Awareness

Dale began her writing career writing five thousand words of fiction a day while doing technical writing to pay the bills, but somehow, the breakneck speed she’s maintained from the start hasn’t slowed. In the fall of 2000, Dale won fourth place in a writing contest that came with the opportunity to work with an agent. She was excited at first, but she ultimately decided to self-publish after the agent encouraged her to cut a character she loved from her debut. She released the first three books in her Psychic Visions series in rapid succession.

Then she switched, temporarily, to the Young Adult genre. Dale’s teenage daughter was craving vampire fiction at the time and couldn’t find what she wanted on the shelves. Her obliging mother composed a ten-book series, which will soon be re-released for a New Adult audience with aged-up characters. Although her daughter outgrew vampires somewhere around book seven, she remains involved in Dale’s business, handling some of the marketing and social media to give her mother more time to focus on the creative side.

Assessment

In 2015, after she noticed a drop in sales, Dale started researching successful authors. She interviewed several of her friends to see what they were doing. What she found surprised her. “Everybody was doing something different. Everybody was doing what worked for them,” she says. Based on this knowledge, she decided the best way forward was to “stop looking outside. Just write what you want to write. Promote it as much as you can, and if it doesn't sell, either move on or keep writing because it brings you joy.”

She started writing Military Romance around 2016, enjoying the fast-paced action that provided a break from her more complicated Mysteries. Now she has one hundred fifty of them published alongside her Thrillers and a newer series of Cozy Mysteries. She says they’re fun and easy to write and grins talking about some of the ideas she has for new stories. “What you want to do is unlock your storyteller. I would consider myself a storyteller versus a writer,” she says.

Action

Of course, how authors get the words on the page is just as important as the craft that goes into their stories. For Dale, the answer has always been quickly—even if the actual method has varied over time.

A few years ago, Dale gave an interview describing how she had written nine thousand words before breakfast. Although she was happy with her writing speed, regularly typing twelve thousand to thirteen thousand words per day, Dale’s knuckles eventually started to complain. It took three tries for her to switch to dictating, but by 2016, she made it stick. Now she dictates ten thousand words in an hour, finishing one-hundred-thousand-word Thrillers in two weeks. Dale does most of her dictation in the morning, but she keeps an 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. work schedule. After she gets her words in, she switches to the business side: advertising, direct sales, and community building. The books are page-turners, no matter which genre, and her readers are always asking for more.

Dale’s storyteller, the creative side of her mind, comes out when she manages to di