When life falls apart, what if sharing your secrets with a perfect stranger makes everything fall back in place? ~ Ana Simons from Silent Signs
~ Author Interview ~
Ana Simons, Author of Silent Signs
I hope everyone is having a fantastic week! Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Indie Author, Ana Simons. Her debut novel – Silent Signs is available on Amazon in E-book, paperback, and currently through the Kindle Unlimited program.
Thank you Ana, for taking the time to share with us today. Congratulations on publishing your first book, Silent Signs. Please tell us about it.
Silent Signs is a novel that combines drama, everyday struggles and the challenges of modern womanhood with emotional moments, humour and passionate passages. It renders a story that explores family relationships, the feelings of loss after the breakup of a marriage and the fears and thrills of finding love again.
That’s the story of Sophie who, after a decade of marriage, realizes she’d missed all the silent signs when her husband announces he wants them to go separate ways.
While still trying to cope with the shock, she must leave for a two-week work assignment in London. As she juggles her emotions at the airport terminal, Matthew observes her, intrigued. When the opportunity to meet her again presents itself, the charming and enigmatic American doctor, who’d relocated to London two years earlier, doesn’t shy away and pursues her romantically. Soon they find themselves diving into an intense affair ─ a relationship she believes is fated to end as soon as the moment for them to part ways arrives.
Except it doesn’t end. Not when he realizes that hers are not the only scattered pieces that need to be put back together.
But is she ready to truly let him in, especially when her husband will be asking for a second chance? If not, is Matthew ready to let her go forever?
http://bit.ly/AMAZON_SilentSigns
How did publishing your first book change your process of writing?
When I first began to write Silent Signs I didn’t know anything about the publishing industry, how it works, how competitive and difficult it is, the entrepreneurial mind-set you need to have, all of the marketing tools you need to master… Oblivious to all of that, I just kept on writing and serialising the novel on the global story-telling app Wattpad. At the time, interacting with fellow authors and readers was fun and rewarding enough.
However, a second book and over two million views later, I finally began to contemplate the publishing possibility in a more serious way. In the meantime, I had already learnt a few things about traditional and self-publishing, about the benefits of creating your social media presence, about the importance of gathering your “tribe” and building your mailing list…
Currently I don’t write as much as I used to – because there aren’t enough hours in the day. I’m also on an academic career and my “writing time” must now also include platform building and marketing work.
And querying agents. In fact, one of the most difficult aspects of the whole process is to keep sane while someone else judges your work…
What was the most interesting part of the self-publishing process? Do you have any advice for writers going on this path?
How easy it is to hit the publish button and the freedom to choose and decide on every step of the way (cover and price, advertising strategies, changes, etc.) make self-pub very appealing.
My advice? Get a good editor and consider your cover carefully. Readers do judge books by their covers.
Does the writing process energize you or exhaust you?
It depends. Some years ago, my thesis supervisor told me that when we write two things can happen: there are days everything flows so wonderfully you feel like you could be the best writer in the world. Then there are those days you’re not the best, but rather a beast who can only bring a couple of crappy lines to the paper… These days are terrible and incredibly exhausting.
I’ve had the pleasure of reading your next book Free Falling, which is written from the male POV. What is it like to write from the POV of the opposite sex?
A very, very funny challenge – that made me read a lot of men’s magazines, check some weird surveys, conduct quite a few awkward interviews and get mad at my husband when he refused to accurately tell me what men think and feel in certain situations.
What are your future plans as a writer? What are you working on currently?
Free Falling is planned to be a series. Book One is finished and will be published soon and Book Two is already in the works. I’m currently also working on its prequel, which I’ll be giving for free on my website.
Blurbs and the link to get the prequel novella can be found here:
http://www.anasimons.com/free-falling
Thank you so much, Kate, for having me here.
A big thank you to Ana for joining us here today, I look forward to reading the novella and I am excited to see your second novel, Free Falling published soon.
As always, I love to hear from readers, please comment below. Wishing you a wonderful weekend!
Kate
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