Hi bookish friends!
Yesterday, I interviewed Rondi Bauer Olson, the author of “All Things Now Living.” We talked about how she got into writing, how she got from shabby draft to published, and she gives insight into her missteps on social media. She gave me much to think about. I transcribed some of the interview for you to read.
Video interview here. Enjoy!
How did you get from the beginning of realizing “This isn’t a good draft” to getting it published?
The first time I realized that it (my book) was not very good was when I got my first critique. It was at my first ACFW conference. So I got that first critique back and I realized I had to do a lot of work. There was an editor at the conference who was just leaving Zondervan and he was willing to do critiques. I revised my first pages and turned them into him and he critiqued them again. And so I’d say, he less became a critiquer and more of a mentor. He helped me develop my style… When I say everything was wrong with it, I mean like everything was wrong with it. I thought I was showing and not telling but I was actually telling. My dialogue was bad. My plot was bad. My pacing was bad. Every part of writing that could be bad needed to be fixed. I just worked on it for many year and like I said many versions of the same story.
I read the article you posted in the ACFW. What happened with your social media page?
One of the things you hear when you go to conferences is that you need a platform. They want to see thousands and thousands of followers. Well, if you are a new author and you don’t have much out there, I had a few short stories out there for teens, but they’re weren’t looking me up. They weren’t interested in me or my writing. Who was I going to have that’s following me? The answers is well like nobody. So I decided I would work on a website and a social media campaign that was based on writing for children and young adult. I knew there was a need and a desire for that. And I did do very well attracting people to my Facebook page and to my Twitter that was focused on that. However, when it came time to actually sell my book, that was not my audience…Here I invested all this time in a platform where my audience didn’t even participate…I turned to focusing on the social media places where my teen readers are and also focusing my website and my Facebook on me as the brand rather than what I’m doing, which is writing for children and young adults.
Can you tell me a little bit about what your story is about?
Right now I’m working on a series of four books. The first book is already out. The second one will hopefully be out soon followed by the other two, series of four. My main character, Amy, has been brought up with the belief that the competing post-apocalyptic civilization is cursed by God because they combined pig genes into the human genome. When she finds herself actually into that community, she has to decide whether they are really human and whether she should make an effort to save them. Or whether or not they are in fact cursed by God. My little tag line is Amy could save the people in New Lithisle if she thought they were human.
