Franklin Square man lands a three-book deal

Rony Kessler

While sitting at a restaurant 20 years ago, Central Nassau County Rotary Club President Rony Kessler, of Franklin Square, started writing a story on a napkin, inspired by his life growing up in Israel and recent scientific advancements. But as time went on, he forgot about those first few chapters, and they lay dormant along with Kessler’s other writings until recently, when Kessler’s son asked to see some of his files from his childhood in Tel Aviv.

With nothing else to do while stuck at his Florida home during the pandemic, Kessler decided it was time to pick up where he left off. “The virus kept me at home,” the 78-year-old said, “and the writing kept me busy.”

He wrote every day, he said, and started attending aspiring writers’ meetings with Stephanie Larkin, the founder and president of Red Penguin Books and Web Solutions, who told him about the publishing process and offered him some advice.

Then, when she first read Kessler’s manuscript in late July, she said she was impressed. Larkin receives a lot of memoirs, she said, and thought Kessler’s story about a 12-year-old girl who travels to Israel to solve her family’s murder was “interesting stuff” and “not what I expected.”

“I really loved that juxtaposition of science and culture,” she said, adding that Kessler backed up all of the scientific theories and technology in his book with actual studies and anecdotes.

She then offered Kessler a three-book deal, and suggested he write a novella to tease his first full-length book. The short-story, “The Professor and the Wild Dogs,” is available now on Amazon, and the novel, “The Mysterious Animal Soup and Rachel’s Gifts,” is expected to be published next week. Kessler is still in the process of writing the third book, which deals with the Bedouin people, a nomadic Arabic tribe.

The books are appropriate for tweens and teens, Kessler said, and include a hidden moral. The novel, for example, deals with genetic manipulation and how “we’re really messing around with things we shouldn’t be messing around with,” Kessler said, and the prequel, which deals with a professor trying to save an endangered species of wild dogs while “sinister and greedy players conspire against him,” according to its description online, is about the importance of protecting wildlife.

“I think that’s a good message to give people,” Kessler said.

He even got his granddaughters, who are between the ages of 11 and 14, to read over the books and make sure they are appropriate for the age group, as part of Larkin’s advice for all authors to spell-check their work, read it over and give it to someone else to read. He doesn’t know how his stories will end when he starts writing them, Kessler said, describing how his stories just flow out of him. So, Kessler said, each part of the editing process, “gave me some things to change.”

Then, when he finished the manuscripts, the publishers would edit it, get artists to design three to five cover and page designs for Kessler to choose from, and promote his work. Before “The Mysterious Animal Soup and Rachel’s Gifts” comes out next week, Larkin said, Kessler will meet with various book clubs on Long Island and hold meet-the-author Zoom events.

After all that is done, and he publishes the third book in his series, Kessler said, he would also like to publish the poems he wrote in the 1960s and ‘70s. “But,” he said, “I don’t want to do that until the book is completed.”

Kessler’s books are available on Amazon.com, and all proceeds will go to the Rotary Club.