Featured Author - Archives
March - May 2004
A Chat With Author Gloria Mallette
Gloria Mallette that worldwind of a writer who has given us such gems as Weeping Willows Dance, Promises To Keep, and now The Honey Well. Always eager to display charm and witticism in illustrating points within the African-American literary world, The Romer Review was able to extract a few opinionated views that gives the reading public an up-front view of this remarkable writer.
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ACR: This month’s theme is author websites and visibility for maximal results…How has having a website made a difference in your career and overall visibility?
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| GM: My website, www.GloriaMallette.com, has made a huge difference in my career and overall visibility, in that readers who happen upon one of my titles for the very first time and are impressed with that book, immediately start looking for other works by me. One of the first places they look, besides a bookstore, is on the Internet. The first week my website was up, I had over ten thousand hits. All of my titles are profiled on my site, and now I get e-mail from readers telling me that they didn't know I had five titles until they saw them on my website or on Amazon.com. The more books they know about, the better my sales figures are. Hence, the better my chances for a long writing career. |
ACR: What advice do you have to give about authors having websites in general as opposed to them not having them?
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 GM: The Honey Well was born out of a story a neighbor told me, several years ago, about a woman down in South Carolina, back in the 1930's, whose husband died and left her with six daughters to raise. With no viable means of income, this woman turned her home into a brothel and all six of her daughters into prostitutes. Her home became known as the honey hole. This story fascinated me. I wondered what kind of woman would prostitute her daughters, her baby girls. That story never left me and when I sat down to create another novel, that story popped into my head. My focus was on writing about a woman who had done such a despicable thing as prostitute her own daughter. Hence that woman had to be manipulative, conniving, selfish, and greedy, all while professing great love for her daughter. It was important to me that this story not so much be about prostitution, but able the love/hate relationship between a mother and daughter when the sanity of motherhood has been overshadowed by greed. |
| ACR: Why did you decide to become an author? |
| GM: I don't know if I would say that I decided to become an author over saying that the need to write was a powerful desire that pulled on me from a very young age. I always had an extremely vivid imagination and was also a voracious reader. My very first manuscript was written when I was nineteen but no one was interested. After two rejections, I shelved my manuscript and went on with my life, all the while hating my day jobs and dreaming that one day, I might be able to see my name on the cover of a book. I was well into my thirties when I dared to sit down and read my first manuscript. I edited and expanded it from 200 pages up to 600 pages and from that moment on, I was driven to write, story after story, even though I wasn't getting published. It was my husband who told me, that it was only when I was writing that I showed any real passion for anything---that my part time job was killing me. The rest is history. |
| ACR: Who has influenced you more in your becoming a writer and why? |
| GM: I would have to say that my husband influenced me more than anyone in my quest to become a writer. As previously stated, he saw the passion I had for writing, but he also told me, to either self-publish or get a real job. Need I say more? I self-published. |
| ACR: In doing the write thing, what can you give emerging and aspiring writers on learning the craft and keeping focused? |
| GM: Oh, wow. I guess the first thing that comes to mind that I actually do tell emerging and aspiring writers, is to first commit that story in their heads to paper. Too many aspiring writers say they want to write; yet they never seem to be able to find the time to put the work in that writing requires. I tell them that writing to me is like any other job---it takes discipline, dedication and hard work. It means reading others, for some it means taking writing courses, improving upon one's grammar, and for all, it means learning the trade of promoting and marketing oneself. Once a book is written and, hopefully, published, the real work has yet to begin |
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