Episode 045 - Nine Things Career Authors Don't Do: Exercise
September 22, 2020
J. Thorn discusses his new book 9 Things Career Authors Don't Do: Exercise, which addresses the importance of exercise, especially considering the potentially sedentary lifestyle of an indy author. We also talk about the strategic and tactical plans behind the 9 Things Career Authors Don’t Do series, and the idea of testing the interest of one’s audience in a particular topic through an MVP, or minimum viable product.
J. Thorn ranks in the Top 100 Most Popular Authors on Amazon in Horror, Science Fiction, Action & Adventure, and Fantasy. He has published two million words and has sold more than 185,000 books worldwide. In March of 2014, Thorn held the #5 position in Horror alongside his childhood idols Dean Koontz and Stephen King. He is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Horror Writers Association, and the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers. J. also hosts the podcasts The Career Author Podcast; Writers, Ink; and The Author Life Podcast.
"I was thinking from a very personal space, and I was trying to think about what were the lifestyle changes or habits or systems that I've implemented over the past three years that have really made the biggest difference. And being on the cusp of 50 and living like a teenager, my body said, that's enough. And so exercise really became foundational." -J. Thorn
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast! Today my guest is J. Thorn. Hey J., how are you doing?
[00:00:06] J.: Matty, how's it going?
[00:00:07] Matty: It is going great, thank you. J. is a returnee to the podcast. He previously appeared in Episode 021 talking about Building Communities in Podcasts and in Person, and so just to give our listeners a little bit of reminder of who you are ...
[00:00:24] J. Thorn ranks in the Top 100 Most Popular Authors on Amazon in Horror, Science Fiction, Action & Adventure, and Fantasy. He has published two million words and has sold more than 185,000 books worldwide. In March of 2014, Thorn held the #5 position in Horror alongside his childhood idols Dean Koontz and Stephen King. He is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Horror Writers Association, and the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers. J. also hosts the podcasts The Career Author Podcast; Writers, Ink; and The Author Life Podcast.
[00:01:03] And we do have one change from the bio that I read in Episode 21, which is I used to say you hosted the Writer's Well Podcast, and I just found out yesterday, today is August 27th, so I just found out yesterday that you and Rachael Herron, who was also a guest on the podcast, are not doing Writer's Well anymore. So before we dive into the topic for today, can you just tell me a little bit about what happened there?
[00:01:25] J.: Yeah, it was really difficult. We love each other and really enjoyed the podcast. And really what happened was we're both in a place, we're about the same age. I think like a lot of people over the past six to nine months, we've been reevaluating many things in our lives, both business and personal, and Rachael and I separately are looking at sort of divergent paths and doing something a little bit different than what we've been doing.
[00:01:51] One of the faults that we both share is the inability to say no to things and to people. And what happens is you keep starting things, you keep adding things, but if you don't take anything away, pretty soon you're in a pretty bad spot. So, in a private conversation we had, we both realized that as much as we love the Writer's Well, it really wasn't going to fit into where we were headed in the future.
[00:02:15] And unfortunately it was probably one of the things both of us should cut and we didn't want to, but we knew, honestly, that that was the right thing to do. We stopped at Episode 190. So we thought, do we make 200 the last episode, do we end at the end of 2020? And we did one episode while we were thinking about that decision. And we finished that episode and said, we can't do that anymore. Because we both knew in our hearts that we were going to end it. And there's no way we could pretend that we weren't. And so we said, all right, next episode's going to be the last one. And people will understand.
[00:02:46] So very, very difficult for us to do, very emotional. Rachael and I are still great friends. We're still going to have private chats on a regular basis, but the podcast just isn't going to fit where we're headed. So that's kind of what happened.
[00:02:59] Matty: Well, just trying to manage one podcast -- as of Episode 021, you had four podcasts and I just thought, Oh my God, how do you do that? So I could totally understand the need to simplify a bit.
[00:03:11] J.: Yes.
[00:03:14] Matty: I'm going to miss The Writer's Well, a lot, but both of you have other great platforms, so I know that people will be able to at least get a taste of J. and a taste of Rachael, if they're looking for that in the future.
[00:03:24] J.: Yeah. I'm going to miss it too.
[00:03:26] Matty: Yeah. So the topic we're going to talk about today, we're actually going to talk about two things. One is one of a bunch of books that you are just publishing -- you are almost on that 2 million books for January or whatever I said earlier -- which is Nine Things Career Authors Don't Do: Exercise. So as you can imagine based on the title, J. and some co-authors have written nine small books, short books, each on a different topic. And the one that I asked J. on the podcast episode to talk about was exercise, for selfish reasons.
[00:03:59] And we're going to talk about that topic, but also sort of as part two, we're going to talk about the whole concept of the series because I'm very intrigued by it. So normally, if we were just going to talk about the book, I would ask you what gave you the idea for this series, but that's going to be part two. So let's hold that and jump right into, how did exercise become one of the nine things that you wanted to talk about career authors not doing?
[00:00:06] J.: Matty, how's it going?
[00:00:07] Matty: It is going great, thank you. J. is a returnee to the podcast. He previously appeared in Episode 021 talking about Building Communities in Podcasts and in Person, and so just to give our listeners a little bit of reminder of who you are ...
[00:00:24] J. Thorn ranks in the Top 100 Most Popular Authors on Amazon in Horror, Science Fiction, Action & Adventure, and Fantasy. He has published two million words and has sold more than 185,000 books worldwide. In March of 2014, Thorn held the #5 position in Horror alongside his childhood idols Dean Koontz and Stephen King. He is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Horror Writers Association, and the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers. J. also hosts the podcasts The Career Author Podcast; Writers, Ink; and The Author Life Podcast.
[00:01:03] And we do have one change from the bio that I read in Episode 21, which is I used to say you hosted the Writer's Well Podcast, and I just found out yesterday, today is August 27th, so I just found out yesterday that you and Rachael Herron, who was also a guest on the podcast, are not doing Writer's Well anymore. So before we dive into the topic for today, can you just tell me a little bit about what happened there?
[00:01:25] J.: Yeah, it was really difficult. We love each other and really enjoyed the podcast. And really what happened was we're both in a place, we're about the same age. I think like a lot of people over the past six to nine months, we've been reevaluating many things in our lives, both business and personal, and Rachael and I separately are looking at sort of divergent paths and doing something a little bit different than what we've been doing.
[00:01:51] One of the faults that we both share is the inability to say no to things and to people. And what happens is you keep starting things, you keep adding things, but if you don't take anything away, pretty soon you're in a pretty bad spot. So, in a private conversation we had, we both realized that as much as we love the Writer's Well, it really wasn't going to fit into where we were headed in the future.
[00:02:15] And unfortunately it was probably one of the things both of us should cut and we didn't want to, but we knew, honestly, that that was the right thing to do. We stopped at Episode 190. So we thought, do we make 200 the last episode, do we end at the end of 2020? And we did one episode while we were thinking about that decision. And we finished that episode and said, we can't do that anymore. Because we both knew in our hearts that we were going to end it. And there's no way we could pretend that we weren't. And so we said, all right, next episode's going to be the last one. And people will understand.
[00:02:46] So very, very difficult for us to do, very emotional. Rachael and I are still great friends. We're still going to have private chats on a regular basis, but the podcast just isn't going to fit where we're headed. So that's kind of what happened.
[00:02:59] Matty: Well, just trying to manage one podcast -- as of Episode 021, you had four podcasts and I just thought, Oh my God, how do you do that? So I could totally understand the need to simplify a bit.
[00:03:11] J.: Yes.
[00:03:14] Matty: I'm going to miss The Writer's Well, a lot, but both of you have other great platforms, so I know that people will be able to at least get a taste of J. and a taste of Rachael, if they're looking for that in the future.
[00:03:24] J.: Yeah. I'm going to miss it too.
[00:03:26] Matty: Yeah. So the topic we're going to talk about today, we're actually going to talk about two things. One is one of a bunch of books that you are just publishing -- you are almost on that 2 million books for January or whatever I said earlier -- which is Nine Things Career Authors Don't Do: Exercise. So as you can imagine based on the title, J. and some co-authors have written nine small books, short books, each on a different topic. And the one that I asked J. on the podcast episode to talk about was exercise, for selfish reasons.
[00:03:59] And we're going to talk about that topic, but also sort of as part two, we're going to talk about the whole concept of the series because I'm very intrigued by it. So normally, if we were just going to talk about the book, I would ask you what gave you the idea for this series, but that's going to be part two. So let's hold that and jump right into, how did exercise become one of the nine things that you wanted to talk about career authors not doing?
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[00:04:24] J.: For me, it was a no brainer. When I was developing the series and thinking about the topics, I was thinking from a very personal space, and I was trying to think about what were the lifestyle changes or habits or systems that I've implemented over the past three years that have really made the biggest difference. And by far, I mean, I was pretty open and transparent about some of my lingering health issues on The Writer's Well, and being on the cusp of 50, and living like a teenager, I kind of said, that's enough. And so exercise really became foundational and I think it's even more important for writers because, for most of, us writing is a very sedentary activity.
[00:05:06] It's very lonely. It's hard. We sit in a chair all day long, or, even if you're not a full time writer, whatever time you're spending writing is most likely spent in a chair and that's just terrible for your health, it's terrible for your body. And so when Zach and I collaborate on this particular title, and Zach has had some pretty amazing physical transformations over the years, too, and so we felt like this was one that we definitely had to write, cause it just came from a very personal place.
[00:05:33] Matty: I had picked that out because any inspiration I can get for exercise, I'm just an intrinsically very lazy person from a physical point of view, and so I thought, Oh, I'm definitely going to start with the exercise one, maybe I'll get a little bit of inspiration there.
[00:05:50] So I don't want you to go through the whole book, but if you were just going to pick out a couple of foundational pieces of advice that you would want to share with authors about exercise, what would they be?
[00:06:02] J.: I think the very first essay, these books are a collection of nine essays, and they are the nine things, right? And so for exercise, I think one of the biggest one for me, it might be the foundation for all the rest, is consistency. And so the very first essay is called Don't Skip Workouts. And I think that's problematic for a lot of people because it might be a new year's resolution, or it could be a new workout regime, or a new dance studio that opens and you get really excited at first and it's easy to become motivated when you first begin.
[00:06:39] And then reality sets in and it becomes very easy to discard the routine or skip a day or say, ah, I don't feel like it today, I'll go tomorrow. And before, you know it, you're out of that routine and then nothing else matters as far as exercise goes. So I think for me, not skipping the workout and having a consistent routine, and that doesn't necessarily mean daily. It just means a consistent routine that works for you, that you've talked to your doctor about, and that you can stick to. And it's got to be something you can do, because if it's mentally taxing for you or it's an activity you don't enjoy, you're more likely to skip it.
[00:07:15] So I think finding that activity that you enjoy, that involves movement, and then committing to a regular routine, that's kind of fundamental to everything we're talking about.
[00:07:25] Matty: The last time I had a really regular exercise routine was like 15 years ago, because I lived in a house, it was a small row house in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and there were originally been three tiny bedrooms on the second floor. And the people who lived there before me had broken out the wall between the tiny bathroom, the tiny bedroom and made a really large bathroom, big enough that I could put a treadmill and a Bowflex in there.
[00:07:51] And I was very diligent about that until I moved out of that house and moved into another place that didn't really have a good place to put that equipment. And since then I've been really struggling with finding what that magic thing is because I'm definitely someone who would prefer to exercise at home, not at the gym. And you guys talk about that too, about how you have to pick your location and the pros and cons of each.
[00:08:15] J.: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. You know, you asked me a few. I think another one that's important, and this might seem contrary to what we just said, but I also think it's important not to do the same routine forever. One of the things that happens when you get into an exercise routine is your body acclimates and it strengthens, and it rises to the challenge. So let's take walking, for example. If you don't do any activity and then you start walking 20 minutes a day, which is a great place to start, when you first start, those 20 minutes could be tough. It might be hard for you to get through 20 minutes, but if you do that for a couple of weeks, it gets a little bit easier. And before, you know it, those 20 minutes just feels like you're walking out to the car. It doesn't feel like much at all.
[00:09:03] So if you don't then adjust and challenge yourself a little bit more, you're going to hit a plateau. And at that point, that routine is far less effective. It's still better than doing nothing, I want to be clear about that. It's better than going back and sitting on the couch. But once your body gets acclimated, it's time to adjust. So maybe that bumps it up to 30 minutes, or maybe you speed up your pace, whatever it happens to be.
[00:09:27] I think you constantly have to be doing that, pushing yourself a little bit, because when it becomes easy or it's not a challenge for you to do, it's really not doing as much good for your body.
[00:09:38] Matty: Yeah. That's the part that I hate to hear.
[00:09:41] J.: Yeah. Most of these people don't want to hear. I understand.
[00:09:44] Matty: Yeah. Yeah. Because I think the danger is that instead of saying, you know, like I walk my dogs every day. Let's say that's 30 minutes of walking. And to hear that if I'm still doing 30 minutes of walking six months from now, it's not really doing me much good, there's a part of me that says, I should make it 45! And there's a part of me that says, I'm just going to stop walking.
[00:10:07] So it's tough. And that sort of leads into the next question I wanted to ask, which is the whole gestalt of giving advice about something like exercise, is that intrinsically different than advice, for example, you and Zach have the Three Story Method about writing approaches, ways to construct a story. Did you find it was intrinsically different to offer information on something like exercise than on something like structuring a story?
[00:10:38] J.: I'll speak for myself and not for Zach, but for me, not at all. I've written professionally, mostly nonfiction, my entire life, and so writing these, believe it or not, felt easy compared to writing fiction. I still use a Three Story Method approach, so if you were to analyze these essays, you'll be able to identify a conflict, the choice and a consequence, and so it's still storytelling.
[00:11:03] But I think the fact that it's in first person, and it's personal experience, made it really easy for me to write these. And it comes across as advice and I guess that's technically what it is, but I think what's important to recognize with any type of self-help or self-improvement material, is that it's only as good as much as it applies to you. And there are going to be certain things in here that people completely disagree with and that's fine. I'm writing it, Zach was writing it, from our own personal experience and that's really the only thing any of us can offer.
[00:11:33] We can tell other people what they should be doing, but no one likes to be told what to do, and that's not very effective. So I think if you just share your story and you tell people what worked for you or what didn't work for you, and then it's up to them to decide what they want to do with that information.
[00:11:47] Matty: I guess what I was thinking might be different is that with Three Story Method, it's a great way for many people to get at the story structure. And there are a gazillion others, each of which probably has value for different writers depending on their approach and what they're looking for and how it's described to them and so on. Which is a little different than it's a scientific fact that if you're walking 30 minutes now, it's not as effective in six months as it was when you first started.
[00:12:16] So you're dealing with something that's sort of a scientific fact with the Nine Things, at least with the exercise book, as opposed to something that's more, here's another approach, see if it works for you, the way I would think Three Story Method would be.
[00:12:31] J.: Yeah. Yes and no. I think the exercise book, it's probably more cut and dried than some of the others, because as you said, there are some science that backs some of this up. But even that, good science changes. And if you would go to pick up an exercise book that was written in the seventies, I'm sure there's advice in those books that we would cringe at today.
[00:12:52] So yeah, on one hand, I think there are some givens. There are some things that seem to be widely recognized as true, but not necessarily. I'll give you a good example. One of the essays in the exercise book is titled Don't Try to Convince Others What They're Doing is Best, right? So these are the exercise evangelicals, the people who say, Oh my gosh, I go out and I row in the pond in my backyard for four hours every morning, and everybody should be doing that. And let me tell you why. Like, hmm, not necessarily. So yeah. I'm sure there's some benefit in rowing, but should everyone be in a rowboat in their backyard rowing? No. So I guess, yeah, it's certain topics in the series lend themselves to more subjective interpretation than others.
[00:13:38] Matty: Well, let me just run through what the Nine Things are. I evidently missed one because I have eight listed here, but we had Introduction, Mornings, Exercise, Self-Actualization, Rebel Mindset, Social Media, Podcasting -- I have that on my to-read list -- A Creative Life on the Road. Can you tell which one I missed?
[00:14:03] J.: Personal Finance.
[00:14:04] Matty: Personal Finance -- thank you. Many of those, if not most of them, are things that I can imagine applying to almost any knowledge worker, and in some cases, not even that -- just anybody. So you're obviously targeting this particularly at writers. Did you ever think about casting the net wider and just writing an exercise book that you put out there for other people who need that advice?
[00:14:27] J.: Yeah. This is a total experiment. I have no idea how this is going to work. I mean, as we're recording this, it hasn't even been up for a week. These books haven't been up for a week, and four of them haven't published yet, so I have no idea if it's going to work. The idea was looking at what Steve Scott was doing with his productivity books, very short sort of targeted titles on a variety of different topics. And I really like that approach.
[00:14:51] Zach and I were talking about this. One of the things we realized is that over the years, we've built a nice following through podcasts and events, and The Career Author is a brand, and it's a recognized brand. And then there are people who, like I said, attend our events or listen to the podcast. So it's a bit of a conundrum because these are really not just for writers. I would say these are for creatives, but these could be for anybody really, anyone who is struggling with any one of these particular topics.
[00:15:23] So from a marketing standpoint, as you know, if you try to appeal to everyone, you're going to appeal to nobody. So we said, okay, we know we're going to niche down and we're going to limit the exposure we get if we target it to our authors, but we felt like leveraging The Career Author brand was important enough that we might benefit from it.
[00:15:41] We could be completely wrong. We don't know. The decision is a good one. So whether it works out or not, we've gone through the decision-making process, and we said, yes, absolutely, having The Career Author in the title and branding them to the podcast is the best decision. Whether or not it works is out of our control. But the decision itself is pretty solid. So we'll have to see what happens.
[00:16:00] But, yeah, the regular person who sees "Career Author" could go right past it thinking, Well, I'm not a writer, and, yeah, that's probably going to happen. On the other hand, we're hoping our audience, who is hungry for this type of stuff, will enjoy it.
[00:16:13] Matty: I totally agree with the idea of niching down. And that's one of the things I want to talk about when we get into the discussion of the series, but I'm thinking back to the exercise book and I can't think of anything that seemed author specific when I was reading it. In any of them did you work to incorporate something that would justify the author targeting or did you just write the topic and then not worry about trying to insert things that would make it specific to authors?
[00:16:42] J.: The ones that I wrote solo or the ones that I wrote with Zach, we kind of kicked around a whole list of ideas and topics, and there's still a big list, and what we decided was to write the ones we cared about the most, because we thought, if that's how we're writing it, then that's how people read it. If we're really invested in the topic or we really care about it, readers will get that too.
[00:17:03] And I know this is getting a little ahead of us, but it also had to do with the people who I invited to write in this series. And I went to people and some of them I knew, but some of them I didn't know what they were really passionate about, and I said, if you had one topic that you could talk to the author community about that's not writing related, what would it be? And that's what I want you to write about, because I think that the passions that we have are going to shine through.
[00:17:28] There wasn't really a conversation of whether or not this appeals to writers or can we create an essay that will specifically tap writers. There's no book out and none in the making on like AMS ads, right? Cause we're looking more at sort of mindset, lifestyle, attitude, approach, and those are more strategies, not necessarily the tactics that might be working now and not working six months from now.
[00:17:53] Matty: Let's use this as an opportunity to segue into discussion of the series, because I think it's brilliant. Can you just describe the business plan that was behind what became the Nine Things series?
[00:18:04] J.: Sure. Like I said, this is a big experiment and people who know me know that I love to experiment. I love to try things and most of them don't work. And I think that's true. You get survivorship bias when you listen to podcasts interviews and you hear about $4 million Kickstarter campaigns, and that's all great. But I think for most people, nine out of 10 things fail, and this could as well.
[00:18:28] So I went into it as an experiment and with my background in entrepreneurship, I wanted to build out an MVP, which stands for minimally viable product. What is the smallest scale thing we can put out there? It's a test to see if this is worthwhile. And so that's what we did. And that's why the books are 10,000 words each, so it's not a big investment in the writer's time. All of the covers are branded, and the elements are changed out, so the cover costs are really low.
[00:18:58] We decided to go just electronic book and just in Kindle Unlimited. Again, what's the minimal we can do to see if this thing has legs. If people like this, if people are reading it, then we'll look at paperback. We'll look at audio. We'll definitely go wide. But right now I wanted smallest, simplest path to publication, just to see if the idea worked. Because if I went full tilt and I said, all right, we're going to write 50 of these and we're going to narrate the audio and we're going to have hardback and paperback and then you launch them and they don't make their money back, then you've wasted a lot of time and money. And I've done that so many times and I'm just not willing to do it again. It's a bit strange, sort of like handcuffing yourself at launch because you're not going all out, but, again, if you go all out, that's such a risk in time and money.
[00:19:50] So that was the approach. I wrote the introduction, which is sort of the overarching essays for the entire series. Let's price that at $0.99, make the barrier to entry super low, all the other books at $2.99, which is cheap for nonfiction, and then drive traffic to that introductory title, the back of the introductory title, and all the rest, all linked to the series, so if you like one, it's really easy to then get the rest, and that's been the approach. In a few weeks' time, I'll sit back and reevaluate. And I have some metrics of what I would consider successful. And we'll see if we get there. If we don't, then it might just be these nine titles and then that's fine. That'll be helpful. But I won't be out a lot in terms of investment. And if it's something that really picks up, then we'll expand it into different mediums.
[00:20:37] Matty: And why did you pick nine? Because I would think that based on what you just described, you might just want to say Things Authors Don't Do and leave it open.
[00:20:47] J.: Yeah. That's a little bit of SEO trickery for you there. There's a lot of Internet marketing research around the listicle, we used to call them the David Letterman Top 10 List back in the day -- I'm dating myself there -- but anytime you see the articles, "these five things" or "the 10 ways," psychologically, that's a hook, it clearly is.
[00:21:10] Even more so, I discovered that odd numbers are better than even numbers. There are A/B tests that prove if I did like The Eight Things for Authors, versus The Nine Things, nine things will win out every time, which is bizarre, I don't understand how that works, but there's data that backs that up.
[00:21:28] That was all in the consideration. There was a book called 13 Things Successful People Don't Do that caught my attention a few years ago and I was like, that is awesome because it's playing on your curiosity. It's one thing to say, five things you can do to improve your writing. I think it's much more of a hook if you say the five things you're doing that's killing your writing.
[00:21:48] The first one you're like, Ah, I'm good. I'm good with what I'm doing. The second one, you're like, Oh my God, do I do that? So I think psychologically, using the inverse or the negative approach of the nine things they don't do, is hookier. Again, we'll see. Maybe not, maybe people think it's clickbaity or gimmicky.
[00:22:06] But what's funny is, it doesn't really change the content, like the way the essays are written are the same, whether it was called, the nine things for authors do or nine things for authors don't do. It's the same material.
[00:22:17] Matty: Yeah. It attracted my attention. I totally agree with everything you're saying about the attractiveness of it, the title. So if it was very successful and you decided that you wanted to go into print, let's say, would you print each piece separately or would you bundle them together into one higher price book?
[00:22:35] J.: Yeah, that's a great question. And that's also one of the reasons why we didn't come out with a KDP print book. It would have been much more difficult to do it through KDP, because once you have that print book, once you have that ISBN number, that book lives on Amazon forever. You can't get rid of it. And so I wanted to see how this was going to do, because when you have a lot of titles, whether they're fiction or nonfiction, you have a lot of options, right?
[00:22:59] So we could bundle these in groups of three. We could bundle them in groups of five, we could bundle the entire thing. And so I didn't want to box us into a corner by having these other additions like paper out in case we were going to do that. So I think that's all on the table.
[00:23:15] I have an ad agency that's running AMS ads for me. I talked to, my guy who's really good and we've talked about that. We're only running ads to the introduction, which is 99 cents. So it's going to be a total loss leader, I'm going to totally lose money on that in the hope of driving read-through for the rest of the series. So I think when we get to the point where we say, okay, are there legs here? Then we can take a look at bundling or packaging or other additions, but yeah, those are all options that are on the table at this point.
[00:23:45] My whole approach here was to have cast such a wide net with this series and to maybe have 20 or 30 titles in it, so that if you find one and you like it, you've got 19 more titles that you can buy. So I don't think I would do a similar series or a spinoff series. I think I would just find other topics. I have 10 more I could write tomorrow. I have, other friends who are either drafting ideas right now, or have ideas. I would go out to those people and look for some diversity in topics that way. I mean, eventually I think we'd run out of interesting topics, but that could be 50 or 60 or a hundred books in at that point.
[00:24:25] They'll still be "Nine Things" because they're nine essays in every book. And it just so happened that we have nine complete titles right now. That was not planned by the way. That was just pure happenstance. So the nine things will tie to the nine essays within each title, but then there could be many more volumes to come. I'm not necessarily taking submissions or ideas from cold emails. Like, Zack obviously. Sasha's writing two titles, Janet Kitto's writing two titles. Jimmy Essien wrote a title, who's in my mastermind group. I have a few that are in different stages of publications. Daniel Wilcox is working on one. My buddy Jeff Elkins is working on one. There are a few more in the works that are at different stages.
[00:25:07] But these are all people who I approach personally and said, Hey, would you be interested in writing in this? And let me know what topic might interest you. I think it's hard to collaborate out of the gate with someone you don't know at all. I might feel differently about it once we've exhausted the friends and family network for co-writers, but we'll see.
[00:25:24] Matty: And what mechanism are you using to distribute royalties?
[00:25:28] J.: The plan is to use PublishDrive's Abacus system, which I'm using with Zack right now. It's really a great service. I think it's $3 a book per month. And all you do is drag and drop your royalty reports into this online dashboard, and it automatically calculates based on the percentages you set of the royalties. We have a very straight ahead, straight up, these are all 50/50. That's what I do with all my authors. So 50% we'll share the expenses, we'll share the royalties. And when the time comes, I'll just drag and drop my royalty reports into Abacus. It'll tell me how much I need to pay them. And that's that.
[00:26:05] Matty: So I wanted to switch from these very detailed logistical questions, just pull back to the wider series, because I think the reason I found this so fascinating is when I knew that I wanted to pursue a nonfiction platform, I started collecting everything I wanted to say into my big mega book about indy publishing, the writing craft and the publishing voyage, as I like to say. And I was intentionally trying to pick things that were not time dependent, like AMS ads or something like that. I was trying to keep it evergreen, but nonetheless, even if it wasn't being impacted by changes in technology, sometimes it was impacted by my attitude. I'd go back to something that I wrote two years ago, and I think, I wonder why I thought that. And so this goal of having my gigantic book out there kept moving further and further away.
[00:26:54] And so I did start chunking it down into writing craft versus community building versus the mindset of an indy publisher. But I think what really intrigued me about this is that I can see opportunities for chunking it even smaller and getting things out there more frequently. And I feel as if for myself, this idea of paying a small amount of money for a small amount of high-quality content is a new mindset that I think other people are adopting too.
[00:27:28] But do you agree with that that's an emerging attitude that people have and are taking advantage of it through the Nine Things series?
[00:27:35] J.: I think so. I think it gets to reader habits and attention spans, which we know have been shortening significantly over the past couple decades. Another part of this was strategic on my part, and I don't know if I'll get to this point, but I also have a big collection of nonfiction ideas and books that I want to write. And my fear is that I go and I spend 40, 50, 60,000 words and months writing on a topic and no one cares about it but me.
[00:28:02] And, it's so part of my strategy with these was to see how they do compared to each other. Now, I know there's some variables that are out of the control. So for example, an author's audience might have some influence on how well the book does and then it's going to be hard for me to separate that out. But generally speaking, I think over time, what I want to be able to do is say, wow, out of these, 20 titles, Rebel Mindset has sold 50% of the books compared to the rest. I want to go deeper on that. Or podcasting, the podcasting book has outsold everything else, 10 to one. People are interested in that. It'll give me some data. It will allow me to say, okay, if I want to write a whole book on podcasting, now I have evidence that there's an audience for it, and it's not just something that matters to me.
[00:28:53] Matty: So if you had started out with a 10,000 word Nine Things podcasting book and then you decided you wanted to dive deeper, you would spin that up as a separate book, or would you try to expand the one that you had out there?
[00:29:06] J.: Oh, I would definitely use the Nine Things title as a starting place, because there's only so much you can cover in 10,000 words. But I'll give you an example for podcasting. One element of podcasting is technology, right? And so you could have chapters on different programs and video capture devices and recording software and microphones. And some of that is going to change over time, but some of it doesn't. There could be a whole section on voice training. What do you have to do to get your voice prepared to podcast? What are exercises you can do?
[00:29:40] These are things you're not going to go into in a 10,000-word short book. So in my mind, and in sometimes in some rough notes, I have tables of contents for these titles that could build out into full books.
[00:29:53] Matty: I'm jumping around a little bit, but I suddenly got intrigued with the idea of the audio. What would you have to see in terms of the success of the ebook to decide you wanted to invest in the audio version?
[00:30:08] J.: I don't have as specific metrics as I should for that. I kind of have a gut feeling. I have what the analytics for Three Story Method and what that looks like. Now, granted, that's a completely different project that was in the work for years. That's a full book. But I can scale it down. And I have a general sense of okay, I need, X number hundred of these titles to sell, or I need X so many thousands of page reads in Kindle Unlimited to justify moving forward.
[00:30:36] I'll probably get more specific with that as time goes on, but it's so new right now. Yeah, I'm just kind of seeing what the algorithms do. And I'm kind of seeing what my audience does as far as, I sent these to my list and see which ones they buy and which ones they don't. So I think when the time comes, I'll know, but audio in particular is such an investment. And it's hard. Especially if you're going to do it yourself, it's incredibly difficult and intensive. So I think I would have to see months of what I considered to be profitable success before I was ready to reinvest back into audio.
[00:31:09] Matty: One of the things you had mentioned was the whole idea of branding this as The Career Author. And I've got to believe that that's going to be key to it being successful. Because any of the topics that are in there, if I went to Google and I Googled podcasting for authors or I Googled how to exercise, there's going to be a billion returns. And so I think a lot of times it's not that people have been searching for information on exercise and just haven't been able to find it and now they have this. It's that they want to hear what you have to say about exercise.
[00:31:44] So if someone is intrigued by this idea of doing a series, but they don't have the same following that you and Zach, for example, have, or that you have across your podcasts, do you think it could still be successful for them?
[00:31:55] J.: I think it's hard. I'll be perfectly honest with you. I mean, we're both podcasters. We love it. We're on a podcast right now. I think if I had to look back on my nonfiction brand and what moves the needle for me for everything, more than anything else is podcasting. I know video is huge. I know YouTube is huge. I know there are people who were making fortunes on that and reaching massive audiences. But I still believe there's an intimacy to podcasting that doesn't exist in any other medium, including the written word. You are literally inside of someone's head.
[00:32:27] You can watch a video and be distracted and looking somewhere else, but with audio you're listening. And if you think about it, it's so primal, right? It's what we did around campfires. We've only been writing for a little bit. We forget that writing is a very small part of our evolutionary process. It's relatively new and it takes a lot of cognitive energy to read something.
[00:32:50] But listening is what we've been doing for tens of thousands of years. The tricky part is that podcasting is a long tail game. Most people quit after seven episodes because no one's listening. And the reality is it takes months -- more like years -- to build an audience.
[00:33:05] So I would say if someone is thinking about this type of thing, if you don't already have a built-in audience, I think it's important to build that first and my recommendation as of August, 2020, and these things change all the time, I'm still telling people the best thing you can do is podcasting. If you're interested in writing nonfiction or teaching or doing anything that isn't fiction related, I still think podcasting is the way to go.
[00:33:33] Matty: Great. Well, that is a wonderful thought to end on and to leave our listeners to ponder. So J., please let everyone know where they can find out more about you and the Nine Things series and your podcasts online.
[00:33:47] J.: Yeah, if you're interested in me, I'm at theauthorlife.com. thecareerauthor.com is where the podcast is, and links to all the books. Those are probably the two easiest places people can find me.
[00:33:57] Matty: Great. Well, thank you so much for returning to The Indy Author Podcast. It was great to chat with you again.
[00:34:02] J.: My pleasure. Thanks for having me on, Matty.
[00:05:06] It's very lonely. It's hard. We sit in a chair all day long, or, even if you're not a full time writer, whatever time you're spending writing is most likely spent in a chair and that's just terrible for your health, it's terrible for your body. And so when Zach and I collaborate on this particular title, and Zach has had some pretty amazing physical transformations over the years, too, and so we felt like this was one that we definitely had to write, cause it just came from a very personal place.
[00:05:33] Matty: I had picked that out because any inspiration I can get for exercise, I'm just an intrinsically very lazy person from a physical point of view, and so I thought, Oh, I'm definitely going to start with the exercise one, maybe I'll get a little bit of inspiration there.
[00:05:50] So I don't want you to go through the whole book, but if you were just going to pick out a couple of foundational pieces of advice that you would want to share with authors about exercise, what would they be?
[00:06:02] J.: I think the very first essay, these books are a collection of nine essays, and they are the nine things, right? And so for exercise, I think one of the biggest one for me, it might be the foundation for all the rest, is consistency. And so the very first essay is called Don't Skip Workouts. And I think that's problematic for a lot of people because it might be a new year's resolution, or it could be a new workout regime, or a new dance studio that opens and you get really excited at first and it's easy to become motivated when you first begin.
[00:06:39] And then reality sets in and it becomes very easy to discard the routine or skip a day or say, ah, I don't feel like it today, I'll go tomorrow. And before, you know it, you're out of that routine and then nothing else matters as far as exercise goes. So I think for me, not skipping the workout and having a consistent routine, and that doesn't necessarily mean daily. It just means a consistent routine that works for you, that you've talked to your doctor about, and that you can stick to. And it's got to be something you can do, because if it's mentally taxing for you or it's an activity you don't enjoy, you're more likely to skip it.
[00:07:15] So I think finding that activity that you enjoy, that involves movement, and then committing to a regular routine, that's kind of fundamental to everything we're talking about.
[00:07:25] Matty: The last time I had a really regular exercise routine was like 15 years ago, because I lived in a house, it was a small row house in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and there were originally been three tiny bedrooms on the second floor. And the people who lived there before me had broken out the wall between the tiny bathroom, the tiny bedroom and made a really large bathroom, big enough that I could put a treadmill and a Bowflex in there.
[00:07:51] And I was very diligent about that until I moved out of that house and moved into another place that didn't really have a good place to put that equipment. And since then I've been really struggling with finding what that magic thing is because I'm definitely someone who would prefer to exercise at home, not at the gym. And you guys talk about that too, about how you have to pick your location and the pros and cons of each.
[00:08:15] J.: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. You know, you asked me a few. I think another one that's important, and this might seem contrary to what we just said, but I also think it's important not to do the same routine forever. One of the things that happens when you get into an exercise routine is your body acclimates and it strengthens, and it rises to the challenge. So let's take walking, for example. If you don't do any activity and then you start walking 20 minutes a day, which is a great place to start, when you first start, those 20 minutes could be tough. It might be hard for you to get through 20 minutes, but if you do that for a couple of weeks, it gets a little bit easier. And before, you know it, those 20 minutes just feels like you're walking out to the car. It doesn't feel like much at all.
[00:09:03] So if you don't then adjust and challenge yourself a little bit more, you're going to hit a plateau. And at that point, that routine is far less effective. It's still better than doing nothing, I want to be clear about that. It's better than going back and sitting on the couch. But once your body gets acclimated, it's time to adjust. So maybe that bumps it up to 30 minutes, or maybe you speed up your pace, whatever it happens to be.
[00:09:27] I think you constantly have to be doing that, pushing yourself a little bit, because when it becomes easy or it's not a challenge for you to do, it's really not doing as much good for your body.
[00:09:38] Matty: Yeah. That's the part that I hate to hear.
[00:09:41] J.: Yeah. Most of these people don't want to hear. I understand.
[00:09:44] Matty: Yeah. Yeah. Because I think the danger is that instead of saying, you know, like I walk my dogs every day. Let's say that's 30 minutes of walking. And to hear that if I'm still doing 30 minutes of walking six months from now, it's not really doing me much good, there's a part of me that says, I should make it 45! And there's a part of me that says, I'm just going to stop walking.
[00:10:07] So it's tough. And that sort of leads into the next question I wanted to ask, which is the whole gestalt of giving advice about something like exercise, is that intrinsically different than advice, for example, you and Zach have the Three Story Method about writing approaches, ways to construct a story. Did you find it was intrinsically different to offer information on something like exercise than on something like structuring a story?
[00:10:38] J.: I'll speak for myself and not for Zach, but for me, not at all. I've written professionally, mostly nonfiction, my entire life, and so writing these, believe it or not, felt easy compared to writing fiction. I still use a Three Story Method approach, so if you were to analyze these essays, you'll be able to identify a conflict, the choice and a consequence, and so it's still storytelling.
[00:11:03] But I think the fact that it's in first person, and it's personal experience, made it really easy for me to write these. And it comes across as advice and I guess that's technically what it is, but I think what's important to recognize with any type of self-help or self-improvement material, is that it's only as good as much as it applies to you. And there are going to be certain things in here that people completely disagree with and that's fine. I'm writing it, Zach was writing it, from our own personal experience and that's really the only thing any of us can offer.
[00:11:33] We can tell other people what they should be doing, but no one likes to be told what to do, and that's not very effective. So I think if you just share your story and you tell people what worked for you or what didn't work for you, and then it's up to them to decide what they want to do with that information.
[00:11:47] Matty: I guess what I was thinking might be different is that with Three Story Method, it's a great way for many people to get at the story structure. And there are a gazillion others, each of which probably has value for different writers depending on their approach and what they're looking for and how it's described to them and so on. Which is a little different than it's a scientific fact that if you're walking 30 minutes now, it's not as effective in six months as it was when you first started.
[00:12:16] So you're dealing with something that's sort of a scientific fact with the Nine Things, at least with the exercise book, as opposed to something that's more, here's another approach, see if it works for you, the way I would think Three Story Method would be.
[00:12:31] J.: Yeah. Yes and no. I think the exercise book, it's probably more cut and dried than some of the others, because as you said, there are some science that backs some of this up. But even that, good science changes. And if you would go to pick up an exercise book that was written in the seventies, I'm sure there's advice in those books that we would cringe at today.
[00:12:52] So yeah, on one hand, I think there are some givens. There are some things that seem to be widely recognized as true, but not necessarily. I'll give you a good example. One of the essays in the exercise book is titled Don't Try to Convince Others What They're Doing is Best, right? So these are the exercise evangelicals, the people who say, Oh my gosh, I go out and I row in the pond in my backyard for four hours every morning, and everybody should be doing that. And let me tell you why. Like, hmm, not necessarily. So yeah. I'm sure there's some benefit in rowing, but should everyone be in a rowboat in their backyard rowing? No. So I guess, yeah, it's certain topics in the series lend themselves to more subjective interpretation than others.
[00:13:38] Matty: Well, let me just run through what the Nine Things are. I evidently missed one because I have eight listed here, but we had Introduction, Mornings, Exercise, Self-Actualization, Rebel Mindset, Social Media, Podcasting -- I have that on my to-read list -- A Creative Life on the Road. Can you tell which one I missed?
[00:14:03] J.: Personal Finance.
[00:14:04] Matty: Personal Finance -- thank you. Many of those, if not most of them, are things that I can imagine applying to almost any knowledge worker, and in some cases, not even that -- just anybody. So you're obviously targeting this particularly at writers. Did you ever think about casting the net wider and just writing an exercise book that you put out there for other people who need that advice?
[00:14:27] J.: Yeah. This is a total experiment. I have no idea how this is going to work. I mean, as we're recording this, it hasn't even been up for a week. These books haven't been up for a week, and four of them haven't published yet, so I have no idea if it's going to work. The idea was looking at what Steve Scott was doing with his productivity books, very short sort of targeted titles on a variety of different topics. And I really like that approach.
[00:14:51] Zach and I were talking about this. One of the things we realized is that over the years, we've built a nice following through podcasts and events, and The Career Author is a brand, and it's a recognized brand. And then there are people who, like I said, attend our events or listen to the podcast. So it's a bit of a conundrum because these are really not just for writers. I would say these are for creatives, but these could be for anybody really, anyone who is struggling with any one of these particular topics.
[00:15:23] So from a marketing standpoint, as you know, if you try to appeal to everyone, you're going to appeal to nobody. So we said, okay, we know we're going to niche down and we're going to limit the exposure we get if we target it to our authors, but we felt like leveraging The Career Author brand was important enough that we might benefit from it.
[00:15:41] We could be completely wrong. We don't know. The decision is a good one. So whether it works out or not, we've gone through the decision-making process, and we said, yes, absolutely, having The Career Author in the title and branding them to the podcast is the best decision. Whether or not it works is out of our control. But the decision itself is pretty solid. So we'll have to see what happens.
[00:16:00] But, yeah, the regular person who sees "Career Author" could go right past it thinking, Well, I'm not a writer, and, yeah, that's probably going to happen. On the other hand, we're hoping our audience, who is hungry for this type of stuff, will enjoy it.
[00:16:13] Matty: I totally agree with the idea of niching down. And that's one of the things I want to talk about when we get into the discussion of the series, but I'm thinking back to the exercise book and I can't think of anything that seemed author specific when I was reading it. In any of them did you work to incorporate something that would justify the author targeting or did you just write the topic and then not worry about trying to insert things that would make it specific to authors?
[00:16:42] J.: The ones that I wrote solo or the ones that I wrote with Zach, we kind of kicked around a whole list of ideas and topics, and there's still a big list, and what we decided was to write the ones we cared about the most, because we thought, if that's how we're writing it, then that's how people read it. If we're really invested in the topic or we really care about it, readers will get that too.
[00:17:03] And I know this is getting a little ahead of us, but it also had to do with the people who I invited to write in this series. And I went to people and some of them I knew, but some of them I didn't know what they were really passionate about, and I said, if you had one topic that you could talk to the author community about that's not writing related, what would it be? And that's what I want you to write about, because I think that the passions that we have are going to shine through.
[00:17:28] There wasn't really a conversation of whether or not this appeals to writers or can we create an essay that will specifically tap writers. There's no book out and none in the making on like AMS ads, right? Cause we're looking more at sort of mindset, lifestyle, attitude, approach, and those are more strategies, not necessarily the tactics that might be working now and not working six months from now.
[00:17:53] Matty: Let's use this as an opportunity to segue into discussion of the series, because I think it's brilliant. Can you just describe the business plan that was behind what became the Nine Things series?
[00:18:04] J.: Sure. Like I said, this is a big experiment and people who know me know that I love to experiment. I love to try things and most of them don't work. And I think that's true. You get survivorship bias when you listen to podcasts interviews and you hear about $4 million Kickstarter campaigns, and that's all great. But I think for most people, nine out of 10 things fail, and this could as well.
[00:18:28] So I went into it as an experiment and with my background in entrepreneurship, I wanted to build out an MVP, which stands for minimally viable product. What is the smallest scale thing we can put out there? It's a test to see if this is worthwhile. And so that's what we did. And that's why the books are 10,000 words each, so it's not a big investment in the writer's time. All of the covers are branded, and the elements are changed out, so the cover costs are really low.
[00:18:58] We decided to go just electronic book and just in Kindle Unlimited. Again, what's the minimal we can do to see if this thing has legs. If people like this, if people are reading it, then we'll look at paperback. We'll look at audio. We'll definitely go wide. But right now I wanted smallest, simplest path to publication, just to see if the idea worked. Because if I went full tilt and I said, all right, we're going to write 50 of these and we're going to narrate the audio and we're going to have hardback and paperback and then you launch them and they don't make their money back, then you've wasted a lot of time and money. And I've done that so many times and I'm just not willing to do it again. It's a bit strange, sort of like handcuffing yourself at launch because you're not going all out, but, again, if you go all out, that's such a risk in time and money.
[00:19:50] So that was the approach. I wrote the introduction, which is sort of the overarching essays for the entire series. Let's price that at $0.99, make the barrier to entry super low, all the other books at $2.99, which is cheap for nonfiction, and then drive traffic to that introductory title, the back of the introductory title, and all the rest, all linked to the series, so if you like one, it's really easy to then get the rest, and that's been the approach. In a few weeks' time, I'll sit back and reevaluate. And I have some metrics of what I would consider successful. And we'll see if we get there. If we don't, then it might just be these nine titles and then that's fine. That'll be helpful. But I won't be out a lot in terms of investment. And if it's something that really picks up, then we'll expand it into different mediums.
[00:20:37] Matty: And why did you pick nine? Because I would think that based on what you just described, you might just want to say Things Authors Don't Do and leave it open.
[00:20:47] J.: Yeah. That's a little bit of SEO trickery for you there. There's a lot of Internet marketing research around the listicle, we used to call them the David Letterman Top 10 List back in the day -- I'm dating myself there -- but anytime you see the articles, "these five things" or "the 10 ways," psychologically, that's a hook, it clearly is.
[00:21:10] Even more so, I discovered that odd numbers are better than even numbers. There are A/B tests that prove if I did like The Eight Things for Authors, versus The Nine Things, nine things will win out every time, which is bizarre, I don't understand how that works, but there's data that backs that up.
[00:21:28] That was all in the consideration. There was a book called 13 Things Successful People Don't Do that caught my attention a few years ago and I was like, that is awesome because it's playing on your curiosity. It's one thing to say, five things you can do to improve your writing. I think it's much more of a hook if you say the five things you're doing that's killing your writing.
[00:21:48] The first one you're like, Ah, I'm good. I'm good with what I'm doing. The second one, you're like, Oh my God, do I do that? So I think psychologically, using the inverse or the negative approach of the nine things they don't do, is hookier. Again, we'll see. Maybe not, maybe people think it's clickbaity or gimmicky.
[00:22:06] But what's funny is, it doesn't really change the content, like the way the essays are written are the same, whether it was called, the nine things for authors do or nine things for authors don't do. It's the same material.
[00:22:17] Matty: Yeah. It attracted my attention. I totally agree with everything you're saying about the attractiveness of it, the title. So if it was very successful and you decided that you wanted to go into print, let's say, would you print each piece separately or would you bundle them together into one higher price book?
[00:22:35] J.: Yeah, that's a great question. And that's also one of the reasons why we didn't come out with a KDP print book. It would have been much more difficult to do it through KDP, because once you have that print book, once you have that ISBN number, that book lives on Amazon forever. You can't get rid of it. And so I wanted to see how this was going to do, because when you have a lot of titles, whether they're fiction or nonfiction, you have a lot of options, right?
[00:22:59] So we could bundle these in groups of three. We could bundle them in groups of five, we could bundle the entire thing. And so I didn't want to box us into a corner by having these other additions like paper out in case we were going to do that. So I think that's all on the table.
[00:23:15] I have an ad agency that's running AMS ads for me. I talked to, my guy who's really good and we've talked about that. We're only running ads to the introduction, which is 99 cents. So it's going to be a total loss leader, I'm going to totally lose money on that in the hope of driving read-through for the rest of the series. So I think when we get to the point where we say, okay, are there legs here? Then we can take a look at bundling or packaging or other additions, but yeah, those are all options that are on the table at this point.
[00:23:45] My whole approach here was to have cast such a wide net with this series and to maybe have 20 or 30 titles in it, so that if you find one and you like it, you've got 19 more titles that you can buy. So I don't think I would do a similar series or a spinoff series. I think I would just find other topics. I have 10 more I could write tomorrow. I have, other friends who are either drafting ideas right now, or have ideas. I would go out to those people and look for some diversity in topics that way. I mean, eventually I think we'd run out of interesting topics, but that could be 50 or 60 or a hundred books in at that point.
[00:24:25] They'll still be "Nine Things" because they're nine essays in every book. And it just so happened that we have nine complete titles right now. That was not planned by the way. That was just pure happenstance. So the nine things will tie to the nine essays within each title, but then there could be many more volumes to come. I'm not necessarily taking submissions or ideas from cold emails. Like, Zack obviously. Sasha's writing two titles, Janet Kitto's writing two titles. Jimmy Essien wrote a title, who's in my mastermind group. I have a few that are in different stages of publications. Daniel Wilcox is working on one. My buddy Jeff Elkins is working on one. There are a few more in the works that are at different stages.
[00:25:07] But these are all people who I approach personally and said, Hey, would you be interested in writing in this? And let me know what topic might interest you. I think it's hard to collaborate out of the gate with someone you don't know at all. I might feel differently about it once we've exhausted the friends and family network for co-writers, but we'll see.
[00:25:24] Matty: And what mechanism are you using to distribute royalties?
[00:25:28] J.: The plan is to use PublishDrive's Abacus system, which I'm using with Zack right now. It's really a great service. I think it's $3 a book per month. And all you do is drag and drop your royalty reports into this online dashboard, and it automatically calculates based on the percentages you set of the royalties. We have a very straight ahead, straight up, these are all 50/50. That's what I do with all my authors. So 50% we'll share the expenses, we'll share the royalties. And when the time comes, I'll just drag and drop my royalty reports into Abacus. It'll tell me how much I need to pay them. And that's that.
[00:26:05] Matty: So I wanted to switch from these very detailed logistical questions, just pull back to the wider series, because I think the reason I found this so fascinating is when I knew that I wanted to pursue a nonfiction platform, I started collecting everything I wanted to say into my big mega book about indy publishing, the writing craft and the publishing voyage, as I like to say. And I was intentionally trying to pick things that were not time dependent, like AMS ads or something like that. I was trying to keep it evergreen, but nonetheless, even if it wasn't being impacted by changes in technology, sometimes it was impacted by my attitude. I'd go back to something that I wrote two years ago, and I think, I wonder why I thought that. And so this goal of having my gigantic book out there kept moving further and further away.
[00:26:54] And so I did start chunking it down into writing craft versus community building versus the mindset of an indy publisher. But I think what really intrigued me about this is that I can see opportunities for chunking it even smaller and getting things out there more frequently. And I feel as if for myself, this idea of paying a small amount of money for a small amount of high-quality content is a new mindset that I think other people are adopting too.
[00:27:28] But do you agree with that that's an emerging attitude that people have and are taking advantage of it through the Nine Things series?
[00:27:35] J.: I think so. I think it gets to reader habits and attention spans, which we know have been shortening significantly over the past couple decades. Another part of this was strategic on my part, and I don't know if I'll get to this point, but I also have a big collection of nonfiction ideas and books that I want to write. And my fear is that I go and I spend 40, 50, 60,000 words and months writing on a topic and no one cares about it but me.
[00:28:02] And, it's so part of my strategy with these was to see how they do compared to each other. Now, I know there's some variables that are out of the control. So for example, an author's audience might have some influence on how well the book does and then it's going to be hard for me to separate that out. But generally speaking, I think over time, what I want to be able to do is say, wow, out of these, 20 titles, Rebel Mindset has sold 50% of the books compared to the rest. I want to go deeper on that. Or podcasting, the podcasting book has outsold everything else, 10 to one. People are interested in that. It'll give me some data. It will allow me to say, okay, if I want to write a whole book on podcasting, now I have evidence that there's an audience for it, and it's not just something that matters to me.
[00:28:53] Matty: So if you had started out with a 10,000 word Nine Things podcasting book and then you decided you wanted to dive deeper, you would spin that up as a separate book, or would you try to expand the one that you had out there?
[00:29:06] J.: Oh, I would definitely use the Nine Things title as a starting place, because there's only so much you can cover in 10,000 words. But I'll give you an example for podcasting. One element of podcasting is technology, right? And so you could have chapters on different programs and video capture devices and recording software and microphones. And some of that is going to change over time, but some of it doesn't. There could be a whole section on voice training. What do you have to do to get your voice prepared to podcast? What are exercises you can do?
[00:29:40] These are things you're not going to go into in a 10,000-word short book. So in my mind, and in sometimes in some rough notes, I have tables of contents for these titles that could build out into full books.
[00:29:53] Matty: I'm jumping around a little bit, but I suddenly got intrigued with the idea of the audio. What would you have to see in terms of the success of the ebook to decide you wanted to invest in the audio version?
[00:30:08] J.: I don't have as specific metrics as I should for that. I kind of have a gut feeling. I have what the analytics for Three Story Method and what that looks like. Now, granted, that's a completely different project that was in the work for years. That's a full book. But I can scale it down. And I have a general sense of okay, I need, X number hundred of these titles to sell, or I need X so many thousands of page reads in Kindle Unlimited to justify moving forward.
[00:30:36] I'll probably get more specific with that as time goes on, but it's so new right now. Yeah, I'm just kind of seeing what the algorithms do. And I'm kind of seeing what my audience does as far as, I sent these to my list and see which ones they buy and which ones they don't. So I think when the time comes, I'll know, but audio in particular is such an investment. And it's hard. Especially if you're going to do it yourself, it's incredibly difficult and intensive. So I think I would have to see months of what I considered to be profitable success before I was ready to reinvest back into audio.
[00:31:09] Matty: One of the things you had mentioned was the whole idea of branding this as The Career Author. And I've got to believe that that's going to be key to it being successful. Because any of the topics that are in there, if I went to Google and I Googled podcasting for authors or I Googled how to exercise, there's going to be a billion returns. And so I think a lot of times it's not that people have been searching for information on exercise and just haven't been able to find it and now they have this. It's that they want to hear what you have to say about exercise.
[00:31:44] So if someone is intrigued by this idea of doing a series, but they don't have the same following that you and Zach, for example, have, or that you have across your podcasts, do you think it could still be successful for them?
[00:31:55] J.: I think it's hard. I'll be perfectly honest with you. I mean, we're both podcasters. We love it. We're on a podcast right now. I think if I had to look back on my nonfiction brand and what moves the needle for me for everything, more than anything else is podcasting. I know video is huge. I know YouTube is huge. I know there are people who were making fortunes on that and reaching massive audiences. But I still believe there's an intimacy to podcasting that doesn't exist in any other medium, including the written word. You are literally inside of someone's head.
[00:32:27] You can watch a video and be distracted and looking somewhere else, but with audio you're listening. And if you think about it, it's so primal, right? It's what we did around campfires. We've only been writing for a little bit. We forget that writing is a very small part of our evolutionary process. It's relatively new and it takes a lot of cognitive energy to read something.
[00:32:50] But listening is what we've been doing for tens of thousands of years. The tricky part is that podcasting is a long tail game. Most people quit after seven episodes because no one's listening. And the reality is it takes months -- more like years -- to build an audience.
[00:33:05] So I would say if someone is thinking about this type of thing, if you don't already have a built-in audience, I think it's important to build that first and my recommendation as of August, 2020, and these things change all the time, I'm still telling people the best thing you can do is podcasting. If you're interested in writing nonfiction or teaching or doing anything that isn't fiction related, I still think podcasting is the way to go.
[00:33:33] Matty: Great. Well, that is a wonderful thought to end on and to leave our listeners to ponder. So J., please let everyone know where they can find out more about you and the Nine Things series and your podcasts online.
[00:33:47] J.: Yeah, if you're interested in me, I'm at theauthorlife.com. thecareerauthor.com is where the podcast is, and links to all the books. Those are probably the two easiest places people can find me.
[00:33:57] Matty: Great. Well, thank you so much for returning to The Indy Author Podcast. It was great to chat with you again.
[00:34:02] J.: My pleasure. Thanks for having me on, Matty.
Links
https://www.facebook.com/JThornwriter/
https://twitter.com/JThorn_
https://theauthorlife.com/podcasts/ - Writers, Ink.; The Author Life Podcast; The Career Author Podcast
https://twitter.com/JThorn_
https://theauthorlife.com/podcasts/ - Writers, Ink.; The Author Life Podcast; The Career Author Podcast
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