About Mariela Dabbah:
Born and raised in Argentina, Mariela Dabbah is an international speaker, award-winning, best-selling author of 6 non-fiction books, two novels in Spanish and a book of short stories, also in Spanish, and one of the most respected voices in leadership and inclusion. As the founder and CEO of the Red Shoe Movement, a global career and leadership development company, Mariela empowers women and diverse professionals to lead with confidence and authenticity. The Postcard is her first novel originally written in English.
What inspires you to write?
An idea, a small thing that happens and triggers my imagination, my what if… It could be a news story, a story someone tells me, something I observe, something that almost happened…
What authors do you read when you aren’t writing?
I love Barbara Kingsolver, Jodi Picoult, Anita Shreve, Celeste Ng, Jojo Moyes…
Tell us about your writing process.
When I start writing I have no idea where the book is going, who the characters are, what their relationship is or anything else. I find out as I write and I'm often as surprised as the reader is later on. It's a fascinating process because I'll stumble upon problems for which I don't have an answer for a while, but suddenly, things become clear as I continue writing.
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
I do talk to my characters while I'm writing. It's a great way to get to know them and feel their emotions closely. It's funny because often as I'm trying to figure out why a character does one thing or another, I would have conversations about the issues I'm trying to figure out with my life partner, and he's always shocked about the fact that I have no clue who these characters are or why they do what they do. He'll ask me: But aren't you the author? And I'll say: Yes, but I still don't know why this is happening.
What advice would you give other writers?
Don't wait until you have time to write. Start today and write one page a day. At the end of the year you'll have 365 pages and you can start the re-writing process.
How did you decide how to publish your books?
I've published all my non-fiction books with large publishers: Sourcebooks and Penguin/Random House. But because I'm not known in the fiction space, it's been hard to get an editor as editors from big publishing houses mostly publish authors who are already well known. So, I decided to go ahead, have the book professionally edited and then published it by myself on Amazon. My suggestion is that you do have your book professionally edited as the quality will define whether it's recommended by readers who actually buy it. And then, prepare yourself to do all the publicity yourself. You will be responsible for all the marketing and the sales of the book. But to tell you the truth, even when Penguin published my books, they'd assign me a publicist for a month and after that I was still on my own trying to get the word out there.
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
As self-publishing has lost its stigma, more and more people are publishing their own books. I think it's possible that in the future, more traditional publishers will be offering a hybrid publication model where they'll charge the authors a basic publication fee but they will help with the distribution in bookstores and other things we are missing when we self-publish on a platform like Amazon.
What genres do you write?: Fiction and non fiction
What formats are your books in?: Both eBook and Print
Website(s)
Mariela Dabbah Home Page Link
Your Social Media Links
LinkedIn
Instagram
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.
