Our Interview with Ann Videan!

                                       Bio

Award-winning Business-Tribe Architect Ann N. Videan, APR, has learned one main thing from strategizing marketing with hundreds of entrepreneurial visionaries: You don’t need to spend too much time and too much money on marketing to obtain exciting results. The simple secret? Our focus on five key attributes: excellence, creativity, kindness, rewards and results.
Word-of-mouth blooms when you offer Excellent products and services that intrigue and/or serve customers. This is where it all starts.
Your marketing will work best if you involve Creativity. All it takes is a marketing idea or message that is unique or even outrageous enough to get people talking.
Your marketing thrives when you build trusting relationships based on Kindness, respect, integrity and giving.
Excellence, creativity and kindness attract loyal followers to your business tribe, as Ann’s own marketing consulting firm has experienced since its founding in 1996. Leveraging word-of-mouth and marketing strategies based on these three fundamentals has earned us 99 percent of our clients.
Accredited in public relations, Ann consults with all levels of entrepreneurial thinkers. She has worked with everyone from microbusiness owners in the neighborhoods of Phoenix, AZ, to executives in Fortune 500 companies like Apple Computer. Ann also has worked with firms as disparate as a telecom provider in San Francisco, Calif., and a die bonder manufacturer in Cham, Switzerland.
With all clients, we focus on making the work Rewarding. We strive to create marketing efforts involving fun, community service, and emotional attachment, which pays off with “wins” like these:
• We enticed 15,000 extras to Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, AZ, to film football movie scenes for Jerry Maguire.
• We served as the catalyst for Rhino Internet/Staging’s role in reintroducing white rhinos to the Phoenix Zoo. (Next time you visit, be sure to check on Ann’s retired lady friends Notch and Half-Ear.)
• Ann leads her own successful business tribes for communicators, writers, and consultants.
Sometimes other people notice what we do, too, which we find both gratifying and humbling:
• As editorial director of RealTime, a corporate in-house newsmagazine, Ann and her team earned a prestigious Gold Quill honorable mention from the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC).
• Peers in the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) selected Ann to receive the Phoenix chapter’s top honor: the PERCY Award.
• A national panel of home-based business experts selected Videan Unlimited as The Crown Jewel Award (top U.S. home-based business).
At Videan Unlimited, we start with excellence and end with what everyone wants: Results. Our clients report thousands of dollars in increased revenue shortly after working with us. They also often comment on gaining enhanced clarity for their marketing vision, and powerful connections with unique people and ideas. We’d love to have you experience this, too, as part of our business tribe.
For fun, Ann spends a great deal of time writing, volunteering for community and professional organizations, and creating memories with her loving and supportive husband, son and daughter. She is also a novelist, musician, photographer, and avid in-line skater.

                                      Bio provided by author's site

We had a great opportunity to get a chance to know a little bit more about Ann and learn of her journey to becoming an author. Ann's days are filled with family, community and professional volunteering, and many other activities besides writing! So get comfortable and please give a warm welcome to Ann!


1. What makes for a good hook in your stories? Where does your inspiration come from?
Paranormal influences and characters who are real, yet quirky. My inspiration comes from everywhere, but mostly from music, movies, talking with people and experiencing a lot of unique activity in my personal life. I love to explore new places, meet new people and try almost everything once.
2. Are you an organized writer? Do you do things like take notes and make lists of characters? Or do you free write and work it out as you go?
I do like to have a rough outline, but I am not a linear thinker, so I must follow my intuition as I write and take the story where it feels right. Or where my characters show me it needs to go. I do make reference lists: favorite character slang, research notes about places and times in history relating to the story, etc.

3. What is your normal writing day like? Do you write when you are inspired or do you have a schedule?

I try to write in two-hour blocks whenever those come up. My most productive writing time was when I treated my writing time as a client and worked at it every day from 1 – 3 p.m. in a local coffee shop.

4. Who is your favorite author and how did they inspire you to write?

 I don't have a favorite author because I enjoy so many different genres. Mostly I'm inspired by "real" dialogue, characters with whom I can picture myself being friends, and fresh worlds created in an author's mind.

5. It’s easy to see that you have a passion for writing but is there any part of it you don’t like?

The whole process is a joy. Sometimes, I wish the books would leap into people's Amazon shopping carts more easily, but making those relationships and intriguing people about your story is part of the fun.

6. Do you make time to read and if you do what are you reading right now?

I read every night before I go to sleep. Right now, I'm into "A Wise Man's Fear" by Patrick Rothfuss, one of the best tale spinners ever.

7. What lead you to write in this genre and style? Is there personal life experience in the writing?

My Rhythms & Muse novel was a story I'd had in my head for many years and wanted to get on paper. Now that it's done, I'm working on a trilogy in the genre which makes my heart truly sing: young-adult adventure/sci-fi/fantasy.

 

8. Your books have been published with Amazon.com, Does this mean you see the publishing industry headed this way?

Yes. In my opinion, the old way of publishing is outdated. Besides, writers should be getting more recognition and compensation for their ideas and hard work. Why not use the amazing technology tools we have available to us to get our stories out to the world?

9. Do you have any online sites where others can read more of your writings?

My Words.Music.Village. blog at http://anvidean.com, where we talk about writing music and creating villages of like-minded people. I also run a writers' tribe on Facebook and LinkedIn called ALWAYS (Alliance of Literary Writers, Authors & Yabbering Scribes).

10. Do you have any more stories in the works? What kinds of stories do you plan to write next?

I am writing the first book in a young-adult adventure/sci-fi/fantasy story about a human girl who finds out she's a faerie (one of the 7-foot tall, wingless, Celtic kind), who must return to the faerie realm to save the human race, her family and the faerie realm. The connection between human and faerie worlds is music, so I will be creating another CD of original music inspired by the book, as well.

 

11. Who would be your first choice to play Alexandra Lauren of your book"Rhythms & Muse"?

I actually have a blog post about casting Alex in a future movie. It's in my Words.Music.Village. blog at http://anvidean.com/2011/03/28/help-me-%E2%80%93-theoretically-cast-rhythms-muse-the-movie/ and I'd love to have input from anyone on it.

My choices, because she appears in the book as both a teenager and a 40-something, would be:

• Teen Alex = Emma Watson

• 40-something Alex = Drew Barrymore

 

12. If you could meet anyone from any time who would it be and what would be your first question?

Shakespeare, "Who really wrote your stories?"