About Me (Erika Q. Stokes)
I find this page the most difficult to write—I can go on for hours about various aspects of book formatting, web design, and other topics of interest, but I never know what to say about myself. It’s not that there isn’t a lot to say, but exactly how much do I want to put on the Internet?!
I do want my clients to know me personally, because that is important to the way I do business, so I’ll start there. I’m in my late 40s and a mother of five boys—I have two adopted sons from overseas, adopted when they were 8 and 10, and two foster sons from our local community. These older kids are all just north of 30. Like most people who put far too much information of their own on social networking sites, they’d rather their mother not talk about them online, so that’s all I’ll say about them!
My youngest is Andy, who is, to my great astonishment, nearly 20 as I write this. Andy has been a big reader since late kindergarten—after he spent ages denying that he would ever learn to read, he one day just started reading like he’d been doing it for years! As a devoted bibliophile myself, I’m more proud of his ongoing love of books than anything else. His attention to detail is excellent, and since early middle school he has assisted me (with author approval) in proofreading books that I then formatted, including The Witch of Leper Cove and Winsley Walker and Other Flying Objects. He is especially interested in fantasy novels, and in RPGs along the lines of Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons.
I am a New Hampshire native, but spent my high school years in Santa Barbara, where I had the opportunity to take college classes in high school. I graduated early because I’m a colossal nerd-geek. I highly recommend this course of action for both its educational and financial advantages. It not only gets the student ahead of the game, but gives them a different perspective when considering which post-secondary schools they may wish to attend.
After high school, I came back home to New England and went to Boston University’s School of Education (now renamed Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development), where I studied education and computer science. This was back before AOL even got online, and websites weren’t quite invented yet—my 14.4kbps dial-up modem and 386MHz computer with a 100-megabyte hard drive were sufficient for all that I needed! The world sure has changed since then—I still occasionally take time out to marvel at technology when I turn to my phone and start browsing websites from a car zipping along the highway (in the passenger seat, of course!!).
In 1998, I started a web hosting business named Web Serve Pro. Over the next six years we grew our datacenter to over 125 servers home to 1500+ websites and, although still considered a small company, we were known for the high quality of our services. 80% of our new business was generated through customer referrals. One of our main selling points was that we knew what nearly every one of our clients did for business and what their needs were—when someone called we knew who they were. We were only able to accomplish this with a top-notch group of individuals that I prided myself on recruiting, training, and retaining. In 2004, after Andy was born, I decided to scale back dramatically, and sold the bulk of the company to another local provider, keeping only a few hosting accounts that were local or for which I did development work.
In 2008, I purchased a small existing 5-year-old tabletop game store, and renamed it The Relentless Dragon. I spent a couple years running the store until it could support full-time employees, and in late 2010, I started working on eBook creation, and soon branched out into print-on-demand formatting as well. My primary focus areas are doing eBook conversions for the Kindle, Nook, iPad, and other devices, as well as providing print-on-demand book formatting for Kindle Desktop Publishing (formerly CreateSpace), Lightning Source, Ingram Spark, and other printers that work with independent authors.
Oh . . . and the question everyone asks me . . . what does the Q stand for? Quenby. The answer to the next question is, no, it isn’t a family name, my parents just picked it out of the name book. :)