GRATITUDE POST

When your publicist is your trusted friend

GRATITUDE POST:

Every time I say, ‘I’m lucky as an author,’ the response from others is always, ‘You’re not lucky, you work hard!’

And it is true, I’ve worked incredibly hard the last two decades to get to where I am as an author today.

But when I say I am lucky, what I really mean is that I am blessed to have Anna O'Grady (pictured above as we left Dja Dja Wurrung Country yesterday) as my brilliant, committed, harder-working-than-me, publicist. And my funny, thoughtful, kind, and warm-hearted friend.

At work as Director of Publicity at Simon & Schuster Australia, Anna has created the campaigns for the last three books I’ve published with S&S. Most recently, she curated the tour for Dirrayawadha, and we have spent a lot of time together: morning coffees, rushed lunches, debriefing dinners, taxi conversations, and road trips telling stories that covered traveling the globe.

Anna and I were already friends, but you can’t spend that much time together and most nights talking about the brutal frontier history, without finding a new depth to a friendship. It is true to say, that I trust Anna with my life.

I’m grateful to Anna professionally for the work she puts into making sure as many people know about the Bathurst Wars as possible. Aside from the media she has generated, in the last three weeks, Anna coordinated the following:

We visited 6 cities
We dropped in by invitation to 38 bookshops for book signings
We had 10 launches / events

During that time, I also had a few days of being quite unwell, and Anna was there to take the load, always smiling with the same line ‘I’ll take care of it.’

I was exhausted before I started the tour, but I woke this morning in my own bed – we all know there is nothing better than that, right? – and I feel good. Anna and I worked to capacity the last few weeks and now we can both breathe a little. There is still a lot of work ahead for this book and for others, but I did not want the moment to pass to say this - there is nothing lonely about being a writer, not for me. Because I am always surrounded by incredible humans all with the same vision… changing the world, one book at a time.

I’ve got more gratitude posts to come, but today, it’s Mandaang guwu to you, Anna.

#gratitude #friendship #dirrayawadha