Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Billie Best. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Billie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you walk us through some of the key steps that allowed you move beyond an idea and actually launch?

I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was a child. All my life I wrote poems, journal entries, essays and short stories, but I kept them to myself because they were never my first priority. That changed when I was in my fifties, my husband died, and the experience was both sensational and cathartic. I knew it was a story I had to tell, so I began to write a memoir. It was only the second time I had a long form writing project and my first try at nonfiction. I struggled to find my voice. Working with an editor got me through the developmental phase of the project and helped me express my emotions. With her guidance my memoir became the story of a woman’s emotional journey from trauma to self-discovery and reinvention.

It was my editor that urged me to write and publish on a regular basis to build a track record and a body of work. So I started a blog in 2018 and began to post weekly. The blog appears on my website, and I also send it out as a newsletter to subscribers, as well as posting it on social media. Those three venues have synergy, and the platform metrics help me measure my success. Writing with the intent of publishing weekly pushed me to see writing as a practice, something I do to improve my skills and test my success. After years of crafting weekly blog posts, my writing is noticeably better.

Still, my memoir had a pacing problem. Then one of my beta readers suggested I start the story with the worst thing that happened to me, and build the telling around that incident as a series of flashbacks. After many rewrites, I finally had a finished manuscript in 2020, just as the pandemic broke and shut down the publishing industry. By that time I was obsessed with launching the book and unwilling to wait and see how the pandemic would play out. So, I took some online classes in self-publishing, launched my own imprint, Widowspeak Publishing, and self-published my memoir titled “How I Made a Huge Mess of My Life (or Couples Therapy with a Dead Man)”. Now I have self-published three books and 220+ blog posts with a following of fans who enjoy my writing.

Billie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I began my professional writing life in marketing communications and public relations producing press releases, brochures, advertising and presentations for my clients. My ability to translate complex concepts into simple, relatable text was the selling point for my talents. I started out in the music business writing media kits for rock bands. That experience got me a job writing advertising copy for a chain of retail stores that sold music related products. Next my knowledge of the music business got me a job as associate editor for a music magazine where I wrote and edited columns and advertisements.

My understanding of how the advertising business worked landed me a job for a chain of stores that sold books and computers to college students. This was a pivotal moment for me as desktop publishing was a new technology that was changing both advertising and personal computing. I was learning on the job how books are sold, how computers are sold, and how personal computers could be used to create graphic designs for marketing and communications.

Today technology is ubiquitous, so it might be difficult to imagine what a boon it was for me to find myself going to classes to learn Apple and IBM operating systems. Because my employers appreciated my writing skills and my ability to communicate complex concepts with elegant simplicity, they paid for my on-the-fly education. As a result, I was hired by an advertising agency with large corporate clients in the technology business who needed communications tools to sell this new thing called the Worldwide Web. Because I was well established as a writer, I was hired to write some of the first user manuals for the software and hardware used in email, databases, and search engines. While this may sound pretty boring, it paid really well, and for the first time in my life I was in demand.

While I was busy writing for technology businesses, I was improving as a writer, building a fluidity between my brain and my fingertips that I rely upon every day. Writing on demand for clients forced me to produce results and see writing less as art and more as craft. I learned that I can write any time, any place, on any topic. Not to say that I gave up on writing as art. All those years I was slogging away on writing communications for clients, I was also keeping a journal, writing short stories and essays, and tinkering with poetry. But my creative writing was something I did on the side because I felt under pressure to earn an income. That shunting of my creative self in favor of my earning power was something I didn’t appreciate until I wrote my memoir. When it finally came time to tell my story in a book, the one thing I wasn’t comfortable with was describing my emotions.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

As a writer I’m selling my artful arrangement of the alphabet to people who enjoy reading. One of the most significant barriers for writers is the amount of time it takes to read. Reading is linear. There’s no way to enjoy a book faster than sentence by sentence. That could be eight, ten, twelve hours of someone’s life used up reading a book. So reading is a big commitment. How do I convince readers it’s worth their time to read my books? Each week I give them a taste of what to expect with my blog.

Since I started blogging in 2018 my posts have evolved to be more storytelling, more personal, more emotional. Because my audience wants the feels. My willingness to expose myself, my truth telling, and my punchy bluntness give my readers a sense of what to expect from my books. I keep posts relatively short, 500-1200 words with a title and a short blurb describing the content. Regular readers know my posts are a quick read, and they can scan the title/blurb before they commit.

The venues where I post my blog are measurable. I use Google Analytics on my website. I use Mailchimp analytics on my newsletter. And I can see views and likes on Facebook and Instagram. When I write a bomb, I know it. When I write a hit the number of subscribers to my newsletter goes up, the number of shares on social media increases, and the amount of time readers spend on my website goes up. I have direct feedback in comments and reply emails. This interactivity puts me in touch with my readers, helps me build a relationship with them, and guides my future posts.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My writing is very personal. I explore aging, relationships, sex and technology from a feminist perspective. If I have a mission, it is to normalize aging, and encourage women to appreciate their life experience and the accrued wisdom they’ve earned with their resilience. I learned early in the process of blogging that more people will read my posts if I include a photo of my face. First it personalizes the content with a visual greeting, like saying hello to someone in the grocery story. Second, I show my real face in selfies without touch-ups or filters to make the point of fearless aging. Putting my face on my writing keeps it real. As a result of that experience with my blog, I put my face on two of my book covers because it instantly communicates my gender and age.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://billiebest.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/billiebestwriter
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/billie.best
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@BillieBestWriter
• Other: https://www.amazon.com/author/billiebest

Image Credits

All photos are by Billie Best