About

• 
• Tweet
• Sharebar

• 
• Tweet

My Story Is Helping You Share Your Story

I am a born wordsmith. I started writing as soon as I could read. When I entered college at the George Washington University, I chose to major in Journalism because I bought into the belief that it was the only way I could get paid to write. The evidence seems to support that limiting belief, as most authors make little or no money as a direct result of producing a book, and MOST self-published authors lose money. This does NOT have to be true for you, as you will learn when we work together.

While in college, I had the good fortune to work at The Washington Post as a news aide, and I picked the brains of some of the best and the brightest writers in the world. Their dedication and skill inspired me, but reporting the news didn’t.

After graduation, I went to work for a world-class investigative journalist, David Wise who had over ten books (now fourteen)to his credit, including a #1 New York Times bestseller, and I helped him research and edit three books in my three year tenure at his service. I had a blast, and I got to see first-hand how a seasoned veteran author goes about composing a book, and how major publishing houses view, produce and promote books.

I completed my work with Mr. Wise, left Washington, D.C. and moved to Central Florida to take a reporting job at a 100,000 circulation daily paper. I covered business, city-government, and also contributed feature articles. Earning just $300 a week, I worked crazy hours for an alcoholic bureau chief in his mid-thirties who had “issues” with a Yankee woman in her twenties having more experience with big stories than he did. From day one, his main objective was to put me in my place.

I’ll never forget the day I suggested we do a story on women in non-traditional jobs, such as construction workers, fire fighters, etc. His response: “That’s not news! Women have been doing construction in this state for 10 years. Ya’ll are equal now!” Imagine my delight when the next day, our paper ran a story off the news-wire on the cover of our business section with the headline “Women Working Non-Traditional Jobs,” originally published by The New York Times.

I soon acknowledged my fierce independence and outside-the-box thinking was a liability in the world of corporate Journalism. Even to the degree that when I was offered a position at the Rocky Mountain News covering night cops, I turned it down saying, “I want to choose what I write about. If I take this position, I won’t be happy, and you won’t be happy with me.”

I walked away from writing professionally for awhile and built a successful personal training business. I enjoyed the process of growing a business and coaching people, but I knew it wasn’t for me.

I’ve got ink in my veins, not iron.

I sold the business, and went back to school to get a Master’s Degree in Spiritual Psychology with the intention of developing a coaching practice for wellness businesses.

As part of my Master’s thesis project, I developed and launched a product-a creativity and self-expression activity kit called Heart, Paper, Scissors. When I began the process, I thought it was a book, so I set out to find an agent. I used a method that had a prestigious agent so impressed with me, he begged his partner to let him sign me. She refused, reminding him that they don’t represent the type of book I was proposing, and it turned out for the best, since I discovered in the process that it wasn’t a book, it was a product with a teaching guide, which I self-published. The benefit to you is that the method I used to impress the agent is the method I teach, and it WORKS for the authors I coach.

As fate would have it, I kept attracting clients into my coaching programs who wanted to write books, so I coached them and edited their books.

Some of the success stories so far include:

• The author whose book was published by Random House, serialized in Newsweek, and was a featured selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club.
• The author who came to me with the query “I wonder if I can write a book” and a year later, had self-published a book that won the praises of famous people in her field, an Evvy Award for Best Spiritual Book, and launched at a book signing attended by nearly 200 people.
• The author who started out as a small time, private practice hypno-therapist, and as a result of our coaching, built an international marketing machine, got an agent and sold her book to John Wiley & Sons. Her book, Let Love In, reached the Amazon Best-seller list weeks before its release!
• The publisher who contracted me to edit a book that was considered for both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, after three other editors failed to edit the book to their standards.

So, what’s YOUR story? What do you want it to be?

I look forward to supporting your success.

Sincerely,

Robin Colucci Hoffman