Hello! I’m Linda Coles, an international speaker and author.

I run a small company called Blue Banana and mainly work from my home office in New Zealand. Paul is the love of my life, Stella and Monkey are my two cats, and Daisy and Britney are my goats. In my spare time I write thrillers and I run — a writer needs to keep moving.

My background is mainly in retail management working for some of the UK’s biggest retailers, but life in the slower lane beckoned and so Paul and I moved to pastures green south of Auckland. The slower life never really happened, and I continue to work with some really great brands, helping them to build relationships with their customers online.

I speak a great deal and write about building relationships — an important part of being successful in business. I wrote the books Learn Marketing with Social Media in 7 Days in 2011, Start with Hello in 2013 and Marketing with Social Media in 2015. I also write regularly as a LinkedIn Influencer, along with Richard Branson, Barack Obama and Arianna Huffington — which sounds very grand — and I am very honoured to have been asked.

I hated English lessons at school, and never became interested in writing until about eight years ago, when I started blogging and working with social media. I wrote my first book to share my knowledge with thousands of others in order to make it simpler for them to understand. Had I known at my very first job at Age 13, delivering milk early on weekend mornings, that I would become a writer, I would have paid more attention at school. Now, I write content for others, so they can pretend they are writing to their client bases, when really it’s me.

The team at Wiley is affectionately known in my house as ‘Team Wiley’: people who are simply a pleasure to work with and who stretch my mind like an elastic band — sometimes to popping point! The whole editing process is my favourite part: our final chance to make the book as good as it possibly can be … otherwise there is no point in writing it.

Connect with me on:

• Twitter: bluebanana20
• Facebook: bluebanana20
• LinkedIn: bluebanana20
• Instagram: bluebanana20
• Pinterest: lindacoles
• YouTube: bluebanana20
• Website: bluebanana20.com
• Podcast: iTunes Blue Banana