Colleen Lindsay has been a literary agent, worked within large publishers, and at several bookstores. She is currently part of the business development team at Penguin Group and community manager for Book Country. We discuss a wide range of topics, including:
- That, when an independent bookstore goes out of business, it is the result of bad business decisions, not market trends. “It Doesn’t Matter How Much You Love Books if You Don’t Know How to Run a Business.”
- How thriving independent bookstores focus on customer service, community service, leveraging social media in a smart way, smart buying, and taking advantage of publisher & vendor specials.
- Her experience and goals in helping to launch BookCountry.com – a free online genre fiction writers workshop.
- How she and her colleagues approached the idea of building a new community for writers and readers online.
- Where she is seeing opportunity for authors in the self-publishing ebook world.
- Why all authors need to be entrepreneurs.
- That the most important part of being a writer is to first get your craft right, then work on your platform.
- The top things that writers often do wrong in the querying process.
Watch our full interview by clicking the play button below:
[flowplayer src=’https://s3.amazonaws.com/WeGrowMediaInterviews/ColleenLindsay.mov’ width=640 height=375]
You can find Colleen on Twitter at @ColleenLindsay, on BookCountry.com, and on her own site http://theswivet.blogspot.com.
Thanks to Colleen for taking the time to chat!
-Dan