Have you written your book yet? Why not? Everybody's doing it. Word processors and the Internet have made it easy. Before all this wonderful technology, it wasn't so easy.

Not that many years ago, people used to write their books by pounding out the words on a device called a typewriter. I'm sure you've heard of those old things. There was no spell check or grammar help. If you keyed a "typo" you had to try to correct it manually with white-out liquid or, if you had a really good typewriter, you could backspace and it would "lift" the original ink off the paper.

Having typed a few chapters, you might have wanted to do a little rewrite or maybe just reorganize the sequences. Good luck! You might as well just start over.

Whenever I think of things like this, it reminds me of a line from an old song. "Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end." Well, they did end, thank God. Technology and the Internet have changed so many things, mostly for the better.

Writing is much easier nowadays. So many would-be writers, yours truly among them, have written a book. Mine is memories from my childhood, not a very original idea for a book.

With some pressure from my friends and relatives, I have tried to get this little masterpiece published. This is not so easy. So far I have failed.

The first thing I did was to go to the Internet, of course. I soon found out my project was not unique. Thousands or maybe tens of thousands are trying to publish their works.

In the good old days you would submit your manuscripts to a number of publishers. Julia Child did it with her cookbook, and one day she received a letter from a publisher offering her money for her efforts. There's a good movie, "Julie & Julia," telling this wonderful story. I recommend it.

I have submitted my manuscript to several publishers. It was easy to do using the Internet, of course. Any day now I expect to receive an email from one of them offering me big bucks for the rights to publish my book.

Let's get real. My guess is it's about a million-to-one shot. It's simply not going to happen. So now what?

How about those self-publishers? There are a large number of companies that are anxious to help you self-publish. All they want is anywhere from $500 to $5,000 of your money, not exactly like the Julia Child story. Still, they do have their costs and they offer several fringe benefits. On the low end they will print a few books and send them to you. They will also promise to register your book with one or more of the very large bookstore chains. This means people could order your book through those bookstores. It does not mean your book would be on the shelves.

At first I thought this sounded pretty exciting. My book would be available through this well-known bookstore. Then I pretended I was a potential buyer through the Internet, of course. This particular bookstore advertises they have 30 million products. I tried a keyword search of the word "memory" and got 67,147 hits. What do you think the chances would be of someone finding my book and ordering it? I decided against using the self-publishing companies.

Finally, I went to a well-known printer-copier store and we are now in the process of putting a little book together from my word processor and some minimal custom designing of the cover. I will end up with about 50 copies. It still isn't cheap, but I hope to recover some of my costs by selling direct. I know you will all want copies, so please be patient until you see my ads — on the Internet, of course.

Terry Brady lives in Glen Carbon.