Pump Up Your Book Chats with Carole Eglash-Kosoff

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Carole Eglash-Kosoff lives and writes in Valley Village, California. She graduated from UCLA and spent her career in business and in teaching. In 2006 her husband, mother, and brother died within a month of one another, causing her to reevaluate her life. She volunteered to work with the American Jewish World Service and was sent to South Africa to teach. She returned there a year later, having met an amazing array of men and women who had devoted their lives during the worst years of apartheid to helping the children, the elderly, and the disabled of the townships. These people cared when no one else did and their efforts continue to this day. It is their stories that needed to be told. They are apartheid’s unheralded heroes and The Human Spirit is their story.

Carole has also completed a historic fiction novel, a pre- and post- Civil War interracial love story set in Louisiana, When Stars Align.

In addition to writing Mrs. Eglash-Kosoff has established the …a better way! Scholarship program, which provides money and mentoring for several worthy local high school students for both their first and second year of college.

All profits from the sale of The Human Spirit will be donated to Ikamva Labantu and other South African charities. The book is available at Amazon, Author House and Barnes & Noble on-line sites as a hardback, paperback and as an e-book.

An avid student of history, Carole Eglash-Kosoff is a native of Wisconsin. After graduating from UCLA, she spent her career in the apparel industry and teaching fashion retail, marketing, and sales at the college level. Her first book is . She has also established the …a better way! Scholarship program, which provides money and mentoring for worthy high school students for both t

You can visit her website at www.whenstarsalign-thebook.com or connect with her at Facebook at www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=553077163.

About The Human Spirit

Apartheid in South Africa has now been gone more than fifteen years but the heroes of their struggle to achieve a Black majority-run democracy are still being revealed. Some individuals toiled publicly, but most worked tirelessly in the shadows to improve the welfare of the Black and Coloured populations that had been so neglected. Nelson Mandela was still in prison; clean water and sanitation barely existed; AIDS was beginning to orphan an entire generation.

Meanwhile a white, Jewish, middle class woman, joined with Tutu, Millie, Ivy, Zora and other concerned Black women, respectfully called Mamas, to help those most in need, often being beaten and arrested by white security police.

This book tells the story of these women and others who have spent their adult lives making South Africa a better place for those who were the country’s most disadvantaged.
Q: Thank you for this interview, Carole. Can you tell us why you wrote your book?

I had gone to South Africa to teach and met amazing men and women devoting their lives to help the disadvantage. I began sending essays back on various individuals and returned to Cape Town the following year to expand those interviews and compile them into a book.

Q: Which part of the book was the hardest to write?

Conveying the emotion of the struggles and degradation these people endured.

Q: Does your book have an underlying message that readers should know
about?

There are people around the world who suffer and who have suffered. We need to help them and recognize that even as we have problems, they rarely rise to mere survival as in other parts of the world.

Q: Do you have a writing tip you’d like to share?

Keep writing….if you aren’t enjoying it, find another pastime.

Q: Would you like to tell us about your home life? Where you live? Family? Pets?

I live alone with my three dogs in a home in a Los Angeles suburb where my husband and I had lived the last decade. I have a pleasantly lit office with music always playing in the background. I have great friends and a wonderful support network including terrific neighbors.

Q: What was the first thing you did as far as promoting your book?

I sent out copies to parties who I thought might be interested and began as wide a promotional effort as I knew.

Q: Are you familiar with the social networks and do you actively participate?

I am working hard to become more familiar. Face Book, Linked-in, and your forum for VBT’s are the new paradigm in marketing.

Q: What is the most frustrating part of being an author?

Giving up valuable writing time to promote your book.

Q: What is the most rewarding?

Having someone tell you how much they enjoyed what you’d written.

Q: Thank you so much for this interview, Carole! We wish you much success!

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Question of the Day

How do you make sales happen for you?

A lot of hard work! I sponsor a lot of on line parties, festivals and contests. Book sales don’t magically happen, believe me. An author has to work hard to earn her readers. And then she has to work hard to keep them by giving them something they’ll enjoy reading. I try hard to make my books worth a reader’s time.

-- Sheila Roberts, Author of Winter at the Beach