About Carrie Aulenbacher:
I’m an author fueled by mocha coffee and pulse-pounding Pinterest boards of Mario Blanco!!
Okay, seriously…I’m the kind of author who was always thinking my ideas for books were only ever going to sit in a drawer in my desk at home. I showed them to friends, who loved them, and that was as far as I took things. But, two years ago, as my husband and I started our family, I began to see how fast time was passing by. I saw things in a different perspective.
Life is so short.
So I got those book babies out of the drawer and dusted them off. When my romance was picked up, my life took a turn. I became an author!
Now I strive to make the most of this opportunity and network with other new authors online whom I can help in their journey. The more book babies I see born, the more my heart sings. I love my role now as a contributing writer to online magazines, as one who can help new authors with customizing their FB author page, as one who can give authors feedback on their online efforts, and as a romance writer that can weave tales of love that my target audience really enjoys.
In my offline world, I LOVE to play outside and get dirty, whether it’s in my garden, my flowerbeds, or my creek. I also love working on my macrophotography catalog of insects and spiders. Yeah, I’m a nerd, so what?
And that’s a little bit about Carrie. *wink*
What inspires you to write?
I’m inspired by the “What If’s” in life. What if that guy looked like he had it all…but was missing something deep inside? What if she were broken hearted but refused to give up on trying to be happy? What if they were put against circumstances that were amazingly challenging…would they survive? Would they make it together?
I also hate the hero winning in the classic sense. Too many stories drag the hero through the mud only to have him win in the last ten pages and that really grinds my gears. Real life is not that way so I work to create stories that are realistic. Stories that could be carved out of real life are the ones that pull me in and that’s what I want to share with my readers.
Tell us about your writing process.
I like to storyboard a plot before I write so that I know exactly where I am headed. As long as I have the main plot set, then I know where to hang all the sideshoot secondary plots. Things can branch off of the main plot in unexpected ways, but I have to know where they are branching off OF…if that makes sense!
I do everything in Word from beginning to end. The only longhand I still do are in my daily journals where I can vent about how frustrating my characters are
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
I love to spend time with my characters in my head on my drive to work before I write things down. I like to visualize them in different situations and just watch the situation unfold like a TV show in my head. If I feel it was a compelling scene, I’ll write it out. If not, I’ll just change the channel in my head on the drive home and watch a different episode and see if I like that direction better. Spending time with them like that helps me hear their unique voices and see their individual quirks so that I can better capture that in the written word later.
I don’t sit down and have a cup of tea with them, per se. I may try on their skin and walk around pretending to be them from time to time, however! What good is pretending if not to help you really feel how another person would react to a certain situation?
Time with them inside my head brings them to life in a way a character sketch on paper never could.
What advice would you give other writers?
Trust that your book baby is worth writing and worth completing.
Don’t do this for the money or fame and don’t do it to shove it in someone else’s face. Do it because you want to prove to yourself that you ARE good enough and that you CAN do this. Everything else will be icing on the cake!
Be prepared to be invisible in the published world and BE prepared to HAVE to learn about online marketing as you can’t avoid marketing your book if you want to sell anything. Hate it all you want – you can’t get around it.
SPEND MONEY on an editor – not your girlfriends, not your husband. Someone who doesn’t know you and who edits for a living. It will be worth it.
How did you decide how to publish your books?
I wanted to submit to the Page Publishing review panel to see what they would think of my novel before going the indie route. They are in the business to sell books and make money and they would know if it was marketable or not. When they finished reviewing and said it was accpeted, I was floored. It meant the world to me that they saw enough in it to publish it.
Page is an awesome hybrid publishing house in NYC that is very thorough and very professional. It’s not for everybody. I recommend that you explore all your options and all the prices involved. Depending on your genre, book length, niche, etc….you might find a different option that’s better suited for you. Don’t give up and do lots of research before making a final decision!
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
More and more will publish themselves, the market will be more saturated with low-quality reading, and it will be harder and harder to establish oneself in their genre as a high quality writer. Not because readers WANT low quality reading, but because you will have to compete with the hundreds of thousands of books published yearly in your same genre. (YES, hundreds of thousands!)
Think all you want that every indie author you meet is sweet as cherries and that nobody’s outright saying that they are competing with you – but your book baby IS competing with everyone else’s book baby for space on a shelf, space in a Kindle library, space in a reader’s heart.
Indies will have to get smarter and work 100x harder in the coming years to get the exposure that will bring in sales.
What do you use?: Professional Editor, Professional Cover Designer
What genres do you write?: Romance
What formats are your books in?: Both eBook and Print
Website(s)
Carrie Aulenbacher Home Page Link
Link To Carrie Aulenbacher Page On Amazon
Link to Author Page on other site
Your Social Media Links
Goodreads
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
LinkedIn
All information in this post is presented “as is” supplied by the author. We don’t edit to allow you the reader to hear the author in their own voice.
