A Life in the Day

It’s my birth-month and I think it only fitting that I dedicate it to launching a new blog series. This week we’ll discuss establishing an author platform and tying that your author brand. After all, readers are buying you when they look for your titles, not your publisher, or your editor, or even your adorable, Puertorican literary agent with a penchant for coffee and gifs in everything. Aren’t platforms for nonfiction writers and 70s shoes? An author platform is as vital to the fiction author as it is to the nonfiction author and it encompasses everything from blogs to social media presence, speaking engagements and media contacts. But simply put, platform is the “ability to sell books because of who you are or who you can reach.” – Jane Friedman So what’s a platform and why do you need one? "Platform is the ability to get people to follow and find you for information and guidance." - Chuck Sambuchino,  Create Your Writer Platform It's what you do before ...

Image by Saritza Hernandez Have you watched Pitch Perfect 2 ? We ended up seeing it twice this past weekend and while I love the songs and found myself singing along (especially in that scene with Rebel Wilson and Adam DeVine) the scenes that struck a chord with me the most were with Keegan-Michael Key who plays Becca's b oss, an award-winning music producer. The first time we see his character on screen he's calling a staff meeting and asks everyone to give ideas. To just shout out anything that comes to mind and no one says or thinks of anything productive to say. As he walks away, he tells them they have one minute to wow him. "My time is like a toddler in a tiara, people: short and precious." – Keegan Michael Key I thought about how many times I think the same thing when going through pitch appointments or going through the query inbox. Your query needs to grab my attention quickly and hook me. In one of my workshops: "It's All in the Hook...

Be mindful of what you say but careful of what you write. My parents used to tell me this as a child all of the time. It was likely due to the rather disturbing stories I'd write as a child of inanimate objects flying around the house and as I got older the "forbidden" love stories I'd scribble about on the dozens of notebooks in my bedroom. As a teen, I didn't understand why my parents were so controlling of my words and often rebelled against them in my writing. As I grew older, I realized why the pen is truly mightier than the sword and it's something I'm often surprised to find many people online forget. You can scream at the wind and howl at the rain but the moment those words are on paper (or screen) they are immortalized and the world's perception of you is forever changed by them. People believe what they hear but they SWEAR by what they read! Celebrities live with this fact of life as their words are often twisted in tabloid TV, e-zines and ...