Conversations with Liz Coley

Today we’d like to introduce you to Liz Coley. 

Hi Liz, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved words, and I have loved numbers. Also, cats, but I was thwarted in those early days by family allergies. That led me on a winding path through a biochemistry major coupled with almost enough literature classes for a double major in English. After college, I took a job in hospital strategic planning and marketing. Words and numbers came together as I wrote the proposals for new projects or services. 

It was an interesting time in the medical world—1983—our hospital was temporarily the ONLY one in the city treating AIDS patients, and I was involved with both words and numbers: writing the policies and procedures for including these patients in our medical and surgical care, and predicting the resources we would need to treat people with HIV at this time when there was about a hundred percent death rate two to four years after diagnosis. 

After two years in this role, I went to management school to formalize what I had been learning through experience. And then, I went back to the same hospital system for another seven years of work in operations. Again—words and numbers—I helped write a procedure manual for how we handled a major rebuild to remove asbestos from the old building while continuing patient care; I worked with the Finance department on budgets; I helped write the Annual Report. Both the best and worst parts of the job was that no two days were alike. 

Then—motherhood! With two little boys who loved reading as much as I did and a very sweet baby girl who was shaped like a car seat, I embarked on a new journey—becoming a writer. At first, I wrote to create a middle-grade science fiction story for the boys. Believe it or not, sci-fi for kids was hard to find back then. During piano lessons and taekwondo classes, I wrote my first novel longhand in a spiral notebook. By the time I had finished it and sent it off to some publishers to consider, I had an idea for another novel for kids and then another. 

I had been regularly attending two annual writing workshops, through which I found a community of other writers, both local and online, to develop my craft. I also learned the business of writing and the challenges of finding an agent, and the long game of hoping to be published. My seventh book, Pretty Girl-13, was published in the US and UK by Harper Collins in 2013 and as a Young Adult/adult crossover book in 11 other countries. That book won three awards. Now I could legitimately call myself a writer. Persistence has carried me through the writing of seven more novels, learning the business of self-publishing (Out of Xibalba, the Tor Maddox series, and The Captain’s Kid), finding a new agent, and still hoping to be published again by big publishing. Overall, my work is mixture of thrillers, speculative fiction, and realistic contemporary young adult stories. 

Meanwhile, in 2016 I attended a playwriting masterclass and fell in love. I began building a new community of actors, directors, and other playwrights as I learned the craft and business of playwriting. Since then, my early work has been read for the public or fully staged in California, Texas, Ohio, Massachusetts, New York. Similarly to the book writing path, I’ve also learned the ins and outs of being a self-producer. Most recently, I took my award-winning one-act play Castaways to the San Diego Fringe Festival. 

Politics was another interest I began pursuing in 2016. I had been a spectator with opinions for a while. This was the year I started volunteering to knock on doors, make phone calls, and write postcards for the candidates I supported. In 2018 I became part of a campaign team for a local candidate who is a disability rights advocate as her campaign treasurer. In 2021, I joined two friends to launch a nonpartisan/nonprofit political advocacy startup—TARGETOHIO—an organization dedicated to raising the political interest, influence, and voice of the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in Ohio. This has been a very time and mind-consuming activity, with all the word crafting, data analysis, and financial planning I could ask for. 

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
A writing career usually involves four major hurdles–creating the work, finding an agent to represent the work, and selling the work, and then critical and/or financial success of the work. 

I’ve found creating the work is the easiest part, but alone it means nothing. 

My first search for a literary agent required 42 attempts. This agent was able to sell only one of my books–a good thing, to be sure, but very frustrating when she failed to guide me to a second sale, and even more frustrating years later when I found out she had stolen some of my royalties. The search for my second agent took at least a year and another 20 attempts. Now we have an excellent working relationship, but the struggle to find an editor who believes in one of my manuscripts as much as my agent and I do is ongoing. We have circulated six or seven novels and still persist. 

As far as the final step, the critical and financial success of Pretty Girl-13, it sold only moderately in the United States, although very well in France and Russia. It was widely pirated in Brazil. At least they enjoyed reading it! In terms of critical success, it won three awards, but that didn’t move the numbers, which are what the publishing industry cares about. It was certainly a struggle for me to promote the book personally—I spent many hours and days at tables at book fairs far and near trying to entice buyers. I offered to visit many schools which didn’t follow through, probably because of the sensitive subject matter. I pitched book bloggers to carry interviews and reviews. I purchased and gave away a LOT of copies in the course of promoting it. I am convinced that the copies in the several thousand libraries that carried it have been checked out and read over and over again–the hard truth is that each copy counts as only one sale. 

Getting discovered is very challenging when there are over 11 million books in print on Amazon. I faced the same challenge of bringing my self-published books to the notice of teenagers. I gave away a LOT of books, and nothing organically went viral among my target readers. However, there is psychic compensation in getting good reviews or actual letters from readers who were touched, inspired, or healed by your words. 

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
As a writer and playwright, I’ve stated that my artistic vision is to take people places they never thought to go, to understand the enemy, to open eyes and hearts, to expose truths both shining and dark, to heal whenever possible. While I started with stories for teens and anyone who ever was a teen, I was only partially successful in releasing those stories into the wild. One became an international bestseller, translated in 12 languages. This book, Pretty Girl-13, is the work I am best known for, a dark psychological thriller that I call “the book I wrote by accident.” 

The other stories have languished in various ways–either as weakly sold self-publications or as unsold manuscripts. I’ve wondered if my timing was just off. I wrote a pandemic flu story–it was considered too edgy. Then when teen fiction turned edgy, that same manuscript was considered too young, too tame. Then as a novel flu was sweeping the country for real, that same manuscript was considered too scary. Finally, I self-published it because I adored my moxie-filled protagonist Tor Maddox and wanted at least a few people to meet her. 

I’d say the things that have kept me going in the face of disappointment are (1) I wanted to set a good example for my kids and not throw in the towel, (2) I routinely received “nice” rejections where people liked my writing even if they didn’t like the story, (3) I occasionally received “nice” rejections in which editors like the idea of my story but not my voice, and most importantly, (4) I liked my characters and their stories no matter what anyone said. If I didn’t, I’d give up. 

So, in obeying the advice that you should “write for yourself” and not “write for the market,” I was forced to realize that my work is just not going to “land” with a lot of editors. Fair is fair–not all the books they publish land with me. At the end of the day, what you choose and like to read is a very personal choice. 

Besides persistence, another aspect of my experience is that I turned to another form of storytelling in playwriting. Over a brief 6 years since I started, I’ve written three full-length plays, a one-hour play, and a few dozen 1–10-minute plays. I’ve been published, I’ve been produced, and I’ve won some awards. As a woman of a certain age, I’m thrilled to have a completely different aspect to my writing career take off in such a tangible way. When so many stories are being written by first-time authors in their teens, twenties, or early thirties, I enjoy my maturity and the way life experience, knowledge, and imagination now combine to inform my work. 

Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
I tell everyone how much I love Cincinnati. The theatre scene here is friendly and vibrant, and the arts in all forms are well-supported and appreciated by the people of the city. I love the way the city continually improves with the development of the waterfront space for family recreation and the renovation of the beautiful architecture in Over-the-Rhine. I’m proud that we persist in trying to establish a greener way of life, from the public transportation downtown to the solar farms powering city services. 

My “least” like the city’s terrible record when it comes to infant and maternal mortality. I know that the community has numerous initiatives to address the issues and has been on the job for 9 years, but the situation should never have been allowed to get this bad. We have only just slipped below the national average. We should be better than this. We will be better than this. 

Pricing:

• Pretty Girl-13 in ebook $10.99
• Tor Maddox 1, 2, and 3 each $2.99
• The Captain’s Kid $4.99
• Out of Xibalba $3.99

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.lizcoley.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lizcoleybooks/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LizColeyBooks
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/LizColeyBooks
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/LizColeyBooks