Pappalardo Finds Voice, Finally Published

It all started with a gnome journal.

It was 2007, and third-grade teacher Gaetan Pappalardo began the new school year with the journal, which his wife found on sale for a penny, as a blank slate, a new chance to throw himself at a goal he'd spent 15 years trying to accomplish: to pen a publishable book.

Pappalardo shaped his new story around a character he named Louie Licks—a wannabe rock star kid who happened to have a magic guitar and a personal drummer, Grady Snake, something of a cross between the young Michael Jackson and Lenny Kravitz.

He'd spend the next nine months crafting Louie's narrative, building it a sentence here, a paragraph there, writing when his students had free writing time and any other chance he got.

Before long, Pappalardo found the right balance, a mix of kid-friendly humor (read: fart jokes), aliens, villains, that perfect sidekick–and suddenly it was the end of the school year, and he had a finished first draft.

Reading through it, he knew he had something different from his previous, rejected efforts.

“It sounded right,” he said. “I said, 'Wow, I found my voice with a 10-year-old rock star.'”

Of course, the journey was barely beginning.

Pappalardo spent the summer revising his first draft, whittling it until it felt perfect, then spent a year submitting that final version, Louie Licks and the Wicked Snakes, in the hopes there would be some interest somewhere.

To his amazement, there was–and not just from anyone.

“I got a whale on the hook—it was Penguin,” Pappalardo said. More specifically, it was Grosset and Dunlap, which handles much of Penguin's books aimed at kids up to 12 years old.

That was the good news. The bad news was they wanted him to dump the aliens from the story and make a slew of revisions.

So Pappalardo reached out to his fellow writers, people like Barry Lane, a writer and teacher, to get advice. Eventually, he made the revisions he thought fit the book, and sent it back–and then went back to playing the waiting game.

Six months later, he got the final call: Penguin wasn't going to pick it up.

“I was really just torn down after that, because I thought this was it,” Pappalardo said.

While it may have been it for traditional publishing, it turned out there was still interest in Louie Licks out there. Lane told him about a fledgling electronic publisher, and Pappalardo sent a few emails–and Louie's story had life.

Almost immediately, the publisher, eReadia, signed off on the book as-is, and suddenly Pappalardo was shifting gears from another rejection to having to find an illustrator. A few more emails and contacts later, he'd done just that, forging a partnership with California-based illustrator Amy English, whose art fit his style perfectly.

“It's so weird how it came together,” Pappalardo said.

It's a departure from the traditional publishing world, where he might never have met his illustrator, let alone been able to have a collaborative relationship. Pappalardo said he's excited by the prospects of electronic publishing as a new market.

“I'm glad I'm getting in at the right time,” he said. “I'm absolutely psyched about it.”

Pappalardo said the book should be out in late summer or early fall, and in the meantime, he has Louie keeping up a blog, and has launched Facebook pages for himself and the book.

He already has ideas on how to promote Louie and the book once it's out—since it's an e-book, that makes book signings a bit more difficult, but he figures he can work around that with miniature posters of the cover.

It also means Pappalardo will have to go pick up an iPad or a Nook or a Kindle—he doesn't have an e-reader right now.

“I can't read my own book,” he said, laughing.