Meet Brenda Whiteside

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brenda Whiteside a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Brenda, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

My dad was the proverbial workaholic. He came from a family of seven children, whose father abandoned the brood early on. At fifteen, my dad quit school and worked in the Sears warehouse in Phoenix to help feed the family. When he married at twenty, his focus switched to his young wife and building their nest. Daddy went into business for himself when I was a young teen, working seven days a week most of the time. His hard work, ethics, and moral compass for the people he dealt with was my example to follow.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I happened on a writing career late in life. Academically, I was always a good student, but painting and drawing brought me recognition. Although I excelled in English and literature studies, I didn’t take my love of writing seriously. I entered college as an art student. Before getting very far along, I married, saw some of the world with my military husband, and had a child. Once our son was off to prep school, I took some college courses, one of which was creative writing. I discovered I found more satisfaction filling a blank page with words than an empty canvas with color. I signed my first contract to publish a novel in 2009.

The first few books I wrote were unintentionally romance novels. I knew nothing about genre, and wrote what I called people stories. Since romance novels are the highest-earning genre of fiction, it didn’t bother me when I wasn’t taken seriously as an author by those who claimed to not read romance. But I did grow tired of the single genre story and branched out into Romantic Suspense. Adding villains, maybe murder, and two to three plot lines within the story was more challenging.

I’ve added two more genres to my plate in the last couple of years. My granddaughter has a vivid imagination, so we teamed up to write a children’s series about a girl and her dog. We’ve published two Sadi and Max books to date. Cozy Mystery is the third adventure, and I’m having a great deal of fun writing with a partner. Joyce Proell is an author friend from when I lived in Minnesota. I came up with an idea born in Prescott, Arizona while having a chocolate martini with my sister. We imbibe twice a year in an historic hotel restaurant/bar to celebrate our birthdays. After a couple of years, we called ourselves the Chocolate Martini Sisters. I knew there was a cozy mystery waiting to be written about two sisters who encounter murder on their chocolate martini weekends and solve the mystery ahead of the detective. I enlisted the best mystery writer I know, Joyce, and we’ve been weaving stories for the last couple of years. Book three just released and book four is in the planning stages.

In addition to getting the characters and stories out of my head and into written form, I am a freelance fiction editor. I take great joy in helping other authors polish their books and realize their dreams. I also review books for an online site because I like to read. I juggle all these things, switching hats several times a week, while blaming my father for his workaholic example that has me busy six to seven days a week! I’ve had thoughts of retiring, slowing down, but they’re only brief, fleeting notions. Writing and editing are my passions and sources of great enjoyment for me.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

My love of reading and an active imagination must have contributed to my desire to create my own books. Although I’m a social being, I can be perfectly happy spending hours alone with only the people who populate my stories. I draw from my own experience, the settings I know, and events around me. I would advise anyone who wants to write fiction books, to be an avid people-watcher. I also advise to not hold back. Write from the heart and/or the deepest recesses of your mind and do it with abandon. Lastly, write every day, even if only for twenty minutes before the day job. I did that for a few years, completing two books.

Beyond creating stories, an author needs a tough skin. Not everyone will like what you write. You also have to be willing to work hard at publishing and promoting. Writing turns out to be the easy part. There will be hours of toiling to get the book in front of readers.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

From the time I published my first book, I was told the only way to sell books was to keep writing more books. There is definitely wisdom and truth in that factual nugget, yet there is more to it than that. I am what is known as a hybrid author because I have books published traditionally with a publisher and also books I have self-published. However a writer chooses to publish, the challenge is the same: find your readers. No longer frowned upon, self-publishing has changed the author to reader dynamic. With a world full of books and available at the touch of a key on your computer or e-Reader, how can an author stand out in the crowd? There are so many avenues to pursue for promotion. If an author tries to follow all of them, they’ll be lost in a maze, not selling or writing. Each author has to choose a couple and hopefully they’ll work for them. Amazon is the behemoth in the publishing world. I am currently attempting to learn all that I can about advertising with them. They don’t make it easy. There are a couple of promotional sites I am also studying. Expanding my fan base is top priority. How to do that is a huge challenge.

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