Reply To: Questions, Insights, & Thoughts on Week 1

[loisbreedloveParticipant]

I found the worksheets useful. I think and talk about my books by what the books are about: Talkeetna is a mystery series set in Alaska, featuring a Native Alaskan police lieutenant….

I don’t talk about them in terms of why did I write them: I wrote the opening scene to Everybody Lies while I was sitting in a bar in Seward, Alaska, thinking about how easy it would be to commit suicide there — pick a trail, start walking and eventually something would get you: the terrain, the wildlife, or the weather. And then I thought about why a woman might choose to do that. That led to Candace Marshall walking along the Parks Highway….
I don’t even talk about my years in Sitka, Alaska. I mention I lived in Alaska, yes, but I don’t tell stories about it.

And my subscribers — the loyal ones we’re wanting to create — probably would like that.  To create those subscribers, I need to sell myself, not my books. Sigh. I have the hardest time with that concept. It crops up again and again as I learn marketing.

(Or that when I workshopped that scene decades ago now, one of the women was a mental health counselor. And she goes, I have to ask this, are you OK? Do you need to talk to someone about suicidal thoughts? Because that was almost too real…. Hehehe.)