We recently connected with Ana Manwaring and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Ana thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the story of how you went from this being just an idea to making it into something real.
My creative writing life cracked open when I was in third grade’s social studies unit on dinosaurs. My report morphed into a short story, Me and My Brontosaurus, and won me the praise of my teacher Mrs. Clancy, and a top grade. In sixth grade, again in a social studies unit, I was captured by our book, Mexico, Our Neighbors to the South. The colorful, embroidered clothing on the pretty dark-haired women, the sombreros and burros, the cactus and marigolds, the legend of the volcanos Popocatepetl & Iztaccíhuatl—a love story of the warrior and his princess who was betrayed by a rival for her hand and died of grief. Popo returned from war victorious and built her tomb from ten mountains and, with his lit torch, lay next to her to protect her memory. How could I not fall in love? I vowed to go to Mexico when I grew up. Popocatepetl is still erupting today.
Later that year, a family friend read my palm. I was going to be a bestselling novelist by the time I turned 50. I didn’t quite make it by 50, but when I turned 40 I had an idea, which required me to do research in Mexico. My real estate focused accounting and tax preparation office (because Mom asked, “what are you going to do with a literature major?”) floundered with a market recession and my investments shot up with the Iraqi war, I bought a VW camper, tricked it out to live in, loaded my dog, “portable” computer, a carton of books, and set off across the border. On a lonely section of the Pan-American highway, the smell of ripening marijuana streaming in through the open window, a pickup appeared with armed men, who brandished their weapons and sped away. Instead of being murdered, I was gifted the idea for my first book of the JadeAnne Stone Mexico Adventures, Set Up. I grabbed my tape recorder and began to dictate. That experience in Mexico was the inciting incident that launched my career. My latest book, award winner Mortal Revenge, is co-authored with the boyfriend I met in a trailer park in Puerto Escondido in 1991. on that trip.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
As far as turning writing into a business? Easy peasy—or so I thought. I published Set Up and waited for my palm reading to manifest true. After all, I already had 25 years of small business management and accounting under my belt. I could keep meticulous records, track inventory, navigate the sales tax system, and prepare my Federal Schedule C.
But I couldn’t sell books except to students who bought them out of kindness, I needed to become visible and searchable. Experts said keep writing. When you have six books, you’ll be “discovered.” With everything else I do, teaching editing, beta reading, administering an organization, researching, writing a column for a small local paper, etc. I found it hard to find time to write my novels. I discovered I’m a deadline writer and I started using National Novel Month (NanoWriMo, an Annual contest to write 50,000 words in the month of November) where I wrote the first 3/4 of five of my novels and my memoir. I was a winner! But that didn’t finish the books or sell the books. After Set Up’s 28 years from concept to book, and The Hydra Effect’s 12 years, I learned striving for perfection was not a selling strategy. Only finishing a book and marketing it was going to sell it.
I started scheduling my tasks as I had back in my accounting office days. I wrote at night on Zoom first with my Sisters in Crime “siblings” and now with my co-author. I design promotions in Canva on Tuesdays. I post throughout the week to Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and occasionally TikTok since I hired a marketing consultant, Lisa Towles of Story Impact Consulting, and learned how to effectively use SEO, alternate text, keywords, and hashtags. I’m continually updating my website and expanding my reach. My sales increase each month! I use my M/W/F “Zoom Study Hall” to work with my beta critique group. The meetings help us be accountable, meaning we show up, and we discuss our approaches and problems from concept to sales, learning from each other. I am a strong advocate for writers’ groups. I’m now working on building a new newsletter to let readers know who I am and what I write. Between my organizations, my publisher, my cover designer, my editor, my first readers team, and my marketing consultant, my knowledge has expanded, my opportunities have multiplied, and my income is growing. The takeaway for me is, you can’t just go it alone, sitting in your writing space relying on inspiration and a few awards to be a successful writer. The success come with sound business practices, branding, and targeted marketing.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
How did I meet my co-author? Remember that trip to Mexico in 1991? My German Shepherd mix Parsely, and I drove to Mexico City where we lived with my cousin’s friend, a dog lover, for accouple of months while I studied Spanish at a school in Zona Rosa. At the beginning of October I drove the many hours to Oaxaca to my next language school. On my first night, my VW bus was broken into and the robbers stole all my clothes—not the generator to power my computer and lights, which would have earned them a lot of pesos. I called my ex and asked him to go to storage and gave him a list of clothes to fly down to me. He registered for my school, secured a spot with the family I had been billeted with, and I picked him up at the Mexico City airport three days later. We attended the school together and headed out to join classmates in Puerto Escondido on the Pacific coast to join classmates when it ended. Let me say, I was none too pleased to be thrown back into a relationship I’d ended. What had I been thinking? We mostly argued. Constantly.
In Puerto Escondido we found a clean, but empty trailer park to stay at. During our first night another VW bus pulled in. My ex wasn’t a beach type and stayed behind while I enjoyed the day with my language school pals at the main beach. This is an excerpt from my memoir Saints and Skeletons:
“Shadows stretched behind me. I gathered my things, paid my bar tab, then Parsley and I trudged back to Las Palmas through the sand. Sam, it turned out, lay in bed, miserable with a debilitating case of turista and told me to go out and leave him alone. I took another shower and tossed on the melon-colored flounced sundress he brought from home, added a bit of green eye pencil, some lipstick. Voila! I was ready to knock ’em dead at the salsa club.
“Hola. Hallo! Do you want a drink?”
A pale, soft-looking man with cropped black hair hailed me in heavily accented English from his barbeque pit at the trailer park. One of the orange camper neighbors.
I waved Hi, and walked over to introduce myself. “Yo soy Ana,” I said as I extended my hand.
“My name is Gerardo from the north of Mexico City,” he replied, pumping my hand a bit longer than necessary and breathing what I took to be the exhaust of a tequila distillery.
Did everyone in Puerto Escondido speak English? Gerardo appeared to be thirty-five, or slightly older. It was hard to tell because, up close, he had that worn look of an alcoholic. After a minute or two of polite small talk in a combination of my broken Spanish and his slurred English, I declined his offer of a cocktail and made an excuse to leave. As I turned to go, on that evening of October 27, 1991, the door of the orange camper slid open and, like in the movies, time slowed.
A slender man of medium-build with light brown hair curling into ringlets onto his forehead and neck stepped out. He looked young, twenties maybe, in his ancient pair of flowered Hawaiian baggies with dress tassel loafers. Nothing else. My feet rooted into the sand. I melted into jelly knees and rubber elbows with a wildly beating heart. Dazzled, I couldn’t take my eyes off his golden aura as he strode across the sandy path from the orange camper. He looked young, sleepy-eyed and innocent, but something in his manner said he was older. He sauntered over to me and took my hand. Butterflies danced in my heart.
“Fernando Leon, a sus ordenes,” he introduced himself, his smile lighting up his sea blue eyes. Warmth flowed through him.
Fernando. Fernando Leon. Fernando from the orange VW camper, from the north of Mexico City. His name played like a mantra. I was still holding his hand, gazing into the vast Pacific of his eyes when I heard myself inviting him out for the evening, drawing him toward the esplanade. “
Fernando and I spent the next year traveling all over Mexico. We lost touch after I returned home to California, but thirty-one years later, bearing a story, he found me. It took us two years to write Mortal Revenge—I needed to re-learn Spanish! We are now working on a personal essay of his fight to eliminate the plague of street dogs and pandemic of rabies in Mexico while we research our next novel.
We write about corruption and impunity. My books, The Jade Anne Stone Mexico Adventures, The Dafne Olabarrieta Mexico Mysteries, and Saints and Skeletons are all set in Mexico and deal with organized crime, human trafficking, illegal arms sales, and government and societal corruption. Mortal Revenge, based on Fernand’s true story, exposes medical and legal corruption at both state and federal levels. It’s a natural partnership. We are equally creative, interested in the same things, hold similar values, and where I’m the editor and accountant, he’s the marketing and research departments. Our biggest drawback is the half a year where the time difference between California and Veracruz, MX is two hours.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
Hopefully as you read about me, you followed the long and winding path from imaginative eight- year-old to retiree with what is no longer a side gig. Writing, editing, publishing, marketing, and teaching is my job. Sounds like a lot, but the creative life is perfect for me. Once I let go of the 9 to 5 mentality and the idea success is determined by the salary—about the time I was forced to close my accounting office doors—I started organizing my life to suite me. The more my daily life suited me, the happier I became and the more my creative ideas flowed. I’m a night owl, crawling through morning commute traffic wasn’t my thing. I started teaching afternoons and evenings part-time, a creative job with no two days the same. I wrote more, I joined writers’ groups, mingled with other writers, and never stopped studying. Talking to you about my journey, I realize that I have become exactly who I always wanted to be. Even if it has taken twenty-five years. Maybe I’m not a best seller—yet— but I’m a creative spirit living in a creative world of my own construction. It’s all come down to having an idea (remember that palm reading?), believing I have the capability to realize it, and saying yes to opportunity as it unfolds in front of me. Some people might call it work, but my job as writer, editor, teacher, director, writing event planner, and marketer is so satisfying, I almost want to get up early every day to start the creative fun.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://anamanwaring.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anamanwaring/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anamanwaring
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ana-manwaring-8111a613/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@anamanwaring
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/profile
- Other: GoodReads https://www.goodreads.com/anamanwaring
Linktree. https://linktr.ee/Ana Manwaring
Image Credits
These are my photos and my purchased cover promotions.