Sara Behnke is an English teacher at the Community School of Davidson. Before becoming a teacher she decided to write two books based on motherhood. She wrote these books as she was pregnant and her goal was to teach about choices and whatever path you take in life always has obstacles.

Jacob Navarro: So what are the names of your books?

Sara Behnke: The first one is called the mommy chronicles and the second one is the must-have mom manual.

Navarro: Tell me about like these books and how you came about writing them?

Behnke: The first one I kind of wrote before I became a teacher. I was pregnant with my girlfriend and the book ended up being a collection of our emails back and forth not only during pregnancy but also during our first year of motherhood we have very different experiences. We just both were kind of commiserating with everything that we were going through and it made us realize that like there’s no perfect path that no matter what you do when you go back to work you stay home or you know all the different choices you can make that there is pros and cons to both of them and challenges with both of them

Navarro: so have you always enjoyed my reading and writing here?

Behnke: I found my love of reading when I started reading Stephen King. Believe it or not, I thought his writing was not so much the subject necessarily, but the way he wrote really spoke to me. I just felt like he could put his finger on a feeling or an emotion in a way that I have never really experienced.

Navarro: Did you learn anything from publishing these books?

Behnke: Yeah, well, the first experience was with a smaller publisher and we learned that we needed to get an agent to help us sell the book and that agent sold the first book but she ended up not being the best fit for us and so we had to kind of pivot and get a new agent. However, what we did that I think was really helpful and did teach us a lot as we just went to a lot of different conferences. We went to Book Expo America. We went to Virginia Festival. [We just tried] to soak up everything we could about the process of publishing a book and connecting with editors and agents and things like that. That helped a lot.

Navarro: Do see yourself making any more books in the future?

Behnke: I would like to, but I’ve never written fiction. I feel like it intimidates me a little bit, but I definitely would like to explore more writing.

Navarro: Do you have any advice to give to people who want to publish a book?

Behnke: So I mean there are different paths for, you know, whether you’re publishing non-fiction. a children’s book, or fiction, and I think the thing that helped us the most is having a good agent. There’s a resource called Publisher’s Marketplace and you can go and look for agents that just represent children’s authors or young adults’ fiction or nonfiction and you want to really target those specific areas. I think, usually, if you can get an agent to look at your manuscripts

and be willing to say,”Okay I’m going to represent you””, there’s a good chance your book will get sold. You want to do this because if you just mail it in to a publishing house it goes into what they call the slush pile, and it may not ever get red, but if you have a person going in on your behalf and saying “hey, I have the Spanish Group, you should really take a look at it,” you have a much better chance that way. However, if you want to be a writer, the best thing you can do is to read and write a lot. From my experience, I would set aside 15-20 minutes a day just to focus on those two [things] and that really gave me the help I needed to write my books.