Upon starting at GuidepostsBooks last year, my first task was spearheading the development of our newest original fiction series, Stories from Hope Haven, which follows the lives and families of four very special nurses in the fictional small town of Deerford, Illinois.
At that time, the prospect of holding the finished product in my hands seemed so far away. Yet here I am today, less than a year later, able to flip through the pages of book one, The Best Medicine by Anne Marie Rodgers.
Holding the first copy of a book has to be one of the greatest joys for an editor. The long hours the author spent writing and revising, the long hours I spent reading and rereading, the long hours our production team spent copyediting and proofing resulted in something we can all be very proud of.
I’m not a mother yet, but I imagine there are parallels between raising a child and fostering a project from infancy, sending it off into the world, and praying people will come to love this “baby” as much as we do. Just picture the author, editor, and production team standing on a porch, clutching tissues, waving to the book as it takes one last look back before heading to its new life in the real world. That’s where we stand now, on the porch waving to Stories from Hope Haven, praying we’ve done everything we could to prepare it for success.
As with GUIDEPOSTS’ other fiction series, we have several authors writing for the same series here. It has been fascinating watching the talented authors of Hope Haven collaborate. Each author has brought boundless creativity and enthusiasm to the table. They’ve taken what was a blurb of an idea and crafted a fully textured world filled with genuine and warm characters. The four nurses are particularly endearing: there’s Candace Crenshaw, a young widow trying to heal her broken heart, Anabelle Scott, the wise older nurse coping with her newfound empty nest, Elena Rodriguez, who recently returned to the church which causes tension with her husband, and James Bell, whose wife struggles with multiple sclerosis.
I don’t want to gush too much in front of my other books (of course I love all of my projects equally…), but Stories from Hope Haven is truly wonderful, filled with so much heart, tenderness and emotion. We hope you enjoy.
Lindsay Guzzardo
Editor
GuidepostsBooks
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