I feel like we spend so much time trying to figure out where our readers should be that we sometimes overlook where they’re actually finding us. Maybe it was a random conversation, a recommendation from another reader, a post you almost didn’t share, a newsletter, a book club, a podcast, a local event, or something completely unexpected. Where have your readers actually been coming from lately, and what have you been doing that seems to be helping? Even if it only brought you a handful of new readers, I’d still love to hear about it. Sometimes the small discoveries are the ones that give another author their next idea.

Some of you have taken advantage of this already, but every Monday here in Skool I host a Book Marketing Lab where I do some free group coaching to anyone who attends. This is a great opportunity for you to get some insight on book marketing and meet some of your fellow Author-Labbers. You joined a community to meet like-minded people...right? 😃 Here's a recording of a previous one if you want to get an inside look: https://www.skool.com/selfpublishingbooks/classroom/7ad1e6a9?md=99046c6399be43b5bb14962e1adef647 If you're an author who's already published, or working on a book currently, feel free to hop in next Monday and bring some questions, or just listen in and learn a few things! No need to stay for the entire hour, you can pop in and out when you'd like. The only requirement to attend is that you have to be at least level 2 here in Skool.

In this authorized biography set in twentieth-century Black America, Arlinda Willis, a sharecropper’s granddaughter from Jim Crow Alabama, fights to earn a love she does not yet know she already has, while a healthcare system she trusts dismisses her. Born in 1951, in Toxey, Alabama, Arlinda grows up in the shadow of Jim Crow racism, raised by grandparents on a small farm while her mother builds a new life in Cleveland, Ohio. When she finally travels north to reunite with her family, she believes love must be earned. She earns love as a teenager, dancing on Upbeat, Cleveland’s nationally syndicated music television show, performing alongside Stevie Wonder and James Brown, integrating the American airwaves while the Civil Rights Movement is reshaping the country on the streets below. She competes in the first Miss Black Cleveland pageant. She builds a distinguished career at one of San Francisco’s most prestigious law firms. Each achievement quiets the voice that tells her she is not enough. At the law firm in 1994, she meets Rob Cole, a white British immigrant, who spends the next eighteen years as her closest friend, caregiver, and biographer. Their honest, funny, and sometimes difficult friendship crosses generational and racial lines. When esophageal cancer strips away her independence and her carefully constructed image of strength, Arlinda encounters a healthcare system that dismisses her pain, minimizes her symptoms, and tells her one story while recording another in her medical notes. The gap between what her doctors say and what they write is a pattern. That pattern has a name. For Once in My Life is the authorized biography thirty years in the making, a portrait of what can be gained and what is lost to care for someone you love. It follows Arlinda Willis from the sharecropping communities of the Alabama Black Belt through the Great Migration, the stages of Cleveland’s Black entertainment scene, the corridors of San Francisco’s legal world, and into a final chapter defined by medical racism, unconditional love, and the hardest lesson of her extraordinary life: That she is enough as she is.

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