and failed. In a quest for answers they ventured into the old upstairs study where Megan’s grandfather kept all of his books and records. In a journal there they learned of the existence of a powerful ancient crown like device of unknown origin. As their search continued they discovered the pieces of this device were hidden there on the farm. Once assembled the user of the device could literally open pathways between dimensions. The girls learned to travel both in spirit and physically through space and time on a quest to solve the mystery of the medallion.

   Their journey is not without some dangers as well as frightening, and sometimes humorous encounters with mysterious beings from another world, and yes, of course, ghosts. Of course this is only the beginning of the adventures. The mystery of the medallion itself had lead them to a second mystery, the powerful crown like device was the second. Who had made it and why? Would they return for it? How old is it really? What will the girls do with their newfound power? The answers to some of these questions can be found within the pages of this book.. Follow Megan and her friend May as they set out on the greatest adventures of all to unlock the secrets of the universe.

Click on the pictures for a full view. Click on the title to go to her other (high res) web page. These pictures are low resolution at 100 dpi. The pictures on the web page are 300 dpi and take longer to load. Laura, as Megan Martin.


Update 3-10-2002

The book has gone to the printer and in 2 to 6 weeks we should have this book in the stores.


Update 1-22-2002

The Adventures of Megan Martin took about a year to complete and we spent the next year trying to figure out how to get a book published.  When you hear the horror stories about how difficult it is to get a book published you have only heard part of it.  Even publishers who say they like the story will tell you they are not interested in it at this time and to contact them again in a year or so.  A writer could starve to death long before they can get a manuscript published by a regular publishing company.   

After trying for a year to get a publisher to publish the manuscript for us we were advised by several people to get us a literary agent.  We were told that publishers will listen to agents before they will the actual writer of the manuscript.  So we spent the next few months trying to get an agent to take the job.  We contacted more than 20 agents and were told basically the same things the publishers were telling us.  Most of them said the story was at least twice to long to be a children's book and they were not interested in it.  Some of them practically ordered me to cut the story length in half and I said I could do that but it would ruin the story.  I also told them it was not a children's story but that it was young adult and family reading for a general audience and they had the nerve to tell me there was no such literary category.  All of the agents I spoke with except one had very abrasive hard core attitudes.  It was a "this is the way it is take it or leave it" and even if  I had done what they ordered me to do there was no guarantee they would ever sell the book.

I did find a female agent who loved the story and read it to her own children.  She believed in it and tried for the past two years to market the manuscript to a publishing company receiving the same basic results I had received over my duration of trying to market it myself.  I paid out $150 for every 6 month contract with her to help pay her expenses, so we paid out $600 for literary agent expenses when if we had known what we were doing we would have had the book published long before now for less than that.

In general and under normal self publishing rules it would cost us from $1,500 to $5,000 to have the book published ourselves.  Some of these publishers rewrite your story and buy the rights from you then pay you a royalty of some small % when they sell it.   These royalties are not large but generally around 3-6% on the retail price of the book.  A friend of mine put me in contact with a publisher who told the story just like it is and who for a small price will allow us to be the boss over how the book looks and we can keep the copyright of the book in our own name.  We control the book in that respect and they told us about things other regular publishers do not want us to know.

Myth: They want you to believe how well you write the book is critical to your selling the manuscript or not. 

    Yes a well written manuscript will generally sell better than one that is not but the truth is that the worst writers in the world can sell their books time and time again not because they are well written but because they know someone at the publishing company who gets them around the traps at the "front door."  To prove this a man who wrote a best seller that sold over 400,000 copies took the same manuscript and changed a few things then resubmitted it to over 20 publishers, one of them being the very same who had all ready sold over 400,000 copies.  This new manuscript was basically the same but submitted under another author's name.  Minor changes has been made to the manuscript to disguise it from the original but the content itself was the same.  The publisher wrote back telling him the manuscript was no way near the caliber as the other author and they would never be able to sell it so they were not interested.  Other publishers said basically the same thing indicating that a book that was all ready a best seller couldn't be recognized as being high quality potential best seller by the publishing agents being contacted.    So you could send them a block of pure gold and they wouldn't know it from a pile of rusted metal.

There's a lot more the publishers don't want you to know but that's a long story and what I want to tell our fans and potential fans is that we have found a publisher now who is going to publisher this story for us, don't charge as much as regular self publishers, pay higher royalties than regular publishers and will allow me to be the boss over how the books looks and we can keep our copyright in my name.  

New graphics are being designed for the cover and soon as these graphics are ready we are on our way to the publisher with it.  Expect the Adventures of Megan Martin to be in print this year.  Check back here for more information about it.  Feel free to write me if you have questions.


Update 2-24-1999:  I talked with an agent today about the story and she said "we simply can't sell a children's book that is over 40,000 words in length because a child simply will not read the entire book.  "They just won't wade through it" was one of the terms she used.  So now I'm stuck trying to figure out how to cut the book literally in half and still have a decent book.  I'm going to load it up and start removing sections and chapters and see what I end up with.  We sent off another manuscript, a very short one to see if we can get it published in the meanwhile.



Update 2-21-1999:  After being contacted by a literary agent and told where to send the manuscript to we did so then received a message from the agent telling us that our story was more than twice to long.  They asked me to shorten it but to do so is to cut the book in half leaving it without any resolution.  It would make it a cliff hanger forcing people to buy two books just in order to get the conclusion from the first one.  I must try to find another agent who will print the book as is before I resort to something so drastic.



Special Update 01-28-1999:  Good news, I finished the story a few minutes ago.  Now come the second round of re-editing, reformatting and printing so I can send it out to the publisher.  It won't be long now until you can read the adventures of Megan Martin Yourself.  In fact I intend to post part of the first chapter and perhaps even selected exciting excerpts from the story right here on a special page just for our visitors.  NOTE 3-5-2002: I knew it wouldn't be easy to get a publisher but had no idea it was possible to spend a life time tyring to get one and never succeed.  Regular publishers have secrets they don't want us to know about and can turn down a perfectly good story for a life time.  Some have even threatened people telling them all kinds of bad things about self publishing and while some of it may be true about self publishers not all are like they.  They don't want you to know that many popular writers were first self published before a regular publisher took them in.  They don't want you to know there are publishing services out there who are not what you would call self publishers who perform all the same services of a regular publisher and pay a higher percentage rate than regular publishers do.  Look how long we worked with a regular literary agent and got no results.  Then a friend of mine had two books published and I asked her how she managed that and she told me her secret.  She put me in contact with Write To Print and now we are very near having this book published.



Update 01-21-1999:  Megan Martin update, I'm up to the point where I am rewriting the end of the story.  I intended to have it done this week but thanks to a cold it doesn't look to promising at the moment.  I'm also doing a little updating on some of the webpages, like this one.  Notice the change and I hope you like it, enjoy.



Update 1-20-1999: Working hot and heavy on the Megan Martin Story.  Re-editing it and hope to finish it this week.



    Recently a funny thing happened.  A young lady by the name of Megan Martin wrote to Laura and Kristy and wanted to know more about the story.  This web site is all but hidden back here and usually only friends and family members are able to find it.  But Megan Martin found it and we are very glad she did.  Because of her e-mail and my daughters insistence on getting the story ready to publish I am now updating this web site and hope to get back to work on the actual story.

    The Megan Martin Mysteries started off with a single idea and then branched into concepts to produce a series of stories starting with this first story or episode which I may call "Adventures In Time."

    It is difficult enough to find time to write stories like this and Laura (our Megan Martin) is my helper, or should I say I am her helper ?  :-)  So we must both take the time to work on the stories.

    The first one is actually complete except for some editing and a few other little changes that need to be made.  It is over 150 pages long single spaced on 8.5" x 11" paper.  I guess that would be around 300 pages when it is double spaced in manuscript format.

    My wife tells me I had better get it finished and get it published because it would be a real shame to spend that much time and effort on a good story and not share it with others.  I think she is right.  So I am going to see what I can do about that.

    Recently we spent 3 months and several thousand dollars to build the girls a little TV studio here at the house.  It has lights, a stage, curtains chroma green wall, fog curtain effect device, 3 cameras and an entire control room to run things with.   Which by the way is my computer room now.  All of this has been very costly and time consuming but the girls love the studio and use it for something nearly every day.  Money is time as they say and the girls held a very special "Happy Pumpkin Day Fest" which turned out to be a two day party.  The entire thing was shot and edited into a 1:45 min video tape which they are asking $10 donations per tape.  The money is theirs to help them pay for the expenses of their productions and to help produce next year's production.  Mom and I have done about all we can afford to do in that department for the time being and when they need money for certain items for their productions they like to pitch in and help make the money themselves.  They also make ceramics they sell to help make their money.  A corner of their studio and one entire shelf above the door is dedicated to this effort.  I expect to make a web page just for that purpose when we build their web sites.

    For now that is the update.  I hope to be back soon to do more.

    Thanks for your interests and please do write the girls and tell them you are interested in their productions.

...Bryon
aka "dad"

 

Megan Martian Mysteries © 1999 Bryon Smith
All rights reserved.  No duplication of the contents of this site in any form without expressed written permission from the author.

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