The white Stuff

If you dream of seeing your name on the cover of a book, becoming an author might be the right career for you!

- BY SARAH E. COLEMAN

We all know that the best days are the ones chock-full of horses: riding them, talking to friends about them, and—of course—reading about them! If you love to read or if you've ever envisioned writing your very own horse book, we have the inside scoop for you, straight from the horse author's mouth.

READ A LOT!

Author Susan Friedland didn’t set out to be a writer, but she’s always loved to write. In fact, she was a middle school English and history teacher for 22 years. A self-proclaimed “word person,” Susan was a total bookworm as a child.

“I wrote horse stories for fun when I was in elementary and middle school,” she says. “I guess that was a foreshadowing of what I do now!”

As a horse-crazy kid, Susan was obsessed with Arabian stallions. She especially loved reading anything by Marguerite Henry, who wrote Misty of Chincoteague, King of the Wind and many other beloved horse stories.

“Marguerite was on her school’s yearbook staff and was a member of a literary club,” Susan explains of her idol. “She read voraciously, too.” Like Marguerite, Susan has read like crazy her whole life, and she credits reading with helping her become the great writer she is.

“To be a great writer, you need to be an avid reader,” she says. “I can’t stress this enough.”

In 2013, Susan attended a writer’s conference to find out what it took to get a book published—her ultimate dream. She learned that publishers want to see writing not just in a story submitted to them for possible publication, but on your very own website. To show publishers she had what it took, Susan launched saddleseekshorse. com and began blogging, writing short stories about her off-track Thoroughbred named Knight and their adventures.

From there, she started pitching ideas to magazines (like