Born to Beauty

Imagine you are at the summer Olympics, watching the 100 meter sprint competition. BANG goes the starter’s pistol and they’re off, all incredibly fast, but one runner is clearly first across the finish line. Now imagine that one runner is not the winner. Imagine if the winner were selected instead based on how hard the athletes had to train to get there, or which one overcame the most life challenges to get there. Imagine if we all decided to give the gold medal to the runner with the most fans in the stadium, or based on the opinion of a few of the most popular people in the crowd.

As strange as each of these scenarios might seem, I have heard Christian novelists seriously suggest almost exact parallels in discussions about excellence and beauty in fiction.

Contrary to popular opinion, the beauty and excellence of a novel are not determined by popular opinion. Nor are beauty and excellence determined by how hard one works on a novel, or by the number of obstacles one has to overcome to finish a novel, or by what we love to read, or what a million other readers love to read, or what Oprah loves to read.

If the winner of a 100 meter sprint were judged on the basis I described, athletic excellence would become irrelevant. Similarly, if a novel were judged based on how we feel about it or how well it sells, beauty and excellence would become nothing more than synonyms for desire or popularity.

If beauty and excellence exist in the arts at all, then there must be some objective basis on which we can unequivocally state that a particular novel is excellent or mediocre, beautiful or bad.

This suggestion commonly invokes outraged responses. For example, one often hears, "But so-and-so thinks it’s beautiful!" Or else, "But a million people bought it!" But these two arguments spring from the circular, self-referencing, illogical proposition that some people think a novel is beautiful, therefore beauty is whatever some people think it is.

Others will protest, “Not all novels can be literary!” But “beautiful” is not a synonym for “classical” or “high brow”. Every genre can be beautiful and excellent in its own way, therefore writing merely for entertainment is no excuse for mediocrity.

Finally, one hears what I call the “best defense is a good offense” objection: "Who are you to decide what's excellent and beautiful?" But this is a red herring. What’s really being asked is, “If beauty and excellence are objective facts, then how are they defined? (And if you can’t offer a definition, then you must be wrong.)”

What if the shoe were on the other foot? What if we demand a definition of beauty from these people instead? Faced with our demand, perhaps they will turn to Merriam Webster:

"Beauty. Noun. 1: the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit. Loveliness."

But this is nothing more than that same circular, self-referencing proposition again. This is beauty as a thing that's relative to me . . . my senses, my pleasure. What’s beautiful for me may not seem beautiful for you, but don’t tell me it isn’t beautiful. I should have the right to decide what’s excellent and beautiful for me. This is beauty as a relative concept, a thoroughly postmodern definition.

Now, some questions. If beauty is truly defined as a thing that’s relative to me, my senses, my pleasure, does it mean beauty changes whenever I change my opinion? Does it mean a thing is beautiful if anyone on earth believes it’s beautiful, even—for example—someone who’s clinically insane? And does it mean beauty remains true even if the thing that I consider beautiful causes pain to others?

By this definition an erotic novel about sex with children would be considered beautiful and excellent, for example, since it gives pleasure to some people. But if we are sane, we will realize child pornography is never beautiful even if it gives some readers pleasure. And in realizing that, we will also understand we have effectively decided beauty and excellence are rightly measured by a standard beyond mere human pleasure or opinion. We have added a moral dimension to the definition. We have insisted that beauty and excellence must be good, and in so doing, we have placed them alongside love, justice, holiness, and all the other earthly manifestations of God's glory in the list of "every good and perfect gift", which we are told "is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows [or like human opinions]."

The higher things like love, justice, holiness, excellence, and beauty can only be rightly understood in reference to something which is constant, just as the 100 meter sprint can only be properly judged on the basis of uncompromising meters and seconds. Therefore, love is what God is. Justice is what God requires. Holiness is how God is. Beauty and excellence are how God appears. In other words, God Himself is the constant against which these higher things are measured.

It could not be otherwise. Think of how distorted these higher things become when we try to define them in terms of our own opinions or our pleasures. Think of what human law has done to how we think of justice. Think of what dysfunctional churches do to how we think of holiness. Think of what our culture does to our idea of love. Think of what pride and the profit motive have done to beauty and excellence in the arts and letters.

Beauty and excellence are how God appears.

This definition makes us uncomfortable, as do all the higher things which follow in God's wake across the universe. Real justice is uncomfortable. (It often means more, or less, punishment than we desire or deserve.) Real holiness makes us uncomfortable. (It can mean loneliness and isolation.) Real love makes us uncomfortable. (It almost always leads to sacrifice.)

It's much more comfortable to define beauty and excellence in terms of what we like, or feel, or want, or in terms of what we're capable of producing. Otherwise we must examine our true motives for writing in the first place. Otherwise we have to do the pride-destroying work it takes to strain toward excellence and beauty in our work. Otherwise we have to compare our work to something unchanging, eternal, and glorious, and that is worst of all, because if God Himself is the ultimate standard for beauty and excellence (and He is), then nothing we could write can possibly compare.

But don’t misunderstand. This doesn’t mean excellent and beautiful writing is impossible. The Bible speaks of beautiful tents, beautiful cities, and beautiful clothes, after all. We only need to understand the basis on which God has called them beautiful.

A man named Samuel once tried to pick a king based on his idea of what a king should be, but God told him to pick a shepherd boy instead, because, “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

In exactly the same way, and contrary to popular opinion, the beauty and excellence of a novel are not determined by popular opinion. If any novel is beautiful or excellent, it is so because of the author’s heart—the motivation—not because of outward appearances.

Does this mean that anyone who loves God can write a novel and it will be beautiful and excellent? Does it mean that even mediocre novels are still beautiful and excellent in God’s eyes if the author writes them with the proper spiritual attitude?

The answer in both cases is no, of course not.

God doesn’t give the same gifts to everyone. Only writers with God-given talent can produce novels of beauty and excellence. No matter how much someone may want to see his name on a published novel, or how hard one works, no amount of love for God will overcome a lack of talent.

And it is impossible for mediocrity to arise from a proper spiritual attitude, because such an attitude means we will be completely willing to work within the gifts God has given, submitting to His plan, and we will use what He has given to the utmost, and then whatever our area of giftedness, we will always, always, always produce beautiful and excellent results within it.

We can know we’re working in our area of giftedness if the work sometimes fills us with a joy very like the way one feels in love, because the talents we receive are given out of heavenly love.
We can know we’re working in our area of giftedness if the results we accomplish sometimes seem as if they are beyond our own ability. As the Bible promises, if we will obey God, He will give in a “good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over" kind of way. As David famously said, "My cup runs over." Where God gives talent, He gives generously, even more than we ourselves suspect is possible.

If we accept our talents for what they are, not trying to turn them into something else for the sake of fickle pride, not settling for less than we what were born to create, then what we make of them in life will always be excellent and beautiful. But this is impossible if we insist on defining beauty and excellence as less than what they truly are, for they are nothing less than a reflection of the Lord on earth.



Athol Dickson's novels transcend description with a literary style that blends magical realism, suspense, and a strong sense of spirituality. Critics have favorably compared his work to such diverse authors as Octavia Butler (Publisher's Weekly) and Flannery O'Connor (The New York Times). One of his novels is an Audie Award winner and three have won Christy Awards including his most recent novel, Lost Mission. His next story, The Opposite Of Art, is about pride, passion, and death as a spiritual pursuit. Look for it in September, 2011. Athol lives with his wife in southern California. Visit his website at www.AtholDickson.com.

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Scariness in Fictionland

Sometimes being a novelist is scary. For example, over the last year or so I’ve seen dozens of emails from other authors who claim they strongly dislike the first person point of view. That’s a frightful development for a serious novelist.

The first person point of view transcends all periods, genres and literary styles. It has existed since the dawn of language. It is as fundamental to literature as oil paint is to visual arts, as antibiotics are to medicine, as the Ten Commandments are to law. For an author to say she doesn’t like an entire point of view is as if a motion picture director had said, “I don’t like male actors,” or an architect had said, “I don’t like south facing windows.” It’s not as if these authors confined themselves to dislike of mere genres, not as if they said, “I don’t enjoy murder mysteries.” It’s more like they said, “I don’t like the letter 'a'.”

If you still don’t understand why I find this so disturbing, imagine if this took hold, and in another decade or two all the seminars and books on how to write started teaching that the first person point of view is against the rules. What if publishers and literary critics jump on this bandwagon? What if everyone decides the first person POV “draws readers out of the story” or “distances us from the action”? What if the day comes when third person is the only acceptable point of view left to us? While you’re at it, imagine living in a world where ice cream shops sell only vanilla.

Don’t scoff at the possibility. This trend which so concerns me is already underway, and has been for many years.

Once upon a time there was a thing called “third person omniscient” narration. You know: a Voice which tells the story from an all-knowing perspective, a “meanwhile back at the ranch” or a “little did she know” kind of storyteller. In centuries past, thousands of wonderful novels were written in this point of view by literary giants such as Dickens, Austen and Tolstoy. Once it was a perfectly acceptable part of the novelist’s tool kit, but you’ll hardly find third person omniscient used today, and when it is, you’ll often hear impatient complaints from The Powers That Be. We’re told it’s “telling, not showing,” and it “draws readers out of the story,” or “distances us from the action.” So they’ve already killed an entire point of view. First person might be next.

Then what? The death of adjectives and adverbs?

Well, as a matter of fact, yes.

While I agree it is a bad idea to dress up weak nouns and verbs with weak descriptors, I also know for a fact that an adverb or adjective can do some very heavy lifting if chosen wisely. For example, Sol Stein in his peerless and pragmatic Stein on Writing (Read it! Read it!) points to this sentence from Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter:

“Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.”

Read that sentence again and omit the words “bald pink” for incontrovertible evidence of the power of adjectives—two adjectives in a row, actually!—in the hands of a great writer.

It's Greene's brilliant writing that makes the adjectives so wonderful. Without him, they are simply inert tools with no qualities to like or dislike whatsoever. To say "I don't like adjectives," (or the first person point of view, the third person omniscient, or adverbs), is like saying, “I don’t like guns.” Until the gun is used, it is just a clump of metal. In the wrong hands, a gun can indeed be dangerous and harmful, but in the right hands a gun can put dinner on the table and keep evil at bay. We tend to focus on the damage done by those who don’t know how to use these literary tools, or by those who deliberately abuse them, and we say, “Therefore, I don’t like the tool.” What a sad, irrational mistake.

While I’m at it, let me add I’ve also noticed a growing impatience with “long” (as in, you know, more than one paragraph) descriptions. Of anything.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who sees the king is naked. What in the world is going on here?

To understand how we came to this, it might help to think of where we are in the history of literature. Around the turn of the last century, the reaction against Romanticism and Aestheticism (and a few other egghead “isms”) which had already begun in the visual arts and philosophy also started to take hold in architecture, dance, music, and literature. Some people said the arts were just too fluffy.

By the middle third of the century, Modernist painting had been stripped down to the bare essentials, simple fields of color, or stark lines, and Modernist architecture had been reduced to a “form follows function” approach that removed all ornamentation. In the same way, Modernism began whittling away at the novel, deleting adverbs and adjectives and the “unnecessary” omniscient narrator, until authors like Hemingway and Fitzgerald were hardly even bothering to write descriptions of characters or settings. Everything boiled down to dialogue and action, period.

That spare approach to fiction is a legitimate aesthetic, and it led to some true masterpieces, but as is often the case with human nature, the pendulum swung too far. Andy Warhol’s soup cans overwhelmed a basic concern with beauty in the visual arts world. In the same way, Modernism’s starkly reduced style of storytelling fascinated all the most important editors and critics in the world of literature, and The Powers That Be in New York City developed a universal disdain for such things as adjectives and adverbs, non-participating narrators, and “long” (you know: more than a paragraph) descriptions of settings, no matter how beautiful the language might be. In fact, “beauty” as a fundamental goal of literature was almost totally forgotten, until today we hardly ever speak of it alongside character, plot, theme, setting and so forth, as I have mentioned in this column before.

It’s a well-known psychological fact that our environment conditions us to prefer our environment. (Stockholm syndrome is one extreme example.) So without really knowing anything about the theoretical reasons for the shift, the reading public came to prefer the stark and spare Modernist style of literature which had been almost universally forced upon them, not because it’s necessarily better in any way, but simply because it had indeed been so universally forced upon them.

Also, it’s a well-known psychological fact that we develop habits mainly because they are more convenient. At rush hour, when presented with a choice between a scenic route and a shortcut, a person falls into the habit of taking the shortcut between their home and workplace. But after doing that a while, the person also takes the shortcut even when they’re not in a hurry, and even though they’re missing a chance to see more beautiful scenery.

Why do they do it? Because it’s easier not to think about which route to take, or to have to think about which way to turn at this intersection or that one. They choose against the beautiful scenery because it’s easier (more convenient) to simply do what they always do, with their mind on autopilot, so to speak.

Similarly, a reader learns to “suspend disbelief” and go along for the ride in one form of novel, and then when presented with a different mode of storytelling, they choose not to indulge, even though it may have great promise, because it’s easier to just stay with the form of fiction they already understand.

The near-death of third person omniscient narration is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Although it was once the most popular form of novel, many readers (and authors) today say omniscient narrators tempt them out of the “fictive dream”. It is as if these people think the narrator they experience in the story is somehow outside the story.

Of course, that is not true at all. In the hands of a skilled author, the narrator can be as much a part of the novel as any other character. After all, who has the right to say a character must participate in the action to be in the novel? Who says we can’t make that omniscient narrator character interesting in other ways? Who says a skilled author can’t introduce a reader to that Voice, and get them thinking, “Oh, good. I like this person,” every time the narrator speaks?

We have forgotten that it was our decision to think of adverbs and adjectives as “superfluous”, our decision to be impatient with descriptions of settings or characters, and our decision to think of omniscient narrators as exterior to the story. These are mere fads and opinions, not objective facts. Indeed, millions of authors and readers who went before us would strongly disagree with all of that. We have been told these perfectly fine literary tools are distractions by the so-called “authorities,” or “critics,” and like sheep we have accepted their judgment, not because doing so has actually improved fiction in any way, but simply because the pendulum has swung too far in one direction.

Well.

Heaven forbid me to become that much a slave to fashion.

I believe no serious author—no writer who genuinely wants to grow and improve in every way she can as a novelist—would ever reject any literary device out of hand, just as I believe every serious author will immerse herself in novels of every style, genre, and point of view. To always strive to learn, to grow, and to maintain openness to everything that might offer the chance of better storytelling . . . that is the universal hallmark of a true novelist, and a true lover of novels.

Athol Dickson's novels transcend description with a literary style that blends magical realism, suspense, and a strong sense of spirituality. Critics have favorably compared his work to such diverse authors as Octavia Butler (Publisher's Weekly) and Flannery O'Connor (The New York Times). One of his novels is an Audie Award winner and three have won Christy Awards including his most recent novel, Lost Mission. His next story, The Opposite Of Art, is about pride, passion, and death as a spiritual pursuit. Look for it in September, 2011. Athol lives with his wife in southern California.

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Because of the Mystery

Do you know what beauty is? I've been trying to create it in my novels, and although the finished product never seems to measure up to what I had in mind, I think it's important to keep working toward it consciously and passionately. Not everyone agrees. In this post I wrote about the strange fact that many novelists rarely think of beauty as a goal in their work. In this one I discussed the reason why a Christian of all people ought to do exactly that, which brings me to the point: when you’re in hot pursuit of a thing, it’s important to understand exactly what that thing is. So what is beauty, anyway?

It’s a difficult question to answer. Everyone has an opinion on how to define beauty, and our opinions vary widely. Like love or the taste of water, it seems beauty is the kind of thing one can’t quite explain. Webster’s defines it as “the quality attributed to whatever pleases or satisfies the senses or mind,” but notice this describes beauty in terms of its effect and not in terms of what it is. One simply knows beauty when one senses it, and as is often the case with intangibles, this means when we ask, “What is beauty?” it may be simpler to explain what beauty isn't. Here goes:

"Beautiful” is not a synonym for “pretty.” This fact is embedded in the language. While “beautiful” comes from the root noun “beauty,” there is no root noun for “pretty.” On the contrary, “pretty,” an adjective, is the root of “prettiness,” a noun. This means we can describe a thing as pretty, but pretty in itself is not a thing to be described. On the other hand, beauty requires no object. Beauty is a thing itself, and it is not necessarily pretty. Nature offers countless examples of the difference. The perfect contours of a great white shark are easily an aesthetic match for any sculptor's masterpiece, and it moves with an effortless grace that any prima ballerina would envy. Surely “beauty” is not too strong a word to define such complete balance of form and function, but who would call that awesome predator “pretty”? Not all beautiful things are pretty, therfore the two are not the same.

Also, with apologies to lingering postmodernists, at its most fundamental level beauty is not relative to anything. Certainly we are conditioned by our cultures to prefer one form of beauty over another in some cases. Many Japanese men think geishas are beautiful. With respect, I prefer less makeup. But that kind of disagreement exists only when we compare what we ourselves create. Everyone on earth agrees sunsets are beautiful. That fact means cultural distinctions are irrelevant when it comes to beauty found nature. Natural beauty—primal beauty—is an absolute which transcends nation, race, gender, religion, age, social mores and language. It is not relative to anything.

Beauty is not always comfortable. Consider forest fires and lightning. Think of the summit of Mount Everest. Are they not beautiful in their own ways? Yet aren’t they also terrifying? Remember the great white shark again, or a black widow or a lion. Some beauty makes us so uncomfortable we feel the need to set ourselves apart from it. And our desire for distance from some kinds of beauty isn’t only due to danger. We were created to care for the garden. To work it. To organize it and arrange it. This explains the impulse many of us feel to make some kind of change in nature. We trim hedges. We separate flowerbeds from lawns. But what of those who take that impulse further? Who set fire to forests simply to destroy them, hunt for animals they do not eat, and fence off land they do not use? Beauty sometimes makes us sense our smallness. It reminds us we are not in control. It whispers “You are only mortal, and none of this is really yours.” Beauty is not always comfortable.

Nor is beauty halfhearted. Sometimes I fail to write beautiful words because of a momentary lack of enthusiasm, a distracted mind, or a prideful hidden agenda, but there is no pretension, no confusion, no uncertainty and no shortage of exuberance in anything of beauty found in nature. Every beautiful insentient thing from the smallest one-celled organism or slightest grain of sand to the greatest sequoia or the highest mountain is completely and sincerely what it is. Indeed, it is only when this is not true—when the purity of nature is polluted—that we call it ugly. Similarly, no crow ever wished it was an eagle. No leopard ever wished it was a lion. Everything of beauty with a consciousness is absolutely determined to be completely what it is, except sometimes for man. Even man is the exception that proves the rule, for who could rightly call a man “beautiful” while he is pretentiously pretending to be something he is not? Such a man may still be lovable (it's best to love him anyway, for we are him from time to time) but it is not possible to think of him as beautiful. Beauty is not halfhearted.

Beauty is not slipshod or substandard. As long as it lives, a mighty oak will always grow leaves in the spring. It never forgets. It never grows leaves partway, or poorly. It never makes the mistake of growing toads or daffodils, nor does it grow leaves on its roots or over in the next county. Mighty oaks are beautiful in part because they can be relied upon to do what oaks do perfectly, each and every time they do it. In the same way, doves are beautiful in part because they always sing their mournful song without missing a note. Ocean surf is beautiful in part because waves always come, one after the other, on and on with never one that fails to do its duty and surrender to the beach. All beauty in creation must fulfill the promise of itself completely. Beauty is not slipshod or substandard.

Undoubtedly there are many other things which beauty is not, but I have only time and space enough to mention one thing more:

Beauty does not exist for our entertainment. Just as the Rocky Mountains were not raised up for snow skiing, and the Bible was not written to help readers avoid boredom, beauty may fascinate or even hold us spellbound, but that is not its purpose. Entertainment can be pretty. It can be funny. It can be tragic. But if a moment comes when we suddenly realize a pretty painting, a funny movie, or a tragic novel has somehow become beautiful before our very eyes, we mean it has become something more than merely entertaining. Entertainment is always inward focused. Its sole purpose is wrapped up in us, but beauty exists either with us or without us, and often, sadly, in spite of us. Think of the violent and profligate life of Caravaggio, or the egomaniacal Frank Lloyd Wright. Think of their beautiful paintings and architecture. The fact that base and selfish men can produce beauty proves that beauty is true, transcendent and sublime in and of itself, and not dependant on us whatsoever. Beauty is not about our entertainment.

But what does it mean to say beauty is true, transcendent and sublime? I could write a book to explain and add no further understanding to that statement. In the end, there's only one thing I can say in the affirmative about beauty without fear of contradiction:

Beauty is mysterious, and it is because of the mystery that beauty is most easily defined by looking elsewhere, at the negative. The loss of mystery becomes the loss of beauty. Practically speaking, this means the best chance of finding beauty in one's work is to concentrate on avoiding all the things that it is not. To create a work of beauty, I cannot write merely pretty words, or comfortable words, or entertaining words. I cannot slavishly conform to culture. I cannot tolerate mediocre craftsmanship, and I cannot write halfheartedly. Beauty is a mystery, so a novelist (or any kind of artist) in pursuit of beauty must never look for it directly. If we do that, we will find beauty has escaped us, much as soap bubbles pop when they are touched and flowers wilt when they are plucked. No one can define the mystery of beauty, but everybody knows it when they sense it. Indeed, beauty is a mystery so powerful it’s blinding. It’s like looking at the sun. I must gaze off to the side, to a place where beauty is not, if I hope to glimpse it as it is.

Athol Dickson’s novels have been favorably compared to the work of Octavia Butler (Publisher’s Weekly) and Flannery O’Connor (The New York Times). One of his novels is an Audie Award winner. His most recent novel, Lost Mission, is his fifth novel in a row to be selected as a finalist for the Christy Award. Two of his novels are Christy Award winners. Athol lives with his wife in southern California.

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Author Interview ~ Sheila Lipsey

Shelia E. Lipsey is an award winning novelist, inspirational speaker and Executive Director of Living Your Dreams Now Non Profit. Lipsey graduated magna cum laude from Belhaven College with a Bacherlor's Degree in Business. She is the extremely grateful and proud mother of two adult sons, and the grandmother of three exceptional grandsons. Lipsey presently resides in the Pacific Northwest.

Welcome to Novel Journey, how long did it take you to get published?

I was blessed to receive a two book deal from my publisher the first time I submitted my complete manuscript. The name of that first novel is Into Each Life.

Do you think an author is born or made?

I believe an author is born. It is not by accident. Like many other spiritual gifts, I believe my writing is a gift from God. It can not be duplicated because what God gives me to write can only be written by me. On the flip side, authors can be made as well. That is what I believe is being done today; we are utilizing our talents and skills to write, thus the massive increase in authors.

What is the first book you remember reading?

I’ve read my entire life since the age of around four so the only thing I can pull from my memory is the book in school about Dick and Jane.

What common qualities do you find in the personalities of published authors?

Passion is what I see in the published authors.

How do you know if you have a seemingly “stupid” book premise that is doomed to fail versus one that will fly high?

What makes the book fail versus fly is often based on a number of issues such as poor editing, lack of character development and plot, and characters. The next thing is marketing/promotion. A book does not sell by itself. It is up to the author to get what it takes to get your book in front of the audience you are writing for. That can be endless because all the time I am doing something about getting my books pushed before the eyes of readers.

What is the theme of your latest book?

The theme of Beautiful Ugly addresses issues of how we feel about ourselves, dealing with low-self esteem, low self consciousness and self worth. It touches on topics such as obesity, promiscuity, as well as how we feel about ourselves can determine who we allow in our lives.

At what point did you stop juggling suggestions and critiques and trust yourself ?

Just recently, but there are still times I need to be stroked. I have finally begun to believe in the talent and gifts God has placed in my spirit, body and mind. Knowing that He makes no mistakes has begun to make me believe in the power of words, including mine so I now stay pretty level headed about my work. When I chewed on that thoroughly, I finally received my breakthrough.

Are takeaway messages important to you?

Yes, indeed. I actually weave my stories in such a way that the message is always found within the pages. I believe a message is important. I write for God and His glory which means that everything I write must be divinely given to me by God. The messages are spelled out through the novel and different readers get different messages that seem to suit their needs and desires.

When do you know you’ve got the finished product and it’s your best effort?

This is a tough question because I write until the Holy Spirit within tells me to stop. I also know when I am drawing near to the end because of how my story is flowing during my writing process.

Any anecdotes about the research or writing of your books?

I’d say that it is important to do as much research about the publishing industry, internet promoting, marketing and to make certain that your book is a totally professional edited book before it hits the stands.

How would you pitch this book to your intended audience?

What I would do is to address issues of how many young women and people in general can deal with issues of low self esteem and low self-worth. I used the internet most of the time because it is an excellent tool for authors and aspiring authors.

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