BW junior Sarah Stefaniak publishes novel

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

Ask most folks who are avid read­ers and they would tell you they think they have a book inside of them strug­gling to get writ­ten; and ask most pub­lish­ers how long it takes a novice writer to get that first book writ­ten and they will tell you that the indus­try stan­dard is seven years.

Ask 16-year-old Big Wal­nut High School junior Sarah Ste­fa­niak, who hap­pens to be an avid reader, if she would like to write a pub­lished novel and she would say she has already done that; and ask her how long it took and she would tell you that it took about six months to write her first novel, My Supplier.

Of course Ste­fa­niak would tell you that it takes longer than six months to write a book and get it sand­wiched between two cov­ers and ready to mar­ket. She wrote My Sup­plier when she was a 15-year old sophomore.

“It started as a home­work assign­ment in Mrs. (Angie) Stooksbury’s class,” Ste­fa­niak said dur­ing a recent inter­view. “The assign­ment was to write a two– or three-page paper about a char­ac­ter with a strong per­son­al­ity. I love writ­ing, and I write all the time, so when I started writ­ing the assign­ment it was fun, but some­times I can’t believe I’ve done this.”

What Ste­fa­niak ended up doing was writ­ing a 358-page novel set in 2038 about a soci­ety that raises per­sonal organ donors for elite citizens.

Ste­fa­niak said she gave a copy of the novel to her par­ents, her mother Carol sug­gested send­ing it to a pub­lisher, they sent it off to Tate Pub­lish­ing, and the rest, as they say, is history.

It wasn’t instant his­tory. Some­body at Tate had to read the man­u­script, talk about it, decide if pub­lish­ing the novel would be a prof­itable ven­ture – which is what pub­lish­ers do, look for prof­itable ven­tures and mar­ketable writers.

“We got a call from Tate and they wanted to pub­lish it,” Ste­fa­niak said. “My father’s an attor­ney, so he helped with my con­tract. Copies are already avail­able online at the Tate web­site, we have early copies that we can sell, and it’s also an eBook.”

Ste­fa­niak said her mar­ket­ing rep is prepar­ing book­marks, posters, cards and com­mer­cial trail­ers for the offi­cial May 7 release of My Supplier.

As an emerg­ing young author Ste­fa­niak has been doing a few book sign­ings. She will be sign­ing copies of My Sup­plier at the high school library start­ing at 7:30 tomor­row (Thurs­day, Feb­ru­ary 21) morn­ing; she’ll be at Com­mu­nity Library in Sun­bury on March 16.

But she also needs to keep her nose to the prover­bial grind­stone; Ste­fa­niak, who wants to become a screen­writer, said My Sup­plier is book one of a trilogy.

For addi­tional infor­ma­tion about Tate Pub­lish­ing, or to order My Sup­plier in book form or as an eBook go to < tatepublishing.com >.

Posted by Gary Henery on Feb 20 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.