Heather Townsend's Journey to Authorship

by Heather Townsend
The Efficiency Coach

Let’s start at the very beginning...

I have always harboured a secret desire to write a book. I’m not really sure why, it’s just something that I’ve always wanted to do. Having been a scientist through school, an engineer at University – I had the belief that I couldn’t write essays, prose, poetry or marketing material. I always knew my talents lay with numbers, facts and logic... Or did they? In quiet moments, I would sometimes wonder what my book would be about. At one point, I even wrote a series of long e-mails detailing my adventures in a new role to people at my previous company. My readership loved these e-mails, but, it is only lately that I have really started to believe that I write well.

In the last six months my career has taken a new turn. I received a small donation from my previous employers to go and start up my own business. As part of my marketing strategy, I started to write a blog – ‘The Thoughts And Ideas Of The Efficiency Coach’ with two objectives in mind:

Drive traffic to my website and increase my search engine optimisation. (Did you know the content of a blog is rated higher than a static website by Google?)
Demonstrate my credibility and expertise to my target market

(Just in case you are wondering my business offers coaching and consultancy, specialising in working with professional services firms and small businesses.)

But over the last few months I now realise that I get a real buzz out of writing either an article or posting to my blog. My blog, and other articles has become a much needed personal creative outlet - something, that I had stifled after years on the corporate treadmill.

But, let’s back to the point of this article. About a week ago, I had an idea to try and make my writing earn its keep. I posted a question on the everywoman forums asking about e-book software, getting self-published and whether people thought my writing was good enough for people to pay to read it.

As a result of the interest received, I have been asked to write a series of articles detailing my journey to becoming a successful, published and profitable author. Over the next 12 months, it would be a delight to be accompanied by yourself on my adventure. And maybe even inspire you to turn one of your own dreams into reality?

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Heather Townsend's Journey to Authorship