A week today, on World Diabetes Day 2013, I’ll be launching my latest book, a short e-book about how Type 1 Diabetes has affected my family. Its prime purpose is to raise funds for the search for a cure, via Type 1 Diabetes charity JDRF.
As close friends, family and regular readers of this blog will know, my husband and our ten-year-old daughter Laura both have Type 1 Diabetes, a serious incurable condition that requires careful management every day to guard against unacceptable short-term and long-term health risks.
The book started out as a series of occasional blog posts here, addressing different aspects of living with Type 1 Diabetes. It brings together all of these posts in one place, plus extra material written especially for the book.
One of the new additions is an excellent Foreword, kindly provided by the broadcaster Justin Webb, who co-presents BBC Radio 4’s influential Today programme, and who also has a child with Type 1 Diabetes.
Here is an extract:
“For families around Britain and around the world – today and tomorrow and for every day until a cure is found – a diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes is a life-altering, life-worsening piece of news…
“For parents, for the children themselves, all is changed. Some cope badly and suffer the awful consequences of complications and added misery. But some people have within them … the strength to fight back…
“This book has been written by someone who is ready and willing and able to fight back, and I commend her for it.
“Debbie Young has written a moving and personal testimony. I hope it inspires people to support the work of JDRF. And to salute the pioneers who first helped Type 1 Diabetics to stay alive, and nowadays helps them to live increasingly normal lives. This is a story that begins with harsh reality but encompasses success as well. It is a story of hope and progress, and one day it must end, in triumph.”
The funds raised by this short e-book will help bring that triumph closer.
Publication Details
The e-book will be available exclusively from Amazon from 14th November. The retail price will be £1.99 in the UK, and the equivalent in all Amazon territories around the world. All profits from every copy sold will go to JDRF, the international charity for Type 1 Diabetes.
The profit will be around 70% of the retail price. because the book has cost nothing but time to produce. Justin Webb and my author and publisher friends have given their services free of charge. Special thanks to SilverWood Books for their beautiful cover design, to novelist Joanne Phillips and poet Shirley Wright for proofreading, and to many other friends for reading the draft copy in advance of publication.
I will also be very grateful to anyone who is willing to post a book review on Amazon, because the more reviews a book has, the more visible it becomes on Amazon, thus increasing sales opportunities.
As the book is relatively short – around 8,000 words – there are currently no plans for a print version, but next year I’m hoping to publish an anthology of essays by other writers whose lives have been affected by Type 1 Diabetes, and I may incorporate this first book as a part of that project. Anyone who would be interested in contributing a piece to the 2014 book is warmly invited to register their interest via the contact form on this website.
Good on you, Debbie. I’m sure a lot of people will benefit from this book.
Thank you, Carol – I hope so! I’m much encouraged by the comments of the people who have already read the draft for me, which includes some parents of diabetic children and some who have no experience or knowledge of diabetes at all. It’s very gratifying, because I started out thinking of the book in terms of a fundraiser, but I think it will serve lots of other purposes too, from providing fellow-feeling to those families who are also living with T1D to giving hope and encouragement to families of the newly diagnosed who are still in a state of shock, as well as raising awareness of what it’s all about, for those who think managing diabetes is just a question of avoiding sugar (oh, if only it were that simple!)
Wishing you much success with this, Debbie, and I commend your efforts to raise awareness and money to advance the treatments and cure for Type 1 diabetes.
Thanks, Laura. It makes me feel so much better to be able to do something constructive about it.