The Conquest of Writing Books ©

My new book, “WHEN THE SHARKS COMES, WILL YOU BE READY?”  launched this month and many folks asked me what motivated me to write.

Before I disclose to you why, let me tell you what I learned from the process of writing my books.  First, it’s a lot of work!  Second, It must have a certain structured format for any work to be considered a memoir like my first book, “Untold Stories of a Real Estate Diva” or a novel like “SHARKS”.

I found writing was the easiest task of the adventure; then I had to get it published.  For a Novel or Non-fiction memoir it is a minimum of 50,000 words; “Sharks” is 52,000 or about 275 pages.  However, industry standard is more like 75,000 to 100,000 which equates 400 pages to 600 pages. A LOT of writing AND remember, using AI to write is not considered “authentic” and looked down on because the writer is faking his/her creativity.

    My friend, Bob Sigall, who writes the “Rearview Mirror” articles for the Star-Advertiser, first explained to me, “write what you know and everything will flow” and he was so correct.  With his encouragement, “Diva” was born from my experiences in real estate.

    “WHEN THE SHARKS COMES, WILL YOU BE READY?” is a novel about a middle-age woman who decides to rebuild herself and enters into an inter-island five day paddling challenge going between four of the eight major Hawaiian Islands.  95 paddlers start out and five get lost at sea and she’s one of them.  Sharks, the elements, and people trying to hurt her, maybe kill her because of her past, who dies, who survives?

The story comes from my experiences; I am an avid water-woman. I continue to swim, surf, and paddle when I get a chance, I have done a few long distance paddles and have paddled to and from four different islands and crossed a few channels.  I did witness the Billy Weaver shark attack in 1959 as a young child.  However, I have never been lost at sea.

What I learned about marketing books; it is NOT like selling real estate. When I started with “Diva”, I originally thought with decades of marketing real estate it would be easy to sale a book, “marketing is marketing”, but that is not true at all.

First, to get on the New York Times best sellers list you have to have 10,000 pre-orders, I had 6 so that did not happened.

Second, you have a maximum of about 3 seconds to catch the interest of a reader with your cover and title. That’s why “Diva” has a sexy cover and BTW, that is NOT me, those days were long pass.   

Third, I went with Amazon.com for my marketing of my books because the internet and social media is now the name of the game.   

Fourth, a lot of folks feel self-publishing is no-end, but people do read many self-published books; “A Handmaiden’s Tale”, which became a very successful movie, “50 Shades of Gray”, which has sold over 150 million copies and made into a movie, and “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” were all originally self-published. There are approximately 3 million books published per year of which, 1.5 million or half are self-published. And sometimes, if you are EXTREMELY lucky, maybe a producer from a show like “Oprah” will hear your chat on a small radio station in the dead of night and ask you on the show and BOOM you will get that moment in time which will launch your book into the stratosphere.  That happened with Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” book and as of today, 44 million copies have be sold and translated into 51 languages. Hope always springs eternal.

So why did I write my books?  I wrote “Diva” because I wanted people to know the history of what it was like to navigate in a man’s world of real estate in the 1970s through 1990’s. As a woman I was a pioneer like others, especially as a shopping center manager in Waikiki.  Waikiki was vibrant and at the height of its existence in the commercial world. Money was flowing and tourists were totally in love with it.

But there was the underbelly.  As a woman manager, I had a knife pulled on me, I was spit on, I had a drink tossed on me, someone scratched my car up, etc.  Negotiating with very rich national and international tenants, to new immigrant Koreans and Vietnamese, many did not speak English well, BUT everyone understood the international language of money.

Today women are common place in commercial real estate, but back then, there was only one other who was in the Downtown Financial District and only me in Waikiki.

Then when I started my own little real estate commercial consulting business in 1986, it was a HUGE endeavor because many people shunned me since I was starting from the ground up again.

One person who I thought was a good friend told me he would give me a job for $2,000 per month and I would have to report to work exactly at 8 am in dresses and nylons and stay to 5:30 pm, Monday through Friday, half day on Saturday and with no vacation for the first year. I would have no reimbursements for car use and gas.  When I told him, I had been getting paid $4,000 per month, not counting bouses for the past few years and my mortgage and maintenance fees were over $1,300 per month, which would leave me nothing to live on at his offered salary, he laughed and said, “What a joke. Who were you sleeping with, get yourself a roommate, and you need a reality check as no one will hire a woman for that amount.”  I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”  It took me several years to build my business and I was close to bankruptcy twice, but in the end, I survived and am still working at something I totally enjoy doing today.

With “Sharks” I wrote it because I felt compelled as this is a story about someone, anyone of us who struggles with self-doubt and personal fears. Many folks feel invisible and I thought, how does someone stay relevant and not inconsequential? Many battle with every day in life; and when adversity comes, will they be ready and how will they handle it?  Will they be consumed or will they be ready to fight for the life they want even with the ebbs and flows of failures and successes.  Sharks also has a lot of vignettes and references about Faith and as a person of Faith, I believe in something greater than me and I wanted to write that no matter where life takes you, if you remain steadfast, you will be shown a way.