Pump Up Your Book Chats with Historical Fiction Author 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, teaching, and traveling. She has visited more than seventy countries. An avid student of history, she researched the decades preceding and following the Civil War for nearly three years, including time in Louisiana, the setting for Winds of Change and her earlier novel, When Stars Align. It is a story of bi-racial love. It is a story of war, reconstruction, and racism, but primarily, it is a story of hope.

This is her third book. In 2006, following the death of her husband, she volunteered to teach in South Africa. Her first book, The Human Spirit – Apartheid’s Unheralded Heroes, tells the true life stories of an amazing array of men and women who have devoted their lives during the worst years of apartheid to help 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.

Her second book, When Stars Align, chronicles the Civil War and Reconstruction through the love affair of Amy, a white girl, and Thaddeus, a colored man born of the rape of an eleven year old slave girl and the teen heir to Moss Grove.

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

About Winds of Change

The racially charged love and conflict of the critically acclaimed When Stars Align become more entrenched after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Amy had taken her daughter, nephew, and a son she’d had never been able to acknowledge, born from her love with Thaddeus, her colored lover, to San Francisco, as a refuge from the intense racial scrutiny of the South.

They are forced to return to their old home, Moss Grove, a successful Mississippi River cotton plantation, as young adults. They discover facts about themselves that refute everything they believed regarding both their parents and their racial background. It changes the lives of each of them. Bess and Stephen’s love is thwarted. Josiah struggles with echoes of his past.

It is a tumultuous time in American history that includes the inventions of airplanes, automobiles, telephones and movies midst decades of lynchings and economic turmoil. It is the Spanish-American War and World War I. Racial biases complicate lives and relationships as newly arrived immigrants vie with white and Negro workers all trying to gain a piece of the American dream. Winds of Change is a soaring historic fiction novel that stands alone but follows the next generation from those we came to know in When Stars Align into the 20^th century. It is a socially relevant, historically accurate, saga of decades often overlooked in American history.

Thank you for this interview, Carole. I would like to start out by asking you about your wonderful new book, Winds of Change, which is set after the Civil War in those decades of new inventions and social change through World War I. Can you tell us what attracts you to this time period?

Carole: Imagine, automobiles, movies, airplanes and electric lights all changing society within a single decade. Imagine 2 major depressions, the San Francisco earthquake, the Spanish American War and World War I….all while mixed race relationships struggled.

In researching the era, what did you find that was particularly interesting?

Carole: All the changes that followed the Civil War including large numbers of immigrants, industrialization and the expansion of the country to the Pacific Coast.

Can you tell us more about your characters?

Carole: Amy’s daughter, Bess, Henry’s son, Josiah, and Stephen…Amy and Thaddeus’ son are the primary characters…they suffer from drug addiction, racial and religious prejudices and still find someone to love.

You chose to open up your own publishing house to publish this as well as your other two books. Can you tell us how that is going?

Carole: Yes, I formed Valley Village Publishing. That permitted me to sell my books at a lower price but one still has to do their own marketing.

What advice can you give to new authors to follow your path?

Carole: Understand the changing dynamics of publishing and marketing.

You travel intensively! Can you tell us about your latest trip to India? Why did you go and what did you do?

Carole: India was the largest part of the world I hadn’t visited and I felt this gaping hole of ignorance. India is home to 2 of the world’s great religions and more than one billion people.

What projects do you have coming up?

Carole: I am working hard on my next book, a historic oriented non-fiction.

Thank you so much for this interview, Carole. Do you have any final words?

Carole: Just…thank you….keep reading and writing.

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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.

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