We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gabi Coatsworth a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Gabi, appreciate you joining us today. Can you recount a story of an unexpected problem you’ve faced along the way?
I honed my skill in business and marketing as I worked in those fields, gradually working my way up from a junior executive in a market research company in London to becoming VP Marketing of a large travel company based in Chicago. What nobody explained to me before I started was that making mistakes was a necessary, even welcome, part of the process. And that failing to sell a product did not make you a failure – it simply meant that one moved on to the next call.
I gradually learned this by the time I finally retired from my full-time employment, and had run my own consultancy company, also in the travel marketing field. And those lessons stood me in good stead when I started submitting my writing to journals and magazines, and eventually, publishers. Rejection is a huge part of becoming a successful writer, but to begin with, I was taking every refusal personally. It wasn’t my work that was being rejected. It was me.
Eventually, though, I came to consider each rejection as bringing me closer to my goal, which helped me persevere. And they taught me that if I wanted to sell my product (my writing) I needed to do what I’d always done in business, and that was to think about the audience for my work. It’s not that I wrote for a specific type of reader, it was rather that I looked for the kind of reader who would be most likely to enjoy the book I’d written.
Gabi, 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’m an award-winning British-born author and blogger, who has spent half my life living in the United States. I began writing as a child, before abandoning fiction for the world of work. I took it up again roughly twenty years ago, and found I had a lot to learn! Both about the craft and the business of writing. I’m a member of several national writing associations, and active in the Connecticut writing community, where I run several groups for writers, including a weekly write-in, and lead memoir workshops.
My debut women’s novel, A Beginner’s Guide to Starting Over, came out in spring, 2023 from Atmosphere Press, who also published my award-winning memoir, Love’s Journey Home, in 2022. My essays, short fiction, and poetry have appeared in anthologies and literary journals, both in print and online
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
I had heard, long before I’d even written a novel, that any aspiring author needed a platform – an audience likely to read the book I eventually came up with. So, in 2011, I signed up for WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. In those days, posting multiple times a day on Twitter was relatively easy – you could write all the tweets in one go, and schedule them throughout the day. Each time I did, the number of followers increased. It’s now at around 8,000, but I’m no longer sure that Twitter is the right medium for promoting a book. I started two Facebook accounts – one for family and friends, with photos of my garden, pets, and travels, and another for my writing friends, where I would share the links to my blog, which featured short, mainly humorous essays about my life. That blog resulted in an offer from an editor who was putting together an anthology of women writers: Tangerine Tango, and she used three of my pieces in the book, which came out in 2012.
Local writers in Connecticut became aware of me when I started a monthly group for them and put it on Meetup. That expanded my list of connections, and now I have around 1000+ writers on my mailing list.
Instagram followed, and then I took over an open mic evening for writers, when the previous host retired.
When my books came out, I needed readers, of course, so with the help of a young graphic designer I found, we put together a social media campaign, using Canva to produce graphics featuring the book, its reviews from other authors, and associated events with the launch. We won an award for the campaign from the Connecticut Press Club.
The best way to build an audience on social media is to start before you need it – now, ideally! Keep it relevant, and don’t accept “friend” requests from people or bots that aren’t in your target market of readers. Post regularly, and share and comment on other people’s posts, – that’s how relationships are made. And join a writing community of like-minded people. There are Facebook and Meetup groups for every kind of writer: women, mystery, horror, essay, and more. You’ll find yourself with a network of invaluable friends you can ask for advice in your forward journey.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
I think many people believe that one simply writes a novel, and offers it to a publisher who takes and publishes it a few months later. That might have worked, up to a point, for Ernest Hemingway, but it certainly isn’t true these days. It takes a village – possibly a small town – to write and publish today. If you look at the acknowledgments pages of any novel, you’ll find the author thanking their editors (plural), beta readers, who read and comment on the book before it ever gets sent out to potential publishers, their agent, if they’re lucky enough to have one, their publishing team, supportive writing friends, and possibly their cat!
This isn’t something to be ashamed of – in fact, it’s the opposite. Each of those people help make a book the best it can be, which is what most writers want. You may have come across books that haven’t been properly edited, and it shows. Or whose cover doesn’t tell you anything about the contents. Or which has typos and missing words. That’s why a writer needs help. All this takes time, more time than you might think, so if you’re asking a writing friend why their book isn’t out yet – cut them some slack. A traditional publisher takes roughly two years from the day the contract is signed to the day the book is on the shelf in a store. And the author has put in at least two years’ worth of work before that! Perseverance and patience are key, and helping others along the way helps too. You may even find yourself in the acknowledgments!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.gabicoatsworth.com Linktr.ee https://linktr.ee/gabicoatsworth
- Instagram: @gabicoatsworth https://www.instagram.com/gabicoatsworth/
- Facebook: @gabicoatsworth https://www.facebook.com/gabi.coatsworth/
- Linkedin: @gabicoatsworth https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabi-coatsworth-a7710031
- Twitter: @gabicoatsworth https://twitter.com/GabiCoatsworth
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cddSUEzT3c&list=PLgDHQL5ntFEmincZzS36H01pL3UVSaQU1
- Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6545850.Gabi_Coatsworth
- Pinterest: @GabiCoatsworth
Image Credits
All mine