By Piper Bayard

She has many names–WANAMama, Writerchik, the Death Star–but you may know her as Kristen Lamb. Fiction writer, blogger, and social media maven. I met her just over three years ago on a patio in Ft. Worth. She was gesticulating wildly, glass of wine in hand, and Texas-twang-talking a mile a minute about antagonists and log lines. It was a watershed moment in my career.

Author Kristen Lamb

I thought I was safe behind a few other writers as I listened, hoping I wouldn’t catch her eye. Then she looked straight at me and asked me, “Do you blog?”

Me: “Blog? . . . Isn’t that cousin to The Creature from the Black Lagoon?”

Kristen: “In the Internet Age, every writer needs a social media platform if they are going to be taken seriously and be viable in today’s market. But here’s the good news. We are not alone.”

And so it began. She was writing a book about her approach to author platform building on social media–WANA, standing for We Are Not Alone. She adopted me as her guinea pig for her methods because she had never met anyone who knew less about social media. As her experiment, I began to blog and started Facebook and Twitter accounts. Major steps for a technophobe.

The result? In three years, I have a social media platform that reaches over two million people. My debut dystopian thriller, FIRELANDS, hit #21 at Amazon for Science Fiction/Genetic Engineering the day I announced it, and it now has a dozen or so five-star reviews from people I’ve never met. After six weeks, FIRELANDS is still sitting at #11 for Young Adult/Dystopia at Kobo, which is pretty amazing since it isn’t even a YA book.

The point of telling you this is not to toot my own horn. It’s to let you know that Kristen’s WANA methods really work. Since I met her, Kristen’s WANA method has developed into three best-selling social media books, a popular new social media site for authors called WANA Tribe, a bi-annual online writers convention called WANACon featuring first class teachers and author keynotes, a series of online writing and social media classes, and her latest achievement, Rise of the Machines.

Rise of the Machines Cover

No one has the ability to interpret social media and what it means to authors and the changing publishing industry like Kristen does. She can take the most complicated information and translate it into a digestible and entertaining form, making it useful to noobs and New York Times best sellers, alike. I can’t recommend Kristen’s books or the WANA method highly enough.

Rise of the Machines is and author’s best friend. You can find it at Amazon.

This week over at Kristen’s site, she is devoting her efforts to an Apocalypse Week to celebrate the success of her guinea pig (me). Please visit her at Kristen Lamb’s Blog and enjoy her hysterical voice as she explores the more humorous aspects of total annihilation. Who else can talk about the Kardashians, e. bola, and apocalypse at the same time and make it funny? It starts here . . .

The Stuff of Legends–Creating a Character Apocalypse

by Kristen Lamb

Have a great week, everyone! Bayard & Holmes will be back next Monday with an update from Holmes on the Syrian situation.

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Field on Fire Canstock

FIRELANDS

Available from Amazon in Paperback and on Kindle

Also in e-book at Barnes & Noble and Kobo,

and at iTunes for iPad and mobile devices.