Alison Winfree Pickrell

My mother instilled an early love for reading by taking us weekly to the library, where we would each emerge with a stack of books. My parents always made sure we had plenty of pencils and paper, so from a very early age I was creating books. In fact, my earliest creation said "Complete with words," on the cover. At age 16 I wrote my first complete novel (borrowed heavily from the Narnia books) which I submitted to many publishing houses without knowing what genres any of them published. My father and I had a ritual where I would stand at his shoulder and hand him tape as he wrapped my ms. in brown paper, tied it with string, and wrote in his careful engineer's block printing on the paper.

During the eighties I had four manuscripts that I thought were worth publishing. I even had an agent who believed in me. But I didn't actually get published until 2006. After that first publication, Ramona Tucker at OakTara wanted to see everything I'd ever written. OakTara published four of my books.

In 2013, my husband Brian and I created Wolf Pup Publishing which now has two titles available. The journey of finding printers, typesetters and cover designers has been a wonderful experience. Our respect for what OakTara and other publishers do has been heightened due to what we have learned. My expectations of achieving great success have been humbled by the sheer volume of other authors out there, however, by choosing self-publication we are able to publish everything I had languishing in my computer and now I'll be able to create new novels.