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Tricia Cliff of High Point has captured her family’s experience during the aftermath of a bad car accident last December in a book titled “Love, Blessings and Seatbelts.”

She plans to donate 12 percent of the proceeds from book sales to different charities.

“I’m trying to use this as a way to 'pay it forward,’ as the Triad community did so much for our family,” Cliff said in an e-mail.

The community rallied around the Cliff family in December after they were in a car accident in Ohio. The accident sent the family’s four children to the Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland. The sons, Will and Lee, were released Jan. 5. Another son, Aaron, and a daughter, Abby, were released Jan. 11, but Abby, who suffered the most injuries, had to return to the hospital for a couple more days after returning home to North Carolina.

After almost a month, everyone was back home and in school.

“People we didn’t even know were e-mailing us and sending us money,” Cliff said. “A lot of people were reaching out in a lot of different ways.”

Using a compilation of e-mails sent and received during the ordeal, Cliff created the book, which is expected to be available in mid-June.

“I wanted it to be a fundraiser,” Cliff said. “My main goal is to raise money to help other people.”

Cliff will host an online preorder event from 6 to 11 a.m. Thursday. She hopes to sell 5,000 copies after reading that less than 5 percent of the 200,000 U.S. books published each year sell 5,000 copies or more.

“I would like to be in that 5 percent,” she said in an e-mail. “I think it’d be neat to make Amazon’s Top 100 list,” she said.

Cliff said she wants to sell books to people in every U.S. state, all Canadian provinces and at least five other countries.

Cliff said she hopes sales from the book will also garner her the attention of a publisher for another book she’s been working on for three years — “Twice a Soldier,” about one of Cliff’s patients, Cpl. Larry Small, a Marine who was wounded in Vietnam.

Contact E.A. Seagraves at 883-4422, Ext. 241, or elizabeth.seagraves@news-record.com