I am deeply honored to have received this testimonial from James Talmage Stevens aka, Dr. Prepper:
I have interviewed many interesting writers (meaning they are yet to be published) and hundreds of authors. Many of them were 1st-work neophytes, and many of them were being interviewed for the first time ever on a radio broadcast. I never critique a work, nor express any negative points about any interviewee. Heaven only knows how many ugly things have been said and posted about my own books! I have made it a policy to interview a writer or author only after reading their submitted tome. It assures I can control the quality of the interview, and gives me the advantage of knowing where the interview can go should something come unglued. It’s not so much a control issue as it is being prepared!
Sara stepped up to the mike and explicated her book and gave it life. I forgot she was a young woman raising kids, and realized she was speaking from personal experience––not just cutting and pasting ideas from other writers. Her book’s story line is unique, but not just because the lead character is a woman!
From each author I receive some new bit of information or knowledge that makes it worth the time to read the work(s) and conduct an interview. My recent interview with Sara F. Hathaway was a rewarding experience––a first-time author, a female author in a genre normally dominated by males, and with an interesting premise.
Sara Hathaway is a young dynamic woman who has not only penned a really good survivalist novel from a woman's point of view, but she is able to weave into her tale lots of tips, pointers, and gut-wrenching personal decisions normally accepted as man-stuff. She’s serious about prepping, her story teaches some good preparedness principles, and her practice of roughing it techniques shows just how tough life could probably be after a broad-based cataclysm takes away civility. I always gain some new ideas from every fiction or non-fiction book I read and from every interview––often realizing I may have left something out of my preparedness supplies. The reality is that the human mind cannot imagine all the possible future events and situations with which it may be forced to deal.
I think Sara epitomizes one of my basic Preparedness Rules of Threes: Hope for the best; fear for the worst. But most importantly, be able to deal with what you got!
One thing Sara has put a lot of effort into is her marketing of her persona and her book––there was a great lesson in her energetic and powerful strategic development plan. She has connected with some great individuals through this interaction––and Sara understands that if an author is to realize big book sales, she must go big in her effort to get the word out to the buying public! Sara’s book is a gutsy subject, written by a gutsy woman. In her book, Sara is making a gutsy effort to share her knowledge, her skills, and her talents to help others realize that they, too, can––and most likely will need to––be gutsy if they are to survive their personal “Day after Disaster.” By the way, Sara’s working on a series with her heroine, and the sequel is in the works. I’m quite sure her next book will be even stronger and have even more dealing with “…what you got!”
–– James Talmage Stevens aka Doctor Prepper, www.PreparednessRadio.com