Pump Up Your Book Chats with Steven Fujita, author of Toe Up to 10K

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Steven Fujita was born in Los Angeles and raised in Torrance, California. He attended college in Washington, D.C., and currently lives in Long Beach, California.

Listen to Steven Fujita’s interview on the Book Club with John Austin, which aired November 2, 2010, about his novella, Sword of the Undead, a re-telling of Bram Stoker’s vampire novel, Dracula.

His other book, $10 a Day Towards $1,000,000, is available on Kindle. This book promotes the idea of using time and savings to build wealth.

His new book, Toe Up to 10K, was released in September 2014. This book chronicles his recovery from spinal cord injury he sustained in 2012.

Visit his website at: www.stevenfujitaauthor.com

Q: Can you tell us why you wrote your book?

I had two main reasons for writing the book. First, when I was first diagnosed with an injury to the spinal cord, I wanted to know how I would recover and how long it would take. It was difficult to find the answers to both questions. I know that each individual recovers differently, but I still wanted to share my experiences so some reference can be out there.

Secondly, I recovered quicker and more fully than expected. I hoped my experience would be inspirational and motivational to someone trying to overcome an obstacle, any type, not necessarily from a spinal cord injury.

Q: Which part of the book was the hardest to write?

The end was the most difficult part to write because I’m really not quite at the end, yet. My goal is to recover fully from spinal cord injury, and to run a 10K race. I kept extending and extending the finish of the book, but decided the book can end with me being 90% recovered. Maybe a sequel is in order when I reach 100% recovery.

Q: Does your book have an underlying message that readers should know about?

Don’t give up.

I write in the book, “If something is not impossible, then no matter how improbable, it is possible.” Sometimes I am reluctant to say this because one can try and try and try as hard as anybody can, and still not be successful. Just because one is diagnosed with an “incomplete” injury doesn’t mean that person will walk again.

After seven weeks, I still hadn’t moved my legs. One doctor, off-hand, remarked “it wasn’t looking good,” for me to walk again. If I had taken his words and stopped trying, I may not have regained the ability to walk. But with an incomplete injury, I knew it wasn’t physically impossible for me to walk again, so I continued to try, and tried hard.

Q: Do you remember when the writing bug hit?

Generally, it was the movie, Jaws. I was around eight years old. Later, I would read the Peter Benchley novel, but the movie was what did it. And I spent a lot of time reading comic books.

As far as the writing bug for this particular book, it was in the computer room at the hospital and being frustrated about my lack of success in finding out how, when and how much I would recover from my spinal cord injury.

Q: Besides books, what else do you write? Do you write for publications?

I maintain a couple of blogs. Currently, the most active being, http://toeupto10k.blogspot.com/. I like to write restaurant on Yelp, also.

Q: Do you have a writing tip you’d like to share?

Best tip I have for writers is to be yourself. The sincerity will come out; you as an individual will come out, and the writing will flow much easier.

Q: How do you think book promotion has changed over the years?

I think book promotion has changed quite a bit over the years. When I wrote my first book, Sword of the Undead, social media was in its infancy. Facebook was still getting situated among the post college-aged users, and Twitter was just being hatched. My promotion for that book was more traditional – I did the rounds at indie bookstores, and sent out press releases to get the word out.

Now, to get the word out, I will post to my blog, post on Facebook, tweet on Twitter. I think social media is an effective and cost efficient way of getting word out. The news media is still probably the most effective way, but I think book signings at bookstores (mostly because very few bookstores are around these days) has lost a lot of its “mojo.” I would still do them with glee, but trying to book them…

Q: What is the most frustrating part of being an author?

Knowing that you’ve gone over the text a dozen times, and had other people going over the text, your editor has gone over the text several times, and then discovering a typo after publication.

Q: What is the most rewarding?

The narcissistic results: seeing your books on sale in bookstores. But mostly because it is concrete evidence of all the work it took to get it to that point.

Q: How do you think book publishing has changed over the years?

I think publishing is more libertarian now. There is a sense of anarchy in that anybody can distribute his or her work easily and to a much wider audience than before – and it’s pretty open – people can distribute messages with very little censorship. It’s also more democratic because traditional distribution is much more open to self-publishers today, thus readers have much more works to choose from.

Q: Thank you so much for this interview, Steven. Do you have any final words?

Thank you for the opportunity to express myself. It was a pleasure answering these questions!

Title: Toe Up to 10K
Author: Steven Fujita
Publisher: BookBaby
Pages: 168
Genre: Self-Help
Format: Ebook

In June 2012, Steven Fujita went to the emergency room, and was diagnosed with meningitis. After four days of improvement, he was scheduled to be discharged when his condition worsened dramatically. His blood pressure, body temperature and sodium levels all became dangerously low. He started to lose consciousness. He was rushed to the Intensive Care Unit. He had suffered spinal cord damage at the T4 level. Upon regaining full consciousness, Fujita could not speak, eat, breathe independently, control bodily functions, nor move his legs.

“Once we understand what we have to go through, become resolved to see it through, and know we will survive, we feel our ordeal is not so bad,” Fujita writes. In this book, he takes the reader on a journey of recovery from a spinal cord injury. It is not only a journey of determination and hard work, but of positive attitude, of drawing inspiration, of gratitude towards those around him: his family, his friends, co-workers, and medical professionals.

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How do you make sales happen for you?

A lot of hard work! I sponsor a lot of on line parties, festivals and contests. Book sales don’t magically happen, believe me. An author has to work hard to earn her readers. And then she has to work hard to keep them by giving them something they’ll enjoy reading. I try hard to make my books worth a reader’s time.

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