Sylva Kelegian

Transcript:

Author Sylva Kelegian Self-Publishing to Share a Message

I spent twelve years in the trenches of dog rescue as I was juggling my acting career, and my marriage, and my home life. The book chronicles my journey through dog rescue and it’s entertaining, it’s spiritual, and it’s highly educational. There are millions and millions of dogs that need homes and it’s a huge problem. It’s like being on a hamster wheel—the dogs are being put in the shelter, being killed, put into the shelter, being killed, left on streets, tied up in backyards, neglected, abused . . . it’s never going to stop until we really get serious in our country and implement spay-neuter laws. My real hope with the book is to really bring awareness to these creatures who, for the most part, are just treated as pieces of furniture.

Choosing to Self-Publish

I self-published mainly because I really wanted this photo on the cover. This is my dog Zamie who the book begins and ends with. She’s the reason I got into rescue and it was really important to me to have this picture on the cover. With a traditional publisher you don’t get to choose your picture—it’s out of your control. It also takes about 2 years for the book to come to fruition and I didn’t want to wait that long.

Self-Publishing with Xlibris

I would recommend Xlibris predominantly because the finished product looks really wonderful. A lot of self-published books look like self-published books—mine don’t and the Xlibris books don’t because they’re of a high quality and that to me was the most important thing. I had a good contact there, a woman named Toni. And whenever there was a problem, she was always right there to respond and to help me. So that was really good, to have somebody there that I could call and e-mail at any time and say “help,” and she’d get right on it. So that was great.

Raising Awareness through Her Book

They’re no different than us, other than they don’t speak our voice language and they have four legs and they have fur—but they have feelings, they have souls, they have senses of humor. They love unconditionally, and I thought by chronicling all the stories and putting them all together I could really raise awareness and make people conscious of what is going on out there for our four-legged friends.

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