Episode 029 - Fostering Creativity through Digital Minimalism with Zach Bohannon
June 2, 2020
From listener Pauline Wiles: "It was so helpful to get a reminder (from someone who's tried it!) to be intentional with our reach-out activities, and that social media - if we don't enjoy it - really isn't a must-do activity."
Zach Bohannon shares the personal and creative benefits he gained by living a life of digital minimalism. He asks us to question our assumptions about whether online interactions are really necessary to create community with our fans and to reach new readers. We also discuss what fodder for our work we miss if we're focused on our devices rather than on the world around us.
Zach Bohannon writes post-apocalyptic science fiction, some horror, and non-fiction books for authors, including the recently released Three Story Method. He is the host of The Career Author Podcast as well as the co-host and organizer for unique author events such as Authors on a Train and The Career Author Summit.
"Just enjoy your surroundings, be Be bored. It's okay to be bored sometimes."
Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Zach Bohannon. Hey Zach, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Zach: I'm doing great, Matty, how are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Zach Bohannan writes post-apocalyptic science fiction, some horror, and nonfiction books for authors, including the recently released Three Story Method. He's the host of The Career Author Podcast, which I can highly recommend based on my own experience as a podcast listener, as well as the cohost and organizer of unique author events such as Authors on a Train and The Career Author Summit.
[00:00:33] We're going to be talking today about a topic that I originally heard Zach and his cohost J. Thorn talk about on Episode 117 of The Career Author Podcast, and it was "Digital Minimalism a Year Later," and so we're going to be talking about fostering creativity through digital minimalism. But before we dive into that, Zach, can you describe for us exactly what digital minimalism is and how it was an experiment that you got interested in doing?
[00:01:03] Zach: Digital minimalism that term has been coined by Cal Newport, who wrote an amazing book that I recommend anyone read called Digital Minimalism. That book really was kind of catalyst for me to jump off on this path a little over a year ago now. It's been a year and a couple months. I quit social media. I got rid of any distracting apps on my phone that I just feel like I didn't need. But digital minimalism can take a lot of different forms. For me it was mostly just the distraction of social media and how it was having a negative impact on my life.
[00:01:37] It's not that necessarily it was having a negative impact on my life. It was that it really wasn't adding any value. It's basically just minimizing your digital footprint and giving yourself more time to focus on the stuff that really matters and what you really want to do, which in my instance is my creative business.
[00:01:55] Matty: Social media is an obvious example of something that you would want to reduce through digital minimalism. How about other electronic platforms?
[00:02:03] Zach: Yeah. Social media is the one most people go to just because there's a lot of studies out there talking about how it's really driving up mental health issues in our country with anxiety and depression. And there's a lot of really interesting statistics out there about that, that honestly, really scared the mess out of me when I started reading that stuff. But it can go a lot of different ways. Just reducing how many apps you have on your phone. We've become dependent on convenience of certain things.
[00:02:27] Another example is I got rid of the Amazon app on my phone and I spend less money on Amazon now. It's amazing how much of a difference that makes because in those little moments of boredom, you'll go and find those apps and then all of a sudden it's like, "Oh, I just found this thing I don't need, I'm going to go ahead and buy it."
[00:02:43] I don't have YouTube on my phone anymore and I'll tell you what's interesting is when I really started to realize that certain apps were a problem, it was when I would just mindlessly swipe to them on my phone and go to click to where they used to be and they weren't there anymore. For some people it might be video games, maybe you're playing video games too much. That can obviously be a place where you'd want to have digital minimalism. I don't have email on my phone. I know that's not possible for everybody. Some people because of day jobs have to have email. I don't. I can really restrict how much time I want to spend on email.
[00:03:14] Because I think we've grown to this place where we think because of the world we're living in, and because of everything being so fast that people need a response from us right away, but they don't. People can wait a little bit for me to answer their email.
[00:03:28] And if it's something really important, then I probably know that person good enough to where they have my phone number and then call me. People are like, "Wow, what about family? How do you keep up with family?" Well, they can call me or I can call them. There's other ways to reach people.
[00:03:43] Or what about readers trying to reach out to you? Well, my email is on my website. If someone really wants to get in touch with me, they can take a few extra steps and figure out how. It's not that big of a deal. So I don't really worry about those types of things.
[00:03:54] I know I kind of went off on a tangent from your original question.
[00:03:56] Matty: No, that's all good. And in fact, it brings up a topic that I did want to talk about, which is that social media is posed as such a must do, especially for new authors, as a way of reaching and building community with readers. So you're in an enviable position in comparison to some of the listeners because you have quite an established fan base. Talk a little bit about how you kept in touch with them, if you did keep in touch with them, during your year of digital minimalism and what advice you might have for people who don't have that ready-made or already created pool of fans to interact with, who are still trying to build their audience.
[00:00:05] Zach: I'm doing great, Matty, how are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Zach Bohannan writes post-apocalyptic science fiction, some horror, and nonfiction books for authors, including the recently released Three Story Method. He's the host of The Career Author Podcast, which I can highly recommend based on my own experience as a podcast listener, as well as the cohost and organizer of unique author events such as Authors on a Train and The Career Author Summit.
[00:00:33] We're going to be talking today about a topic that I originally heard Zach and his cohost J. Thorn talk about on Episode 117 of The Career Author Podcast, and it was "Digital Minimalism a Year Later," and so we're going to be talking about fostering creativity through digital minimalism. But before we dive into that, Zach, can you describe for us exactly what digital minimalism is and how it was an experiment that you got interested in doing?
[00:01:03] Zach: Digital minimalism that term has been coined by Cal Newport, who wrote an amazing book that I recommend anyone read called Digital Minimalism. That book really was kind of catalyst for me to jump off on this path a little over a year ago now. It's been a year and a couple months. I quit social media. I got rid of any distracting apps on my phone that I just feel like I didn't need. But digital minimalism can take a lot of different forms. For me it was mostly just the distraction of social media and how it was having a negative impact on my life.
[00:01:37] It's not that necessarily it was having a negative impact on my life. It was that it really wasn't adding any value. It's basically just minimizing your digital footprint and giving yourself more time to focus on the stuff that really matters and what you really want to do, which in my instance is my creative business.
[00:01:55] Matty: Social media is an obvious example of something that you would want to reduce through digital minimalism. How about other electronic platforms?
[00:02:03] Zach: Yeah. Social media is the one most people go to just because there's a lot of studies out there talking about how it's really driving up mental health issues in our country with anxiety and depression. And there's a lot of really interesting statistics out there about that, that honestly, really scared the mess out of me when I started reading that stuff. But it can go a lot of different ways. Just reducing how many apps you have on your phone. We've become dependent on convenience of certain things.
[00:02:27] Another example is I got rid of the Amazon app on my phone and I spend less money on Amazon now. It's amazing how much of a difference that makes because in those little moments of boredom, you'll go and find those apps and then all of a sudden it's like, "Oh, I just found this thing I don't need, I'm going to go ahead and buy it."
[00:02:43] I don't have YouTube on my phone anymore and I'll tell you what's interesting is when I really started to realize that certain apps were a problem, it was when I would just mindlessly swipe to them on my phone and go to click to where they used to be and they weren't there anymore. For some people it might be video games, maybe you're playing video games too much. That can obviously be a place where you'd want to have digital minimalism. I don't have email on my phone. I know that's not possible for everybody. Some people because of day jobs have to have email. I don't. I can really restrict how much time I want to spend on email.
[00:03:14] Because I think we've grown to this place where we think because of the world we're living in, and because of everything being so fast that people need a response from us right away, but they don't. People can wait a little bit for me to answer their email.
[00:03:28] And if it's something really important, then I probably know that person good enough to where they have my phone number and then call me. People are like, "Wow, what about family? How do you keep up with family?" Well, they can call me or I can call them. There's other ways to reach people.
[00:03:43] Or what about readers trying to reach out to you? Well, my email is on my website. If someone really wants to get in touch with me, they can take a few extra steps and figure out how. It's not that big of a deal. So I don't really worry about those types of things.
[00:03:54] I know I kind of went off on a tangent from your original question.
[00:03:56] Matty: No, that's all good. And in fact, it brings up a topic that I did want to talk about, which is that social media is posed as such a must do, especially for new authors, as a way of reaching and building community with readers. So you're in an enviable position in comparison to some of the listeners because you have quite an established fan base. Talk a little bit about how you kept in touch with them, if you did keep in touch with them, during your year of digital minimalism and what advice you might have for people who don't have that ready-made or already created pool of fans to interact with, who are still trying to build their audience.
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[00:04:33] Zach: The first thing that's important to understand is, I have that now, but I started from zero, just like everybody else. I do want to preface by saying that I have a lot of author friends who have great success with social media. They do really well interacting on social media with readers and building their audience that way. It just didn't work for me. I built my audience through a mailing list, through becoming friends with other authors, doing promo swaps, places like BookBub and eReader News Today, getting my books on there and running promos, and then having a really good call to action in the back of my book that got people to want to sign up for my list.
[00:05:08] That's how I've gotten thousands of people on my mailing list, and that is my social media. That's how I interact with my readers on the fiction side. On the nonfiction side, J. and I's for the podcast, for Patreon, for our event stuff, we use Slack channels. We've experimented on fiction with having communities off of Facebook. We're brought up to think like, this is what we have to do. And Becca Syme says this a lot, in a great book she wrote called Dear Writer, You Need to Quit.
[00:05:34] Matty: I'm going to be talking with Becca in a couple of weeks.
[00:05:36] Zach: Oh, that's awesome. Very, very cool. I love that book. It was very, very inspiring. One thing she says a lot in that book is "question the process." I think that especially as new authors we get into the indy world and there's so much to learn and we get overwhelmed, but you take a lot of things as like, this is what I need to do. But that's not necessarily the case. And one thing, and J. was the original person to bring this up to me, and I've really thought about this, I think that we need to question do readers really want to interact with writers? I think that that's a really valid question. I think we make the assumption that readers want to be in these communities and hear from us. And like I said, I have some friends who have really great groups on Facebook and do really well. But I know for me and for us, we've tried a lot of different things and it's just, readers never really wanted to engage.
[00:06:22] It could be a genre dependent thing. I know a lot of romance authors do really well at this, so maybe like a lot of the women specifically who read romance like being in these Facebook groups, and maybe cause we're writing post-apocalyptic fiction, those are more introverted people who want to just stay in their bunkers and not talk to anybody. So there are definitely some factors there.
[00:06:42] But don't assume you need to be on social media. If you enjoy it and you like being on those platforms, by all means do it. As long as it's not getting in the way of your creativity and you're not spending more time on Facebook than you are getting words down and it's not affecting your mood.
[00:06:58] That was the thing for me. I could read something on Facebook and it just ticked me off for whatever reason, and it ruined my mood for hours. As a creative, you can't have stuff like that in your head. You can't be worried about dumb stuff, you know? And so I had to recognize things affect me. That's my personality. I'm not going to try to fight that. So how do I fix that? Well, I eliminate this thing that is causing that. It's really going to be a person by person basis, but don't think that you have to have social media to build a platform because you absolutely do not.
[00:07:29] Matty: When you started your digital minimalism experiment, and I believe that you continued your email communication with your fan base that had signed up for your email list, correct?
[00:07:41] Zach: Correct. Absolutely.
[00:07:42] Matty: And I believe I remember that you said on The Career Author Podcast episode that you had not seen an impact in book sales when you started that experiment.
[00:07:53] Zach: Yep. The most important thing is my sales haven't gone down. They've stayed pretty steady. They haven't increased necessarily as a direct impact of leaving social media. There's other factors obviously in there, but I think a lot of people are scared their sales are going to go down or readers are going to forget about them.
[00:08:06] You just have to find another way to talk to those readers. And I would much rather have reader's email lists and talk to them through email than I would a Facebook group where tomorrow Facebook could decide to get rid of Facebook groups or they could decide to change one little algorithm just like they've done before with Facebook pages.
[00:08:23] I remember when the Facebook pages algorithm change happened where they bumped it down to like 2% of people who like your page see your posts unless you pay for it, and that crushed a lot of authors who were really depending on that. That's what happens when you depend on another platform. I would much rather be doing all that through email. So I'm definitely still communicating to readers.
[00:08:44] As a matter of fact, this morning I had an email go out because I have a new novel coming out in two weeks and I've already gotten a bunch of emails. I've been doing that this morning, emailing readers back and forth. So it's not like I'm completely disconnected.
[00:08:57] And now on the nonfiction side, I mentioned we have Slack, but the podcast is my social media. That's how I connect with those people through the podcast, comments on the website, comments on Patreon, stuff in Slack.
[00:09:07] So it's not that we've completely gone antisocial. It's just that I'm more picky about how I do it and I don't want to be on these infinitely scrolling platforms, these online slot machines that are just totally distracting and filled with toxic crap, you know?
[00:09:23] Matty: How often do you release a fiction book?
[00:09:26] Zach: It hasn't been as much lately. That's about to change. The last year or so, J. and I have been focused on a lot of different things within our business, and that's kind of gone by the wayside. But a couple months ago we made a conscious decision: we're obviously still doing a lot of stuff together, but we're also going to start trying to do more stuff on our own. And for me, it was more like, I'm going to try to really double down on fiction, because in past years, I've gotten five or six books out in a year. Usually about four, I think my best year had six. The series I'm writing right now are shorter books, around 50,000 words. So I'm hoping to get these out a little bit faster for this new zombie series I'm about to launch.
[00:10:02] Matty: It's an interesting consideration because I think one of the reasons that social media is hyped so much for authors is that for people who aren't on a schedule as fast as that, I'm on more of a book a year kind of schedule, that it's easier for readers to forget about you in between books if you're only releasing a book once a year. Then, in a way, I think it's more important to do something that's keeping you in mind with your readers in addition to the email list, which I totally agree with. I totally agree with the importance of owning your platform, but that social media can provide a way to keep that connection if it's used judiciously and you don't let it take over the time that you should actually be spending writing.
[00:10:43] Zach: Yeah. And I'm not going to pretend like I probably haven't lost some readers by not being on social media. I probably have. A doubt it's that many because my social media platforms weren't really growing that much anyway. But I think you could definitely make an argument for that.
[00:10:56] And again, if you enjoy being on those platforms and they don't have really any mental effect for you and you're not spending too much time on them, then I think that's totally fine. I know author friends I've talked to about this and they're like, "Yeah, I'm fully capable of getting on Facebook five minutes a day and just posting a couple of things, looking through and being fine."
[00:11:15] Okay. But I'm not like that. I know I can't do it. And I think that people really need to stop and question whether or not it's affecting them. I think if you just take a break from it for a week or so, just detox from it and see what happens. Cause there's a couple other interesting things that happen.
[00:11:30] For one, once you go away from it, you don't miss it as much as you think you will. The other thing is you realize how concentrated people are on themselves. You realize that people are way more in their selves and really not paying attention to what you're doing. I've been off social media for a year and three months, and it took I think six months for one friend to come to me and say, "Hey dude, are you okay? I haven't seen you on social media." No one noticed I was gone because that was another important thing to experiment, and Cal Newport talks about this, don't do the whole "Oh, I'm leaving Facebook. I'm going guys." Just quit posting.
[00:12:07] Matty: That's a great point.
[00:12:08] Zach: And it taught me a lot. It taught me how centered people are on themselves. I don't want to cuss on your show, but no one cares about you. Obviously people care about you, but people aren't paying as much attention to you as you think they are.
[00:12:22] Matty: I really like everything you just said. I think that what you had said about the fact that one can really let social media impact their mood is so important. And I'm pretty much a Facebook person. I've tried a couple of other platforms. I've tried Twitter, I just don't understand it. And I know that Facebook gets a bad rap because crazy things go on on it, as they do with any social media platform. And I hear a friend say, "Oh this friend said this 13th offensive thing." And I said, "Well you have to stop looking at it." I have been able to create quite a benign and enjoyable environment on Facebook for myself by being pretty brutal about unfollowing people who are annoying me. So you can detox in a way by getting rid of the toxic people from your feed. And there's also the consideration of how much time you're spending on social media, and that's time you're not spending writing.
[00:13:15] But you and J. spoke really movingly, I thought, about the impact on creativity. Of people whose faces are buried in their devices. Talk a little bit about that and what a creative person should be doing instead of some of the horror stories that you related on your podcast.
[00:13:38] Zach: Yeah, absolutely. Before I go into that, I do want to mention there's a great TED Talk that people can watch on YouTube. It's by a woman named Bailey Parnell, and it's called, "Is Social Media Hurting Your Mental Health?" That is a great thing. It's only 15 minutes long and she really goes over about what we were talking about. I definitely recommend people watch that.
[00:13:56] As creatives, we really thrive in these moments of boredom. I come up with all my best ideas when it's quiet and when I'm bored. And so that usually happens either in the shower, as we joke around the podcast a lot. J. will be like, "Oh, Zach takes five showers a day," and I'm including Three Story Method. I came up with Three Story Method title in the shower.
[00:14:18] But I'm really big as well on taking these really quiet walks. I walk around neighborhood and I see people walking and they've got earbuds in their ear and they've got their phone. You see it on the treadmill if you go to the gym, You see people on a treadmill just staring at their phone. People are addicted to their screens and they always have to have input. We always have to have content going on. I used to love going on walks around my neighborhood, listening to a podcast or whatever. But when I stopped doing that, I found so much more creative energy. And so I typically try to take these walks and don't even have my phone with me, or if I'm going somewhere where I need to have it just in case, I'll have it on silent or turned off, but have it somewhere where I can't reach it, in a bag or something. I don't want to be able to just go into my pocket and grab it because we mindlessly do that, you know?
[00:15:00] But I've just found by doing that, if I'm struggling on a plot thing in a book, I can almost always work through it just on a silent walk or in the shower. If I need to think of a title for something or whatever it is, I'm so much more creative.
[00:15:15] And as I said, this also goes back to going on there and getting caught up in some dumb crap. I'm so glad I'm not on Facebook right now because of all the Corona virus stuff because I know it'd be affecting my mood and that affects my creativity. We only have so much willpower in a day. And I want to be thinking about the stuff that really matters and worrying about stuff that really matters and not all this other junk that I can't control. So that absolutely affects your creativity, for sure, by just not having that extra input coming in and taking away your willpower.
[00:15:44] My dad, we were talking about this, he's like, "Well, why don't you just unfollow her," like you were saying, and I'm like, "Okay. I could do that. But to me that's just a waste. That's not worth my time." Especially when I've already removed myself from the platform and I realized I don't miss it. If it was something I really missed and wanted to be on, I probably would take time to do that. For me, I don't miss it.
[00:16:03] Matty: The other aspect of an impact on creativity, there's that idea that if you can get away from your device, you're giving yourself more room internally to work through ideas, come up with those ideas, be creative in that sense. The other way I think that digital minimalism can be really helpful to creativity is that, especially if you're writing fiction, I always get my ideas for characters by looking at what's going on around me. I rarely take an individual and transfer them wholesale into a book, but I'll be sitting in a restaurant and notice how a couple is talking to each other or walking in the park and see a family playing soccer together, something like that.
[00:16:46] And if you're focused on your phone, then you're missing all that fodder that's out there in the world that you can use in your work. Have you found any difference for yourself, especially with your fiction, in a benefit in that way of digital minimalism?
[00:17:04] Zach: Oh, absolutely. I'm the same way, I like to observe people and put that in my characters. And you absolutely get more of that when you're not buried, when you can actually pay attention. I love sitting in coffee shops to work and I can't wait till I can do that again. And in the moments where I'm sitting there working, if I take a break, instead of picking up my phone and looking at it, because I have that in my backpack, in a deep pocket where I can't get it. My phone's on do not disturb, but the people who absolutely need to reach me, like my wife, I have her set as a favorite on my phone, so it'll break through that do not disturb, so if she needs to reach me, she can get ahold of me and so can family
[00:17:42] But anyone else, I'm like, I just don't need to hear from you right now. And I don't have a lot of notification stuff on my phone anyway, just text messages pretty much and a couple other things. But in those moments where I take a break, I look around and watch people and see what people are doing and I'm picking up things like you're saying.
[00:17:57] And you can definitely do that more if you're focused and paying attention. Plus you see how many couples are sitting there having coffee and they're both on their phones. You see how much people are really married to the devices too, especially when you're not doing it.
[00:18:11] Matty: If I were in graduate school for English lit, I'd be curious to do a study of the novels that come out from, not just the generation of people who have grown up with devices, but individuals who are specifically tied to their devices. How do they portray other people? Because their pool of information is so small if they're always on their phone or they're always taking selfies.
[00:18:34] The whole selfie thing it's a whole other weird thing.
[00:18:37] Zach: Yeah, yeah. That goes back to people are focused on themselves.
[00:18:40] Matty: Will there be a generation of books that are just self-contemplative, self-reflective, but not reflective of the outside world. It would be interesting to see.
[00:18:49] Zach: Yeah, it's bizarre. You and I talked before the show about when I was at the art museum in Chicago I'm sitting there, my phone's off. You know, the one person who I need to be able to reach me is with me--my wife--and I'm looking at this, it was either a Van Gogh or DaVinci painting, and I'm sitting there enjoying it and this woman jumps in front of me and takes a selfie in front of it and just walks away. I'm like, you don't even look at the painting. People were taking pictures of all these paintings, and I'm just thinking to myself, when are you actually going to go back and look at those?
[00:19:16] I do the same thing at concerts. I used to take a bunch of photos at concerts. I never go back and look at them. I might post them to social media or whatever, just to be like, "Hey, look where I was," you know? And create FOMO for other people and make them feel bad for themselves, like, "Oh, I wish I was there." You know? Just enjoy your surroundings, Be bored. It's okay to be bored sometimes.
[00:19:36] Matty: Yeah. I think that's a really important message. The other aspect, and I'm not even sure this falls into digital minimalism or not, but here we are coming to the end, sort of, of the COVID quarantine--
[00:19:51] Zach: Depends what state you live in.
[00:19:52] Matty: Depending on what state you live in. And Zoom has really been a lifeline for me. I use Zoom for my podcast interviews, but also I do a daily Zoom sprint with a couple of fellow authors, which has been great, and Zoom cocktail parties, you know, I'm able to get together with people that I would never be able to get together with otherwise because of geographic or timing considerations.
[00:20:16] Do you feel as if there are pros and cons from a digital minimalism point of view to what is now an enforced increased reliance on this kind of communication, but that might continue after the driving force of the virus has passed?
[00:20:31] Zach: That is such a great question. It really is. And for anyone who listens to The Career Author and knows J. and I, we've kind of put our flag in the sand, we are all about in-person interaction. There's been these in-person events, we've seen the impact and the difference of having them happen in person, and what happens when you get a bunch of people in a room as opposed to doing things online, and he and I have these meetings, when we're going to start a new series together, we have a big thing in our business to talk about, we always do that in person. We always meet in Cincinnati, which is halfway between where the two of us live.
[00:21:07] But I have to tell you after doing The Career Author Summit online and seeing how that went and going through this whole thing, we still very strongly believe that in-person interaction is by far the best, but we've kind of come around on how you still can have an impact virtually and how Zoom and doing the types of things you're talking about can still be awesome and you can still do some really cool things and they can still be impactful. So I know for us personally, it has made us think about that a little more.
[00:21:38] And looking at our events moving forward, they're still going to be focused on doing stuff in person. But we are going to consider other options because we're really seeing what the value was like and that, okay, maybe it's not quite as bad as we thought. And you still can get a lot of value out of this type of stuff.
[00:21:56] Matty: Great. Well that was just such great food for thought Zach. I appreciate you spending the time talking to us about it, and this is the point where normally I would say, "Let us know where we can find you and your work online." Not sure if that's the right line to use of the circumstance, but if people want to find out more about you or the events you just talked about, where should they go to get that information?
[00:22:19] Zach: Yeah, so I know these are all authors so don't worry about my fiction books. I don't like promoting that stuff on these. But just go thecareerauthor.com, and that's where you can find our podcast. You can find all the really cool stuff, the events we do. We have some really awesome stuff, fingers crossed, for next year that we actually announced at the summit. We talked about them, but we haven't announced them publicly yet because we're finalizing dates, which is crazy right now. You know, try and run events and try to plan for that stuff right now is pretty nuts.
[00:22:49] But that's the best place to go find out. Because we have some really cool world-building weekends and we are planning on doing the summit in person again next year, which is our 125-in-person conference. We already have our speaker lined up. We have everyone lined up and we're just trying to figure out if we're going to move the date or not. So, just head over to thecareerauthor.com and you can see all the cool stuff J. and I do over there for authors.
[00:23:13] Matty: Great. And I can also put a plug in that your podcast is wonderful, so I highly recommend people head over there and check that out as well.
[00:23:20] Thank you so much, Zach. This was fun.
[00:23:23] Zach: Awesome. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
[00:05:08] That's how I've gotten thousands of people on my mailing list, and that is my social media. That's how I interact with my readers on the fiction side. On the nonfiction side, J. and I's for the podcast, for Patreon, for our event stuff, we use Slack channels. We've experimented on fiction with having communities off of Facebook. We're brought up to think like, this is what we have to do. And Becca Syme says this a lot, in a great book she wrote called Dear Writer, You Need to Quit.
[00:05:34] Matty: I'm going to be talking with Becca in a couple of weeks.
[00:05:36] Zach: Oh, that's awesome. Very, very cool. I love that book. It was very, very inspiring. One thing she says a lot in that book is "question the process." I think that especially as new authors we get into the indy world and there's so much to learn and we get overwhelmed, but you take a lot of things as like, this is what I need to do. But that's not necessarily the case. And one thing, and J. was the original person to bring this up to me, and I've really thought about this, I think that we need to question do readers really want to interact with writers? I think that that's a really valid question. I think we make the assumption that readers want to be in these communities and hear from us. And like I said, I have some friends who have really great groups on Facebook and do really well. But I know for me and for us, we've tried a lot of different things and it's just, readers never really wanted to engage.
[00:06:22] It could be a genre dependent thing. I know a lot of romance authors do really well at this, so maybe like a lot of the women specifically who read romance like being in these Facebook groups, and maybe cause we're writing post-apocalyptic fiction, those are more introverted people who want to just stay in their bunkers and not talk to anybody. So there are definitely some factors there.
[00:06:42] But don't assume you need to be on social media. If you enjoy it and you like being on those platforms, by all means do it. As long as it's not getting in the way of your creativity and you're not spending more time on Facebook than you are getting words down and it's not affecting your mood.
[00:06:58] That was the thing for me. I could read something on Facebook and it just ticked me off for whatever reason, and it ruined my mood for hours. As a creative, you can't have stuff like that in your head. You can't be worried about dumb stuff, you know? And so I had to recognize things affect me. That's my personality. I'm not going to try to fight that. So how do I fix that? Well, I eliminate this thing that is causing that. It's really going to be a person by person basis, but don't think that you have to have social media to build a platform because you absolutely do not.
[00:07:29] Matty: When you started your digital minimalism experiment, and I believe that you continued your email communication with your fan base that had signed up for your email list, correct?
[00:07:41] Zach: Correct. Absolutely.
[00:07:42] Matty: And I believe I remember that you said on The Career Author Podcast episode that you had not seen an impact in book sales when you started that experiment.
[00:07:53] Zach: Yep. The most important thing is my sales haven't gone down. They've stayed pretty steady. They haven't increased necessarily as a direct impact of leaving social media. There's other factors obviously in there, but I think a lot of people are scared their sales are going to go down or readers are going to forget about them.
[00:08:06] You just have to find another way to talk to those readers. And I would much rather have reader's email lists and talk to them through email than I would a Facebook group where tomorrow Facebook could decide to get rid of Facebook groups or they could decide to change one little algorithm just like they've done before with Facebook pages.
[00:08:23] I remember when the Facebook pages algorithm change happened where they bumped it down to like 2% of people who like your page see your posts unless you pay for it, and that crushed a lot of authors who were really depending on that. That's what happens when you depend on another platform. I would much rather be doing all that through email. So I'm definitely still communicating to readers.
[00:08:44] As a matter of fact, this morning I had an email go out because I have a new novel coming out in two weeks and I've already gotten a bunch of emails. I've been doing that this morning, emailing readers back and forth. So it's not like I'm completely disconnected.
[00:08:57] And now on the nonfiction side, I mentioned we have Slack, but the podcast is my social media. That's how I connect with those people through the podcast, comments on the website, comments on Patreon, stuff in Slack.
[00:09:07] So it's not that we've completely gone antisocial. It's just that I'm more picky about how I do it and I don't want to be on these infinitely scrolling platforms, these online slot machines that are just totally distracting and filled with toxic crap, you know?
[00:09:23] Matty: How often do you release a fiction book?
[00:09:26] Zach: It hasn't been as much lately. That's about to change. The last year or so, J. and I have been focused on a lot of different things within our business, and that's kind of gone by the wayside. But a couple months ago we made a conscious decision: we're obviously still doing a lot of stuff together, but we're also going to start trying to do more stuff on our own. And for me, it was more like, I'm going to try to really double down on fiction, because in past years, I've gotten five or six books out in a year. Usually about four, I think my best year had six. The series I'm writing right now are shorter books, around 50,000 words. So I'm hoping to get these out a little bit faster for this new zombie series I'm about to launch.
[00:10:02] Matty: It's an interesting consideration because I think one of the reasons that social media is hyped so much for authors is that for people who aren't on a schedule as fast as that, I'm on more of a book a year kind of schedule, that it's easier for readers to forget about you in between books if you're only releasing a book once a year. Then, in a way, I think it's more important to do something that's keeping you in mind with your readers in addition to the email list, which I totally agree with. I totally agree with the importance of owning your platform, but that social media can provide a way to keep that connection if it's used judiciously and you don't let it take over the time that you should actually be spending writing.
[00:10:43] Zach: Yeah. And I'm not going to pretend like I probably haven't lost some readers by not being on social media. I probably have. A doubt it's that many because my social media platforms weren't really growing that much anyway. But I think you could definitely make an argument for that.
[00:10:56] And again, if you enjoy being on those platforms and they don't have really any mental effect for you and you're not spending too much time on them, then I think that's totally fine. I know author friends I've talked to about this and they're like, "Yeah, I'm fully capable of getting on Facebook five minutes a day and just posting a couple of things, looking through and being fine."
[00:11:15] Okay. But I'm not like that. I know I can't do it. And I think that people really need to stop and question whether or not it's affecting them. I think if you just take a break from it for a week or so, just detox from it and see what happens. Cause there's a couple other interesting things that happen.
[00:11:30] For one, once you go away from it, you don't miss it as much as you think you will. The other thing is you realize how concentrated people are on themselves. You realize that people are way more in their selves and really not paying attention to what you're doing. I've been off social media for a year and three months, and it took I think six months for one friend to come to me and say, "Hey dude, are you okay? I haven't seen you on social media." No one noticed I was gone because that was another important thing to experiment, and Cal Newport talks about this, don't do the whole "Oh, I'm leaving Facebook. I'm going guys." Just quit posting.
[00:12:07] Matty: That's a great point.
[00:12:08] Zach: And it taught me a lot. It taught me how centered people are on themselves. I don't want to cuss on your show, but no one cares about you. Obviously people care about you, but people aren't paying as much attention to you as you think they are.
[00:12:22] Matty: I really like everything you just said. I think that what you had said about the fact that one can really let social media impact their mood is so important. And I'm pretty much a Facebook person. I've tried a couple of other platforms. I've tried Twitter, I just don't understand it. And I know that Facebook gets a bad rap because crazy things go on on it, as they do with any social media platform. And I hear a friend say, "Oh this friend said this 13th offensive thing." And I said, "Well you have to stop looking at it." I have been able to create quite a benign and enjoyable environment on Facebook for myself by being pretty brutal about unfollowing people who are annoying me. So you can detox in a way by getting rid of the toxic people from your feed. And there's also the consideration of how much time you're spending on social media, and that's time you're not spending writing.
[00:13:15] But you and J. spoke really movingly, I thought, about the impact on creativity. Of people whose faces are buried in their devices. Talk a little bit about that and what a creative person should be doing instead of some of the horror stories that you related on your podcast.
[00:13:38] Zach: Yeah, absolutely. Before I go into that, I do want to mention there's a great TED Talk that people can watch on YouTube. It's by a woman named Bailey Parnell, and it's called, "Is Social Media Hurting Your Mental Health?" That is a great thing. It's only 15 minutes long and she really goes over about what we were talking about. I definitely recommend people watch that.
[00:13:56] As creatives, we really thrive in these moments of boredom. I come up with all my best ideas when it's quiet and when I'm bored. And so that usually happens either in the shower, as we joke around the podcast a lot. J. will be like, "Oh, Zach takes five showers a day," and I'm including Three Story Method. I came up with Three Story Method title in the shower.
[00:14:18] But I'm really big as well on taking these really quiet walks. I walk around neighborhood and I see people walking and they've got earbuds in their ear and they've got their phone. You see it on the treadmill if you go to the gym, You see people on a treadmill just staring at their phone. People are addicted to their screens and they always have to have input. We always have to have content going on. I used to love going on walks around my neighborhood, listening to a podcast or whatever. But when I stopped doing that, I found so much more creative energy. And so I typically try to take these walks and don't even have my phone with me, or if I'm going somewhere where I need to have it just in case, I'll have it on silent or turned off, but have it somewhere where I can't reach it, in a bag or something. I don't want to be able to just go into my pocket and grab it because we mindlessly do that, you know?
[00:15:00] But I've just found by doing that, if I'm struggling on a plot thing in a book, I can almost always work through it just on a silent walk or in the shower. If I need to think of a title for something or whatever it is, I'm so much more creative.
[00:15:15] And as I said, this also goes back to going on there and getting caught up in some dumb crap. I'm so glad I'm not on Facebook right now because of all the Corona virus stuff because I know it'd be affecting my mood and that affects my creativity. We only have so much willpower in a day. And I want to be thinking about the stuff that really matters and worrying about stuff that really matters and not all this other junk that I can't control. So that absolutely affects your creativity, for sure, by just not having that extra input coming in and taking away your willpower.
[00:15:44] My dad, we were talking about this, he's like, "Well, why don't you just unfollow her," like you were saying, and I'm like, "Okay. I could do that. But to me that's just a waste. That's not worth my time." Especially when I've already removed myself from the platform and I realized I don't miss it. If it was something I really missed and wanted to be on, I probably would take time to do that. For me, I don't miss it.
[00:16:03] Matty: The other aspect of an impact on creativity, there's that idea that if you can get away from your device, you're giving yourself more room internally to work through ideas, come up with those ideas, be creative in that sense. The other way I think that digital minimalism can be really helpful to creativity is that, especially if you're writing fiction, I always get my ideas for characters by looking at what's going on around me. I rarely take an individual and transfer them wholesale into a book, but I'll be sitting in a restaurant and notice how a couple is talking to each other or walking in the park and see a family playing soccer together, something like that.
[00:16:46] And if you're focused on your phone, then you're missing all that fodder that's out there in the world that you can use in your work. Have you found any difference for yourself, especially with your fiction, in a benefit in that way of digital minimalism?
[00:17:04] Zach: Oh, absolutely. I'm the same way, I like to observe people and put that in my characters. And you absolutely get more of that when you're not buried, when you can actually pay attention. I love sitting in coffee shops to work and I can't wait till I can do that again. And in the moments where I'm sitting there working, if I take a break, instead of picking up my phone and looking at it, because I have that in my backpack, in a deep pocket where I can't get it. My phone's on do not disturb, but the people who absolutely need to reach me, like my wife, I have her set as a favorite on my phone, so it'll break through that do not disturb, so if she needs to reach me, she can get ahold of me and so can family
[00:17:42] But anyone else, I'm like, I just don't need to hear from you right now. And I don't have a lot of notification stuff on my phone anyway, just text messages pretty much and a couple other things. But in those moments where I take a break, I look around and watch people and see what people are doing and I'm picking up things like you're saying.
[00:17:57] And you can definitely do that more if you're focused and paying attention. Plus you see how many couples are sitting there having coffee and they're both on their phones. You see how much people are really married to the devices too, especially when you're not doing it.
[00:18:11] Matty: If I were in graduate school for English lit, I'd be curious to do a study of the novels that come out from, not just the generation of people who have grown up with devices, but individuals who are specifically tied to their devices. How do they portray other people? Because their pool of information is so small if they're always on their phone or they're always taking selfies.
[00:18:34] The whole selfie thing it's a whole other weird thing.
[00:18:37] Zach: Yeah, yeah. That goes back to people are focused on themselves.
[00:18:40] Matty: Will there be a generation of books that are just self-contemplative, self-reflective, but not reflective of the outside world. It would be interesting to see.
[00:18:49] Zach: Yeah, it's bizarre. You and I talked before the show about when I was at the art museum in Chicago I'm sitting there, my phone's off. You know, the one person who I need to be able to reach me is with me--my wife--and I'm looking at this, it was either a Van Gogh or DaVinci painting, and I'm sitting there enjoying it and this woman jumps in front of me and takes a selfie in front of it and just walks away. I'm like, you don't even look at the painting. People were taking pictures of all these paintings, and I'm just thinking to myself, when are you actually going to go back and look at those?
[00:19:16] I do the same thing at concerts. I used to take a bunch of photos at concerts. I never go back and look at them. I might post them to social media or whatever, just to be like, "Hey, look where I was," you know? And create FOMO for other people and make them feel bad for themselves, like, "Oh, I wish I was there." You know? Just enjoy your surroundings, Be bored. It's okay to be bored sometimes.
[00:19:36] Matty: Yeah. I think that's a really important message. The other aspect, and I'm not even sure this falls into digital minimalism or not, but here we are coming to the end, sort of, of the COVID quarantine--
[00:19:51] Zach: Depends what state you live in.
[00:19:52] Matty: Depending on what state you live in. And Zoom has really been a lifeline for me. I use Zoom for my podcast interviews, but also I do a daily Zoom sprint with a couple of fellow authors, which has been great, and Zoom cocktail parties, you know, I'm able to get together with people that I would never be able to get together with otherwise because of geographic or timing considerations.
[00:20:16] Do you feel as if there are pros and cons from a digital minimalism point of view to what is now an enforced increased reliance on this kind of communication, but that might continue after the driving force of the virus has passed?
[00:20:31] Zach: That is such a great question. It really is. And for anyone who listens to The Career Author and knows J. and I, we've kind of put our flag in the sand, we are all about in-person interaction. There's been these in-person events, we've seen the impact and the difference of having them happen in person, and what happens when you get a bunch of people in a room as opposed to doing things online, and he and I have these meetings, when we're going to start a new series together, we have a big thing in our business to talk about, we always do that in person. We always meet in Cincinnati, which is halfway between where the two of us live.
[00:21:07] But I have to tell you after doing The Career Author Summit online and seeing how that went and going through this whole thing, we still very strongly believe that in-person interaction is by far the best, but we've kind of come around on how you still can have an impact virtually and how Zoom and doing the types of things you're talking about can still be awesome and you can still do some really cool things and they can still be impactful. So I know for us personally, it has made us think about that a little more.
[00:21:38] And looking at our events moving forward, they're still going to be focused on doing stuff in person. But we are going to consider other options because we're really seeing what the value was like and that, okay, maybe it's not quite as bad as we thought. And you still can get a lot of value out of this type of stuff.
[00:21:56] Matty: Great. Well that was just such great food for thought Zach. I appreciate you spending the time talking to us about it, and this is the point where normally I would say, "Let us know where we can find you and your work online." Not sure if that's the right line to use of the circumstance, but if people want to find out more about you or the events you just talked about, where should they go to get that information?
[00:22:19] Zach: Yeah, so I know these are all authors so don't worry about my fiction books. I don't like promoting that stuff on these. But just go thecareerauthor.com, and that's where you can find our podcast. You can find all the really cool stuff, the events we do. We have some really awesome stuff, fingers crossed, for next year that we actually announced at the summit. We talked about them, but we haven't announced them publicly yet because we're finalizing dates, which is crazy right now. You know, try and run events and try to plan for that stuff right now is pretty nuts.
[00:22:49] But that's the best place to go find out. Because we have some really cool world-building weekends and we are planning on doing the summit in person again next year, which is our 125-in-person conference. We already have our speaker lined up. We have everyone lined up and we're just trying to figure out if we're going to move the date or not. So, just head over to thecareerauthor.com and you can see all the cool stuff J. and I do over there for authors.
[00:23:13] Matty: Great. And I can also put a plug in that your podcast is wonderful, so I highly recommend people head over there and check that out as well.
[00:23:20] Thank you so much, Zach. This was fun.
[00:23:23] Zach: Awesome. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Links
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
Bailey Parnell TED Talk "Is Social Media Hurting Your Mental Health?"
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