A Conversation with Jamie Rockers, Author of "Savannahs & Sunsets: An African Overland Adventure"
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Featured Author, Jamie Rockers
Author of Savannahs & Sunsets |
ABB: Why did you feel you had to tell this story?
Rockers: Well, I have been writing for years and have written several books about traveling and living abroad but
Savannahs & Sunsets: An African Overland Adventure is my first book that has been published and it just so happens that it was about my most recent travel experience, which was a 3-month overland trip through Africa.
Many people had asked me why I was going to Africa of all places, a continent that had seen horrible poverty and atrocities committed over the years. I wanted to see the Africa beyond what the newspapers and media said, the simple Africa that had nothing to do with war and poverty, child soldiers and corrupt politicians. I wanted to take a closer look at this continent and interpret it for myself. So that’s why I wrote the story.
ABB: Where do you get your ideas?
Rockers: My books are all travel memoirs and are based on my personal experiences so my ideas come directly from those. When you are traveling and placing yourself in an unfamiliar territory, the story writes itself!
ABB: Do you ever experience writer’s block and how do you overcome it?
Rockers: I do sometimes and I’ve found the best way to combat this is by writing while I am actually traveling.
Savannahs & Sunsets: An African Overland Adventure was written while I was traveling as I kept a day-to-day account of what adventures were happening. However, I have written books after the experience had already occurred and it was much harder to recreate the scenes because I wasn’t living and breathing it. So that didn’t really work for me. I found the best way was to write as I went.
ABB: What advice would you give to aspiring writers on the writing and publishing process?
Rockers: It takes a lot of time and effort to write a book. If you want to write something decent, you have to be prepared to put the time and energy into it. It’s like a child, you have to nurture it so it keeps on growing. So as long as you are willing to do that, I would say go for it! The writing process is the easy part. The difficult part is the editing and the research. You have to write draft after draft in order to get things right. It’s also easy to become too close to your own work and not see the mistakes in it that other people can point out. So there is always a risk of that. With the publishing process I think it is tough work to send out query letters to book agents, hundreds of them. After that they have to actually sell your book to a publishing house which could take a lot of time. However, I think things are changing and more people are self-publishing these days.
ABB: How do you market your work? Have you found some avenues to be more successful than others?
Rockers: Every author has to market their work, it doesn’t matter if you are a
New York Times bestseller or someone who has sold five books. Marketing is half the battle! I generally use social media and I’ve found Twitter to be really useful in connecting with fellow travel writers, book agents, and publishing houses big and small. Press releases also have to be sent to relevant media sources as well as word-of-mouth. Getting good reviews online is also part of the process as most people won’t believe your book is good until they hear someone else say it!
ABB: If your book was made into a movie, who do you picture playing each part?
Rockers: Hmm, I haven’t thought that far ahead! I wouldn’t have the slightest idea!
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Synopsis
Africa. What does that word conjure up in your imagination? For me, it is of vast savannahs in a sun-bleached land, of empty drifting dunes, soft sandy beaches with turquoise waters, an ancient and raw frontier where the skies are set aflame with the setting sun, and where the most exciting wildlife on earth coexist. I had always wanted to go to Africa. It is one of those places that I wrote in CAPS on my bucket list and somewhere I described as "ESSENTIAL TO TRAVEL TO”. Although I have both traveled and lived abroad extensively, I always felt like Africa should be kept as the "final" destination in my traveling career. Not that I will never travel again, it just seems appropriate after trawling the globe, to leave Africa for last.
So after turning thirty, and realizing that there wasn’t much time left before life’s real responsibilities got in the way, I knew that it was time to go. So I gathered up my resources, pinched my savings together, and took off on a three-month overland trip through Africa.
Follow me, through savannahs & sunsets, through Africa! Starting in Nairobi, I followed my African dream through the countries of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa, discovering what makes Africa so intriguing and encountering some of the most exciting wildlife on the planet.
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Official Book Video Trailer
Savannahs & Sunsets
About the Author:
Jamie Rockers is from Garnett, KS, USA and began her traveling “career” in Argentina in 2002. Although she studied film at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles and worked in Hollywood, she blames Argentina for her continuing wanderlust and for her departure from Hollywood. Since that time, she has studied in London and lived in Japan for four years, where she worked on a number of projects, including as a paid blogger on
www.gaijinpot.com, followed by over 2 million people.
She has published six articles about traveling in Japan in Japan Today. She moved to Australia after backpacking through ten countries in Southeast Asia in the summer of 2010 and has currently relocated to the United Kingdom. She has travelled to over fifty different countries and lived in four, from learning to tango in Argentina to partying with sumo wrestlers in Japan to traveling across Russia by train.
Savannahs & Sunsets, An African Overland Adventure is her first published book. Another two will follow, one about her adventures through South East Asia and one about Argentina. Visit her website at
www.jamierockers.com. Look at her travel pictures at
http://pinterest.com/jlrockers/.
Visit her blog about life in Japan at
http://blog.gaijinpot.com/author/jamie-rockers.
Or her blog about her trip on an overland journey through Africa at
http://rockersjamie.wordpress.com/. You can also find her on Twitter
https://twitter.com/jlrocker or follow her Facebook Fan page at
https://www.facebook.com/jrockersauthor?ref=hl.
FOR MORE INFO:
Website: www.jamierockers.com
Blog: http://rockersjamie.wordpress.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jlrocker
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jrockersauthor?ref=hl
Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/jlrockers/
Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/107640220968693457275/posts/p/pub
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Amazon: http://amzn.to/11y0cnh
