Lorraine Enos has a Bachelor's degree in Accounting from Illinois College. She has worked as an auditor for the U.S. Military and held various computer-related positions in private industry.

The Portable Coach is the result of her decision to be proactive in making life changes. Her training as an auditor and in computer applications allowed her to develop analytic methods to assess her situation and determine which course to take. She has chosen to share those strategies in The Portable Coach. Lorraine lives in the Chicago area with her husband and two kids. She's currently co-authoring a novel and working part-time. She is available for workshops and seminars.

For more information visit http://lenos66.com or email her at lenos66@yahoo.com.

Each year thousands of Americans pay personal coaches up to $200.00 an hour for advice on how to make career and personal changes in their lives. Coaches guided their clients through transformation steps including individual assessment and goal setting. Millions more could benefit from the services of a personal coach but cannot afford their hefty fees.

The Portable Coach: A Do-It-Yourself Approach to Personal Coaching fills this void and contains realistic advice on how readers can bring lasting changes to their lives. Instead of providing easy answers, The Portable Coach encourages readers to ask tough questions and look within themselves for answers. This book is a must read for anyone who desires to transform their life.

Oh that's an easy one, Annette. I've wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl. I was always writing down stories and everyone who read them said that I should be a writer. it's just taken me quite a while to get the self confidence to put what I write out there for public consumption.

You are a qualified accountant, have your real life skills helped you
as a writer?

Yes, very much so. Working as an auditor, I learned to be very analytical, to assess data, and to make a decision about what was important and what was superfluous. Those skills have helped a lot as a writer, especially when I was working as a journalist, because you have to assess scads of data and then decide what is important enough to go into the book or article and what can safely be left out.

What made you decide to write a self-help book?

The Portable Coach just kind of happened. I've always been a very avid reader of self-help books, but none of them gave me exactly what I needed. So using my analytical skills, I figured out how to help myself and then I figured that those same exercises could help other people. So I wrote The Portable Coach.

You're working on a novel at the moment, do you find it different from
writing non-fiction?

Very much so. It's a lot more fun because I don't have to worry about anyone suing me if I misquote them. It's also fun to get inside someone else's head (i.e. my characters) and see how they think. I have a lot more latitude writing fiction than nonfiction because I can go off in totally different directions and make things up as I go along.

If you could meet any character from a book, who would it be and why?

Hmm that's a tough one. I guess right now I'd have to say either Goldie the caterer from Diane Mott Davidson's books or Kay Scarpetta from Patricia Cornwell's books. Both of them are strong women who solve crimes and don't really take garbage from anyone.

How to you handle real-life interruptions, phone calls, children etc.?

Not very well, unfortunately. I have a tendency to fly off the handle when I'm in "the zone" and people interrupt me. I also tend to write late at night or early in the morning to minimize interruptions. Of course, the biggest interruption to writing is marketing The Portable Coach. I'm just amazed at the amount of time I spend writing letters, sending emails, and making phone calls to promote it. My writing has kind of taken a back seat to promotional efforts right now, I'm hoping that soon I'll find the balance between writing and marketing, but I haven't yet.

What have you found to be the best way to promote your books?

I'm really just starting my promo efforts and getting a feel for what works and what doesn't. A lot of things that work for fiction authors don't work for me. As a workbook, The Portable Coach is pretty labor intensive for buyers and it is not an impulse buy, so book signings and the like don't seem to be working as well.

I've also decided that for the effort it takes me to get a book signing or local event where I might sell ten books, I might as well spend the same effort working on getting radio interviews and coverage in magazines. I'm currently developing a list of talk radio shows across the country that might be interested in having me as a guest and newspapers that might be willing to run a free article in exchange for a blurb at the bottom. The other thing I'm doing is avidly reading newspapers and magazines looking for stories similar to mine and then querying the author and / or editor telling them that I would be willing to be a source the next time they do a similar story. I've found that women's magazines run similar stories every month or so, so we'll see how that turns out.

Marketing on a budget is also extremely difficult because many news outlets want to see a free copy of the book before they'll work with you and that can get expensive.

However, I guess I'd have to say that my best marketing tool right now is my mom, she's been out selling copies to everyone she knows.

In The Portable Coach you use a lot of real-life examples, do you
find yourself basing characters in your novel on people you know? Or events in your own life?

Yes, Whisper Alley is based on events that happened while my husband and I were in Okinawa and a lot of the characters are based on people we met there. Our main characters, Rick and Jennifer, are based on us and, as such, it's really hard to hurt them. I tell everyone that I meet that if they want to get to know me to read my books. I'm in everything that I write. Sometimes I'm not recognizable unless you know where to look, but there are character traits of me in every character I've created.

And there is nothing more satisfying than taking revenge on someone you don't like by making them a really nasty character in your book and knowing that they will never realize it's supposed to be them.

Any more details on what you're currently working on?

As I said, Whisper Alley is based in part on events that happened to my husband John and I while we were on Okinawa. We added in bits and pieces of our experiences and mixed in a healthy dose of current events in Okinawa and provided our own answer to the question of "What if the rapes of Okinawan women by US service members weren't random occurrences?" Everyone who's read it has said it is a quick read and a good story.

Just write. The only way to become a published author is by putting one word at a time on a piece of paper and having the self confidence to submit. The one thing I would caution beginning writers against is submitting too early. Take the time to proof and polish your writing so it is the best it can be and, if possible, ask other people for their opinions. Then when you think it is ready, sit it in a drawer for a week. When that week is up, read it again and if you still think it is ready, send it out. If not, polish it some more.

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