Hello, my name is Kathleen and I am a writer, er author…

It all begins with an idea. You want to tell a story. You might have been writing for twenty years or two, but now it’s time. It’s out there. The book. It is one of the best days of your life when you open the box from your publisher and hold your new baby. The one with the glossy cover. Good wishes flood in from all over the globe (you know that’s how you wrote this scene) and the champagne pops. Congratulations! You’re an author. Now it’s time to get out there and tell people about it. Gulp.

Even with published poems, book reviews, and more than a dozen years of experience as a book publicist and certified meditation teacher, I found myself swallowing hard. I love promoting authors, but myself? My book? Umm, yeah. Not so much. Sound familiar?

Many of the authors I work with are women who are publishing for the first time in the second half of life, after successful careers in entirely different industries. Therein lies the challenge, I reflected recently. To move from writing on the side to putting our work front and center as authors, we become beginners again. After years of building competence in another field, we are newbies. It can be scary as hell, and yet if we stay open, accept that we don’t have all the answers, Beginner’s Mind, as they call it in Zen, is also one of the most fruitful spaces of all, especially as a storyteller.

In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” - Shunryu Suziki

There is a lot to learn on the journey. A year into promoting my debut novel, I have discovered what I like to do for promotion and what doesn’t work for me. Lessons have been learned about balancing work, promotion and new writing. All these things have informed how I coach authors I represent.

Now, I feel ready to begin something new. With great joy, I dedicate this space to sharing with readers and other writers, wherever you are on this wild ride called life.