Heather Killough-Walden – A Passionate Story Hits Amazon’s Number One
Heather Killough-Walden is the author of some nine novels including “The Spell” which recently reached number one on the bestselling romance novels on Amazon. In this interview I asked Heather about how she became a writer, her thoughts on writing stand alone novels as opposed to writing a series of books and what she believes are the best ways a writer can promote themselves.
Darrell - What made you want to become a writer in the first place?
Heather - I suppose the writing itself is what made me become a writer. I learned to read at what is considered a very young age, and the ability to write came clinging to its coat tails. I’ve never been good at spoken communication; I get nervous, fumble over my speech, and suffer from horrible foot-in-mouth disease. As a result, I realized early on that if I wanted to communicate effectively, I would need time to think before I spoke. What gives you more time to think about what you’re going to say than writing it down? By the time you’ve put your thoughts into words, they’re more or less edited. It’s the safer bet.
But because I was quiet and preferred time to myself, I wasn’t the most popular girl in school. Hence, I used my writing as a bridge between this world and one that wasn’t quite so painful. This other world was of my design. I drew its landscape, colored its people, gave it depth and dimension. It was filled with beings who were larger than life and indomitable because that was what I wanted to be. They could defend themselves, stick up for others, and even defy gravity to literally leave their troubles on the ground.
I almost flunked out of high school because of this other world. Instead of paying attention in pre-calculus, I sat scrunched in my desk and furiously scribbled stories about vampire and werewolf gangs clashing on a deserted, bon-fire lit beach. I suppose that in the end, those stories did have more to do with my career choice than did exponential functions and logarithms.
Darrell - What's a typical day of writing like for you?
Heather - I wake up to writing and I fall asleep to writing. There is a quote by Eugene Ionesco that I keep on the front page of my website: “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” That couldn’t be more true. The moment I wake up, I use mouthwash. Then, while my daughter is still asleep and before hitting breakfast or even a cup of coffee, I am at my computer, responding to personal feedback from readers.
My daughter normally wakes up somewhere in the middle of this and I rush to fix her breakfast, give her a bath, get her dressed, and prepare her for homeschooling. As she does her assignments, I sit across from her with my laptop to get back to work on any one of the seven novels I am currently writing and on the administrative work that comes with keeping up some kind of presence in the literary world. I hit the FaceBook messages, blogs, sales copy, cover copy, synopses, edits, more edits, and so forth with all I’ve got.
Somewhere in there, I do the laundry, vacuum, take out the trash, clean the bathrooms, and make phone calls for doctor’s appointments, hair appointments, and dental appointments. All the while, however, I’m noticing people and places and music and movement and cataloguing everything around me for use in my books. Sometimes I’m doing the cataloguing in a literal sense – writing notes in a small leather-bound notebook I carry with me everywhere I go.
Family is important (obviously), so I try my best to make time with them every night. We sit together for an hour and read from the Kindle or a paperback; Terry Pratchett, Wendy Mass, Frances Hardinge and the Monk series by Lee Goldberg are some of our favorites. But I’ll be honest with you…a lot of the time, as we’re reading, my thoughts are drifting to my own stories. I have always (and most likely always will) existed half in this world and half in that other. It is both an escape and an inescapable prison, perhaps gold gilded, but a prison nonetheless, and as soon as both my husband and my child are back in bed, I’m once more seated before the computer, my fingers flying across the keyboard. If not there, then I’m tucked into the couch with throws all around me like a nest, a leather journal in my lap, the quiet night air filled with the sound of my pen scratching and the next door neighbor’s dog barking at god only knows what.
At some point, I fall asleep. But even in my dreams, I’m writing. Almost the entirety of The Game came to me in a dream, as did the lead characters in The Patrick Sinclaire Story, The Third Kiss, and Sam I Am, along with the plot for Hell Bent.
And then, four or five hours later, I wake up and do it all again.
Darrell - You have a number of series for sale as well as a number of stand alone novels. Would you recommend a new writer start trying to produce a series?
Heather - I recommend that a new writer write what he or she knows and what he or she is comfortable writing. If that’s a stand-alone novel, then fantastic. If it’s the first novel in a series, then also fantastic – but be prepared. If the book sells well, it means you actually have to write the next books in the series. There’s no going back.
Writers have to stick with what they know and what they are passionate about. Whether this turns out to be a paranormal romance series or a single thriller, if it is filled with passion and knowledge, it will be wonderful and people will read it.
Darrell - What do you think are the best ways for a writer to promote themselves?
Heather - Be nice to your readers. That’s the number one rule. They’re priceless; you aren’t a writer without someone to read your words, and it’s your readers who purchase your books, spread the news about you through word of mouth, and continue to come back for more.
Create a stark, eye-catching cover that draws readers to your book out of all of the books surrounding it on the Amazon or Barnes and Noble page. A book is always judged first by its cover, no matter how the saying goes. This is essential. Also, pricing is very important for eBooks. EBook readers don’t want to pay the same price for an eBook that they would have to pay for a physically tangible object such as a paperback. So, price accordingly or they’ll walk away.
On the second tier of importance in the marketing arena are of course all of the tools most indie authors already know how to use: Twitter, FaceBook, guest blogs, etc. Remaining active on these fronts is fairly important. Plus, it can be fun. It’s a gift to be able to interact with your readers, to feel their excitement over something you’ve created. The fact that you’ve touched someone’s life with your words – well, that’s immeasurably cool. It’s why we write professionally, isn’t it?
Important Links:
Return to the Table of Contents