I first found Writers Helping Writers while I was working on my memoir.

I felt like I’d struck gold. This online support group, co-founded by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, is a resource for writers and editors, providing tools and support as well as a place for writers of all levels to connect.

Ms. Ackerman and Puglisi have now co-authored more than a dozen description thesauruses, including the most recent addition, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus.

I’m honored to have Angela Ackerman as my guest today.

Q. Can you describe that magical moment when you and Becca Puglisi realized you’d stumbled upon a recipe for success with your thesaurus series?

A.When we started the Emotion Thesaurus, we posted entries on our blog, one per week, and immediately saw our hits skyrocket. That helped us see that people struggled in this area and liked the idea of these unique lists of brainstorming ideas we were providing. Years later we self-published The Emotion Thesaurus and it quickly climbed Amazon’s bestseller lists. More incredibly, it has stayed in the top 5 in different categories ever since (six years and counting). People seem to be huge fans of our list style and we are so grateful. Word of mouth referrals are so important in our industry.

Q. What have you learned about the book promotion process that you’d be willing to share using your readers/supporters?

A. I am not a fan of promotion but I love marketing. Marketing is all about understanding who your audience is, what they need, and then making sure to provide it. My best advice is to take the time to know who your readers are and what they are interested in. and then supply whatever it is that they will find the most entertaining, helpful, or interesting based on who they are. (I have lots of marketing handouts, interviews, and swipe files on marketing at Writers Helping Writers, so people can check those out for more help.

Q. Can you give a simple description for how writers can best use one of your thesauruses?

A. All of our thesauruses take a challenging area of description and break it down. Each book is part instruction, part brainstorming list. The Emotion Thesaurus looks at how to show the body language, thoughts, and visceral sensations for over 75 emotions, offering a huge list of ideas to describe each feeling. The Negative and Positive Trait Thesaurus books tackle character personality and how writers can show, not tell, different traits through behavior and actions, creating deep, compelling characters. Our Urban and Rural Setting Thesaurus books explore the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures for 220 different story locations…and a lot more. Our Emotional Wound Thesaurus book investigates nearly 120 different types of painful events in a character’s past which explains their behavior, how they view the world & themselves, and fears they will have in the current story.

Q.Was it ever difficult when compiling the Emotional Wound Thesaurus?

A.Oh yes. I would say this was the hardest book we’ve written simply because emotional wounds aren’t fictional. Each traumatic event we profiled is something that people, including some of our readers, would have experienced. Some of the wounds in our book were personal ones too, forcing Becca and I to dig around in our own pasts. This wasn’t easy. We spent hours researching the accounts of people who have experienced things like domestic abuse, childhood neglect, racism, and rape. It took a toll on us and we needed to take a lot of breaks to mentally recharge (I ended up baking a lot of cookies for my kids!) Once we finished, we had a psychologist vet every entry for accuracy, because we knew writers would see themselves in some of the entries as we so often write about things that are personal to us.

Q.What has been the most surprising feedback you’ve received from publishing it this past fall?

The most wonderful feedback we’ve had is that people are finding this book is actually helping them work their own unresolved wounds, which is wonderful. This isn’t something we’re surprised by because Becca and I both found the process of looking at our own past trauma and thinking about how important it was to move past such things to live a full life very cathartic. This book does exactly this, showing writers how characters will behave when influenced by trauma, and how internal growth is the key to them becoming stronger and more capable so they can achieve their story goal. If anyone wants to see an example entry of this thesaurus, it can be found here.

I should also mention that we have many more thesauruses than books, too. If anyone wants to see all 14 of our description thesauruses, they can be found at our second site, One Stop for Writers.

To meet Ms. Ackerman in person, consider attending the Alaska Writer’s Guild Conference 2018 in Anchorage, Alaska with me this next September.

Or follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

 

 

Thank you for stopping by, and for making Pieces of Me a #1 e-book on Kindle this week in domestic partner abuse category more than a year after publication. I was ridiculously excited.

Here’s the link to my Arctic Entries story I mentioned during the last post.

Have a great day.

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