With L. Diane Wolfe, author of the Circle of Friends novels

The Writing Show (WS): You would not believe how good at marketing this week’s guest is. Check the "Archives" section of her Web site and you’ll see dozens and dozens of interviews and book signings she’s done--without the help of a publicist, mind you. In today’s publishing environment, her accomplishments are nothing short of phenomenal, and she’s going to tell us how she does it.

L. Diane Wolfe’s five-book Southern-based series, The Circle of Friends, centers on a group of college-age kids and portrays love and friendship overcoming all obstacles. Diane began writing as a teenager and was inspired to return to the pursuit by the adage “everyone needs something to hope for and someone to love.” Traveling the East Coast to promote her series, Diane maintains schedule heavy with book signings and speaking engagements. Dubbed “Spunk on a Stick,” she averages more than 80 appearances and interviews each year. She also conducts seminars on publishing and plans to open her own publishing company in 2008.

Welcome to the Writing Show, Diane. It’s a pleasure to have you with us today.

Diane Wolfe (DW): Thank you. It’s very nice to get a chance to talk to you in person, Paula. I’ve read your emails on the PUBLISH-L listserve. Now I get to actually hear you.

WS: Let’s get started with a little background. Tell us about your books.

DW: Circle of Friends is an inspirational five-book fiction series. Right now, the fourth one is out. They're meant to inspire as well as entertain; I’ve been described by one reviewer as “encouragement personified.” I've based them in the Southern U.S.A.. They're aimed at both adults and young adults and focus on friendship overcoming obstacles and the pursuit of dreams.

WS: And these are novels, right?

DW: These are novels. They were originally for adults. I won’t give you my real age, but let’s just say it’s over forty. I wrote what I wanted to read, and by the second one, I realized I had a huge teen following as well as adults reading the books because they're very clean books. So I switched to promoting them as Young Adult as well as Adult. Now if someone asks, “Are they Young Adult,” I say, “Yes.” If someone asks if they're Adult, I say, “Yes.” They fit into both categories. I didn’t want to miss a market by saying “No” either way.

WS: Tell us about a couple of the books.

DW: The first one, Lori, follows a girl who wants to be an Olympic swimmer. That’s probably where the whole theme of the series started. The story follows this girl for four years on her journey to get to the Olympics, so it really focuses on setting a goal and achieving a dream and shows you what friendship and a positive attitude and chasing your dreams can do for a person’s life and the people around them. That theme keeps going through the other four books. All the characters are friends, so if you read Books 2 and 3, you get to see a little further into Lori’s life and what happened to her after the Olympics.

WS: That is such a wonderful idea. Did you start out thinking you were going to write a series, or did you start with one book and think, "Aha! I could make this a series"?

DW: I originally dreamed the first two characters, just enough of a whisper of a dream to see who they were. I started forming a story and then started writing it. I think probably about a couple of chapters in, all the other characters became so alive and real, and I could see where each one had struggles in their lives that they would need to overcome. Probably about half-way through writing Lori, I already had outlines for the other four books. So I knew pretty soon after I started writing that it was going to be a series.

WS: Tell us about the other characters.

DW: Book 2 is Sarah; she's Lori’s best friend. Lori, of course, is an Olympic swimmer. She’s beautiful and athletic, and she ends up marrying the high school quarterback. She’s perfect in Sarah’s eyes.

Then there’s Sarah, one of these people who feels second all the time, who has a poor self-image. She’s estranged from her father, and she never feels like she measures up. It’s her journey in finding trust and belief in herself and in others when she meets up with another friend from high school, Matt. Both of them learn to trust and believe in other people once more over about a five-year period starting when they’re in college at Georgia Tech.

And the third one, James, which came out last year, is a friend Lori meets in college. He’s come from an abusive past; this is kind of my dark horse of all the stories. I tried not to make it too dark, but he was abused physically and emotionally, so it’s him dealing with that as he unexpectedly becomes a father right before he graduates from college and has to deal with his own son while still trying to reconcile with his father. I did a lot of talking to different people about abuse, and I’m a foster parent as well, so I’ve experienced what that does to children. It’s a real touchy subject, but from what I’ve heard, I’ve handled very realistically how someone deals with that when they grow up.

WS: I just love this idea for the series Circle of Friends because one leads to another. I suppose you could make it endless if you wanted to.

DW: I’ve had fans tell me, "Please don’t end with the fifth one," but I’m going to be very ready to move on by the time I finally finish this fifth book. I might come back to a sixth one later on, in five or ten years, and touch on all five main characters’ lives, see where they’ve gone in life, but I’m ready to do something different soon. It’s run its course for me.

WS: You just mentioned that one reviewer called you “encouragement personified.” You seem to me to be a real marketing genius. For example, you have a description of yourself. You call yourself “Spunk on a Stick.” Why do you call yourself that, and how did you come up with it?

DW: “Spunk on a Stick” stands for drive, determination, and enthusiasm. Where it came from, I’ll give credit to my husband because his theory is everything tastes better on a stick. He says chicken is good, but if you get chicken like you get at the state fair, it’s on a stick. He says that’s even better. So that’s where “Spunk on a Stick” came from. He said spunk is good, but spunk on a stick is even better. That just stuck, and over the last few years that’s what everybody’s come to know me as. I either get called “Spunk on a Stick” or I just get called “Spunky.”

WS: It really is catchy. I’ve been through your Web site and a lot of your material. You’ve got so much great branding material there. You’ve got your slogan. You’ve got complete marketing materials. You’re cross-promoting with other people. You’ve listed all your speaking engagements and your interviews and your bookstore appearances, and it looks like there are about seven million of them.

DW: Some days it feels like it.

WS: How did you learn how to market and brand yourself like that?

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