Please welcome friend and author…

… Joanne Mallory.  Great to see you Joanne and thanks for finding time in your busy schedule to be here.

JM  Many thanks to you for inviting me over.

AW  I’m intrigued, Joanne.  You’ve got a new book coming out soon.  What’s that all about?

JM   I’d like to chat with you today about writerly things…

AW  OK.  You’ve got my attention!

JM   I’m a fiction writer – a romance, fiction writer no less.   Now this has been known (from time to time) to give a writer a bad name.  You see romance writers tend to get labelled for writing fluffy, chic lit, formula fiction or, my personal favourite; bodice rippers, and we get, well, written off, as not being able to do anything else.  Which kind’a narks me, because writing is hard, in all it’s forms, and all its genres.  I recently read a post (on Instagram) that said “Non-fiction writers have it easy…”

And I just want to clear up a myth here; No writer has it easy.  We just write what works best for us, as best we can.

AW  I couldn’t agree more!  I’ve tried writing romance myself and I found it especially difficult, for many different reasons, so I turned to crime, my current genre of novels.

JM   I write romance because I love the happy ending, life is confusing and sometimes cruel, hence I like my fiction to be of the warm and fuzzy kind – sue me.

But I’ve taken on a non-fiction project this year, I mentioned to my publisher that I could put lots of marketing tips in one place, and design the book around ‘cheap as possible ways to help writers organically grow their audience.’

And let me tell you, it was TOUGH.  I’m used to being able to switch up the plot and lead my heroine on a merry dance, but non-fiction is a whole different animal.  I checked and double checked my facts, putting as much information down on the page as possible, covering as many platforms as I could, and do you know what I was left with?

AW  I can guess, but tell me anyway.

JM  A dry text -- dry like the Sahara, with reams and reams of instructive, yawn inducing information. Now, stay with me here, because I’m going to tell you how I made it better in the hope that you might like to buy a copy…

AW  OK, let us in on the secret then…

JM  Saving this book-baby was going to take more than a little jiggery-pokery – It needed a full-on Frankenstein!   So, I went back to methods I hadn’t used since Uni; I printed the whole lot off, took a black Sharpie and a red pen and attacked it.

The manuscript looked like the remains of a horror victim by the time I’d finished with it.  All that was left was a few chapter headings and some ideas, and thus started the beginning of what is now the finished project.  It took lots (and lots) of runs to get the content to a place where the text, (hopefully) has a humorous tone, so that the reader (hopefully) feels like they are having a personal chat about their on-line self, and how they can make it work better for them.

I wrote Building An Author Platform and filled it with all the simple things I wished I’d have known when I first started, it would have saved me so much time.

AW  Thinking back to my first book… the number of times I said to myself, ‘I wish I had known that sooner’… So, I get that!  And what’s happening next?

JM  If you’re interested in finding out more, I’m having an on-line launch on Facebook on the 19^th of

May, where I’ll be giving lots of tips and tricks on author marketing. Just click Joanne's Launch Event  to 
come along.

AW  Thanks Joanne, I will be at the theatre on the 19^th, but I will certainly drop in at some point during the day.  I hope it goes well and thanks for being here today.

Joanne’s book Building an Author Platform is available for pre-order on Amazon.

myBook.to/Buildingmallory