Episode 100 - Becoming the Relaxed Author with Mark Leslie Lefebvre
October 5, 2021
Mark Lefebvre talks about the importance of being a relaxed author. We discuss relaxed writing, including writing at your own pace and fitting your writing process to your lifestyle; relaxed publishing, including the advice to publish wide … or not, and how to deal with cancel culture and bad reviews; relaxed marketing, including deciding if and where to engage on social media and the option of outsourcing; and relaxed business, including the importance of saying “no” and the benefit of finding trusted voices and tuning out the rest.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre is the author of more than twenty books that include fiction and thrillers, and paranormal non-fiction explorations. He has also edited numerous anthologies. With three decades of experience in bookselling and publishing, Mark is a seasoned and trusted book industry professional who embraces both traditional and indie publishing options.
"I want to get away from that overly prescriptive approach where there's one way of doing things and that's the only way and if you don't do it that way, you're not gonna make it." —Mark Leslie Lefebvre
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I’m thrilled to have hit three digits with landmark episode 100 of the podcast! I have gotten to interact with so many great people in the writing and publishing worlds—both guests and listeners—and that ability to “build a crew” of fellow creators continues to be one of the primary drivers of why I invest time in producing the podcast.
It’s fun to look back on the evolution of the podcast—from audio-only chats, usually recorded in person and usually with members of my local writing community, to both audio and video, produced to a more professional quality as better tools became more easily accessible and my skills improved, not to mention the ability to easily loop in guests from around the world (easy except for coordinating time zone differences). It’s also fun to look back on the changes I’ve made in my own writing and publishing voyage based on the knowledge and insights that my guests have shared …
I could list many, many more examples of the valuable knowledge I’ve benefited from from my guests. I'd love it if you would go to theindyauthor.com/Podcast, scroll through the list of episodes, and click into a couple that look valuable to you in your own voyage.
Matty Dalrymple, The Indy Author
It’s fun to look back on the evolution of the podcast—from audio-only chats, usually recorded in person and usually with members of my local writing community, to both audio and video, produced to a more professional quality as better tools became more easily accessible and my skills improved, not to mention the ability to easily loop in guests from around the world (easy except for coordinating time zone differences). It’s also fun to look back on the changes I’ve made in my own writing and publishing voyage based on the knowledge and insights that my guests have shared …
- understanding the pros and the cons of indy and traditional publishing thanks to Jane Friedman, Ran Walker, Jason Kasper, JK Ellem, Julie Mulhern, Lisa Regan
- weighing the quantitative and qualitative benefits of how I invest my creative energies thanks to Michael La Ronn
- assessing whether the common writing and publishing wisdom that’s out there is right for me thanks to Becca Syme and Kristina Adams
- looking to not only books but also movies and TV for best practices for the writing craft thanks to Tiffany Yates Martin
- reassessing how I develop a character’s voice thanks to Jeff Elkins
- expanding to video thanks to advice from Dale L. Roberts of Self-Publishing with Dale
- optimizing my website thanks to Pauline Wiles
- appreciating the importance of building community thanks to Mark Leslie Lefebvre and J. Thorn
- and last but not least, deciding to continue the podcast when I was wavering thanks to advice from Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn.
I could list many, many more examples of the valuable knowledge I’ve benefited from from my guests. I'd love it if you would go to theindyauthor.com/Podcast, scroll through the list of episodes, and click into a couple that look valuable to you in your own voyage.
Matty Dalrymple, The Indy Author
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast today. My guest is Mark Leslie Lefebvre. Hey Mark. How are you doing?
[00:00:06] Mark: Hey, Matty, good to see you again.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is great having you back. I'd like to give our listeners just a little reminder of your many accomplishments.
[00:00:14] Mark Leslie Lefebvre is the author of more than 20 books that include fiction and thrillers and paranormal non-fiction explorations. He has also edited numerous anthologies and with three decades of experience in bookselling and publishing, Mark is a seasoned and trusted book industry professional who embraces both traditional and indy publishing options.
[00:00:31] And Mark has been one of the more frequent guests on the podcast. He was in Episode 63 "Wide for the Win", Episode 20, way back, "Working with Libraries and Bookstores," and Episode 14, "Collaborating on 'Taking the Short Tack'" with the two of us, which we co-wrote. And I especially arranged have Mark here for this episode, because it is landmark episode 100.
[00:00:55] Mark: Congratulations, Matty. That is awesome. That is awesome. And you brought a seasoned person here. My seasoning, just to let you know, is Montreal steak spice, usually.
[00:01:04] Matty: Exactly. Well, I couldn't think of a better person to help me celebrate a milestone that I'm very excited about and that you were instrumental in helping me get to. So thank you very much for that.
[00:01:17] Mark: Yeah, and I'm thrilled to be a repeat guest. I was going to say three-peat, but it's four-peat now.
[00:01:22] Matty: Now it's four-peat. I think you're competing with Dale Roberts who is going for the green jacket.
[00:01:27] Mark: Oh, then I got to fight Dale, bananas and all, I got to fight for space.
[00:01:34] Matty: So we are here to talk today about one of his many accomplishments lately, which is the book BEING A RELAXED AUTHOR, which he co-authored with Joanna Penn of the Creative Penn.
[00:01:46] So I want to start right out just by saying that when I heard that Mark Lefebvre and Joanna Penn were going to write a book about being relaxed, I had to kind of crack up a little bit because based on my everyday definition of relaxed, your names are not the ones that would spring to mind. But I thought it would be informative for you to talk a little bit about that first and just let us know where the idea of the relaxed author came from.
[00:02:08] Mark: Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that because I think the misconception people have when they see that we wrote the book THE RELAXED AUTHOR is that we are relaxed authors. No, no, no. We want to be more relaxed authors, and nobody is fully relaxed all the time. However, the concept of it, and maybe I'll get back to why I think we were good authors to write this book, or we were appropriate authors to write this book, I was being interviewed for Joanna's podcast, probably I think it was for WIDE FOR THE WIN when that came out earlier this year, and we were talking about long-term strategies and not getting all stressed out about release day and all these things that seem to just drive authors crazy in anxiety and stress. ...
[00:00:06] Mark: Hey, Matty, good to see you again.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is great having you back. I'd like to give our listeners just a little reminder of your many accomplishments.
[00:00:14] Mark Leslie Lefebvre is the author of more than 20 books that include fiction and thrillers and paranormal non-fiction explorations. He has also edited numerous anthologies and with three decades of experience in bookselling and publishing, Mark is a seasoned and trusted book industry professional who embraces both traditional and indy publishing options.
[00:00:31] And Mark has been one of the more frequent guests on the podcast. He was in Episode 63 "Wide for the Win", Episode 20, way back, "Working with Libraries and Bookstores," and Episode 14, "Collaborating on 'Taking the Short Tack'" with the two of us, which we co-wrote. And I especially arranged have Mark here for this episode, because it is landmark episode 100.
[00:00:55] Mark: Congratulations, Matty. That is awesome. That is awesome. And you brought a seasoned person here. My seasoning, just to let you know, is Montreal steak spice, usually.
[00:01:04] Matty: Exactly. Well, I couldn't think of a better person to help me celebrate a milestone that I'm very excited about and that you were instrumental in helping me get to. So thank you very much for that.
[00:01:17] Mark: Yeah, and I'm thrilled to be a repeat guest. I was going to say three-peat, but it's four-peat now.
[00:01:22] Matty: Now it's four-peat. I think you're competing with Dale Roberts who is going for the green jacket.
[00:01:27] Mark: Oh, then I got to fight Dale, bananas and all, I got to fight for space.
[00:01:34] Matty: So we are here to talk today about one of his many accomplishments lately, which is the book BEING A RELAXED AUTHOR, which he co-authored with Joanna Penn of the Creative Penn.
[00:01:46] So I want to start right out just by saying that when I heard that Mark Lefebvre and Joanna Penn were going to write a book about being relaxed, I had to kind of crack up a little bit because based on my everyday definition of relaxed, your names are not the ones that would spring to mind. But I thought it would be informative for you to talk a little bit about that first and just let us know where the idea of the relaxed author came from.
[00:02:08] Mark: Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that because I think the misconception people have when they see that we wrote the book THE RELAXED AUTHOR is that we are relaxed authors. No, no, no. We want to be more relaxed authors, and nobody is fully relaxed all the time. However, the concept of it, and maybe I'll get back to why I think we were good authors to write this book, or we were appropriate authors to write this book, I was being interviewed for Joanna's podcast, probably I think it was for WIDE FOR THE WIN when that came out earlier this year, and we were talking about long-term strategies and not getting all stressed out about release day and all these things that seem to just drive authors crazy in anxiety and stress. ...
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[00:02:51] And because Jo and I have both been around the block a few times within indy publishing and, on my side, traditional publishing, the idea was just like, Yeah, it's just a long-term thing, you kind of take it, and we were pretty chill about it. And then we joked about the fact that, oh, we should write a book called THE RELAXED AUTHOR.
[00:03:11] And because Jo has a gigantic audience, I call The Creative Penn podcast is the NPR podcast compared to the average local station that the rest of us have. And well, at least Americans understand that. When I talk to folks in Canada, it's CBC, or when I talk to folks in the UK, then I say it's BBC. So you've got to think about your audience, right?
[00:03:36] Yeah. Some listeners to our podcast responded and said, oh my God, you should write that book. And we just got so much, so many comments, so many requests that we should write the book that I think within a week, we messaged each other with the same sort of thought, like maybe we should consider it.
[00:03:53] And so we thought, why don't we write this book by doing some Zoom meetings together and just chatting with one another and we'll do a survey, we'll ask people what stresses them out, and then we'll just apply our own perspectives.
[00:04:04] And Jo and I, we have a lot of similarities in terms of our approach to thinking about long-term and stuff like that and wanting authors to not be so stressed out and worried about missing the boat on things, because things can make us so anxious all the time. So we have a different approach, but the end goal is to try to help authors think about the long-term, sustaining a long, relaxed career, as opposed to being all stressed out about all of the highs and lows that obviously come with publishing, the waves.
[00:04:33] And so we recorded, the very first draft was audio recording, which was kind of interesting. We just chatted, we threw out topics and then we took turns answering our perspective on it. We transcribed that and that became the first draft. And then we bounced it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
[00:04:49] So it was a fun process. I mean, it wasn't all that stressful, and it wasn't all that rushed, despite the fact that neither one of us had planned to write and publish this book this year. So it was like an additional entire project.
[00:05:04] Fortunately, when you co-author, you're not doing all the work yourself, so it kind of cuts the work in half, but it creates other work as you and I know. And the other work is that communication piece, so you normally don't have to do. You can communicate with your editor, you can communicate if you have a different proofreader or whatever, but you usually don't have to, well, maybe your cover designer, but you don't have to communicate with the other person and decide, hey, how do you want to do this?
[00:05:28] We had to talk about the formatting. When I write the word eBook, I use small e, capital B, so all of my books under my own imprints, that's the style I use. And Jo doesn't use that style, she uses a different style. But because it was published under Curl Up Press, we always went with Curl Up Press style. Because again, audience expectations. What are they used to? And so there were fun things like that that we encountered along the way.
[00:05:53] Matty: Well, I wanted to take this approach to understand a little bit about the content. So there are four parts. There's relaxed writing, relaxed publishing, relaxed marketing, and relaxed business. And what I did is I went through, and I picked out two of the topics that I thought were especially interesting to me, selfishly, and that I also thought would be especially interesting to our listeners.
[00:06:14] So we're going to start out with relaxed writing and one of the points I picked out was write at your own pace. So talk about that a little bit.
[00:06:21] Mark: I mean, in the author community in particular, there's a lot of, oh my God, you've got to publish a book a month minimum, which means writing fast and trying to get more productive. And one of the challenges is if you're chasing things like that for the sake of chasing them, rather than remembering why you were drawn to writing in the first place, because potentially it was something you found pleasure in, you actually enjoyed, when you take something that you love and are passionate about and start turning it into something that stresses you out because you're trying to keep up with something that maybe isn't your natural pace.
[00:06:54] Similarly, if you're a fast writer, don't force yourself to write slow just because the market dictates to write slow. So go with the pace that works for you. And that's kind of the thing, there is no one right way of doing it. The only right way of doing it is the way that you're most comfortable with. So all we're really trying to do is talk people off the ledge of, oh no, I can't do this if I don't write a book in a weekend, or whatever. So that's the other thing.
[00:07:19] And then alternatively, I remember being disappointed from an author, a Canadian literary author, when I was a kid that said, any book that takes less than four years to write is not a real book. And I was going, no, that can't be true. I don't want to take four years to write a book.
[00:07:36] So again, similarly, we're not just targeting people who write fast, we're targeting pace in general and trying to say there is no right way, the right way is what you're comfortable with. And so I hope that that helps authors understand it's okay if you're a fast writer. It's okay if you're a slow writer. Don't worry.
[00:07:53] Matty: Yeah. There were two episodes that I thought of as I listened to that part of the book. One was Episode 30, which was "Common Writer Wisdom, Is it Right for You?" with Becca Syme. I think it's a great companion piece, listening to Becca's information is a great companion piece to THE RELAXED AUTHOR, I think. And then Episode 94 just recently was "Debunking Writing Myths" with Kristina Adams, similarly about how, you know, don't look at this like word count per day as the ultimate measure of how successful your writing is.
[00:08:25] And I think that that sort of ties nicely into the second bullet of relaxed writing that I picked, which was improve your writing process, but only if it fits with your lifestyle.
[00:08:36] Mark: Yeah, because I mean, the more you write, the better you become at writing. The more you practice, I mean, obviously, so you're going to continually be getting better, ideally, as a writer. So provided you're learning, right? You're taking feedback from your editor and you're applying things and you're like, oh yeah, I did that before, I'm going to adjust that. It's always important.
[00:08:56] But I say that to the effect that you're always learning, you're always incorporating new things, you may be experimenting and trying to get better at it. But not saying it in such a way that if you're not measurably getting better every day, you’re losing and you're ruined. So again, if it fits in with your lifestyle, and hopefully, practicing and writing regularly is going to help you become a better writer.
[00:09:17] And again, I used to try to offer that, try to write every day or write every day. But what if I can't, what if something happens? Well, you know, regular writing habits are good, but if you only can write once a week because you're working a full-time job and balancing a family or whatever, that's that time for you. It's whatever works best for you. Not necessarily, you have to learn something new about writing every single day or I fail. I want to get away from that overly prescriptive approach where there's one way of doing things and that's the only way, and if you don't do it that way, you're not going to make it. So we want to get away from that with authors as much as we can.
[00:09:53] Matty: I think one thing that creates stress sometimes in the writing is when you haven't reached the level you want, the productivity level or the craft level, and you're looking at what else is out there to see what other ideas there are. And you're having to make that choice about, should I give this a try because what I'm doing now, isn't working, or am I fighting against my natural tendency and maybe I haven't written for several days or several weeks or several months because I'm percolating an idea, and that's just the way I go about it. How do you overcome that stress that is related to, do I try something else, or do I stick with what I'm doing now?
[00:10:32] Mark: I think one of the things we often fail to recognize, and this comes back to pace too, when you talked about that. You know, sometimes when you sit down, in an hour you can write X number of words, or maybe it takes four hours to write the same number of words. A lot of the writing happens below the surface, in your heart and mind and soul. Like you said, it percolates. You have to sit on something. Sometimes you don't have to, but other things, you chew on them for a while, you debate, you do a bunch of things.
[00:11:01] I think there's often a lot more going on under the surface that is not visible. So if you only see when I am sitting in front of my chair with a keyboard in front of me, as opposed to, you see me sitting on the beach, sipping a cocktail and just staring off into space, I might be writing. Don't go when you're judging based on those surface level things.
[00:11:20] Matty: Yeah. The part about relaxed writing and I think to an extent, relaxed publishing, which is the next topic we're going to take a look at, came at a good time for me, because I had decided that I was going to try to put out two fiction novels a year. So, one in April, one in October. So I had put out a book last October, I put one out in April and I wanted to put another one out this October.
[00:11:44] And so I was more or less on track to do that, and a couple of things came up and the example of the whole idea of THE RELAXED AUTHOR kind of came out of the blue for you and Joanna. A couple of opportunities came up that I didn't want to say no to, but they were taking me away from time that I would have spent on fiction writing, but I was getting closer and closer to the deadline I had set for editor, in order to hit an October release date.
[00:12:08] And I realized that just a couple of days ago, I finally sent him a note and I said, I'm just not going to make it. And I realized it was because I might be able to write a novel in six months and even have it edited and proofread and all the work that has to go into it, but I really need to have a little time away from it. Like, I have to have a down period. And so I had always planned on having two weeks my husband and I are spending in Maine, that's just coming up in a week, that was going to be my time away from the book. And I wasn't going to be happy with the product if I didn't have that time when I could step away from it. And for me, stepping away from it for like a couple of hours or a day, which I totally believe works for some people, is never going to work for me.
[00:12:52] So it was more relaxing for me as an indy author to be able to say, you know what, I'm in charge of the schedule, I'm going to change it. And also more relaxing, and I think this has also a lead into the publishing conversation, that it was easier for me to do because I hadn't told anybody else that I was aiming for October. I just said, later this year. It was an internal deadline and I’ve been saying, later this year, which I still feel confident I will be able to do. So being careful about how much you share out, both your writing and your publishing deadlines, I think could be another way of having a more relaxed approach to it.
[00:13:28] Mark: Yeah, because you would have been stressed out had it been up for pre-order or had you publicly announced that you were going to do this and then you had to feel foolish or feel like, oh, I guess I don't know myself or whatever. And that, yeah, sometimes that can cause stress.
[00:13:44] For me having external deadlines like that, I find less stressful. Because what I end up doing is if I keep it internal too much, I keep pushing it off because then no one's going to know. If I have a deadline and it's publicly available. Like I pushed WIDE FOR THE WIN back, I had the pre-order up everywhere but Amazon, because I was intelligent enough about that going, well, I could slip, because I've got a lot of stuff to do here. And I would've kept pushing. And this is the problem I know Erin <Wright> ran into when she was writing, she just wanted to keep making it better and add new stuff as it came up and every time you finished a chapter or something, you go, oh, they added this thing. And I had to really stop doing that. You know, draw the line in the sand and say, no, listen, I can't keep updating this or I'll never have it done.
[00:14:30] And so I think recognizing those things about yourself are so critical because, look at how relaxed you are, Matty. It's like, hey, I can have two weeks in Maine, we're going to enjoy ourselves. You need that time to decompress. You're probably working on writing without realizing it in the background anyways.
[00:14:46] Matty: Oh, I'm doing other things, it's just not on that particular novel.
[00:14:49] Mark: Yeah. And you're probably better prepared when you come back to it because you've given yourself the appropriate breathing space and that's critical. So the answer you found for yourself there was the critical answer.
[00:15:00] Matty: Exactly. And I think you're being very good at pointing out that what worked well for me would not necessarily work well for other people. So it's just another good example, and I think you and Joanna make a good point of this in the book, you're not being prescriptive about what to do to be relaxed, you're discussing the things that can cause either stress or relaxation and then encouraging people to think through them intentionally for themselves.
[00:15:22] Mark: Yeah, especially with advice from so many of the people who filled out the survey, because often we say, well, how do you deal with this? And so we did, we took a lot of that content and said, well, here's what Matty does or here's what, whatever, right? Here's some suggestions. Because you may find, in some other author's answer, you may find something that you can adapt for yourself.
[00:15:42] Matty: Yep. So let's jump into the part two, which is relaxed publishing. And this one cracked me up. So one of the topics was publish wide, or don't. Talk about publish wide or don't, as a relaxed author.
[00:15:58] Mark: Both Jo and I are well-known advocates for publishing wide and broad and not being dependent on any single source of income, diversifying your income is really important for having a good safety net.
[00:16:09] But the reality is, publishing can be stressful to authors, because they have to learn multiple systems, or they may have to log in to six different accounts to do one thing on that single book. And, given that Amazon is the world's largest bookstore and search engine, et cetera, it may make sense to reduce your stress to only have to worry about one. As long as you understand, there's pros and cons. And that's the whole idea.
[00:16:36] So, while we advocate for wide, we're not saying the only way to be relaxed is to publish wide, because some people are more than happy to pick one store and just go with it and enjoy the ride. And if that is what makes you less stressed and you're able to enjoy returning to the page and the publishing process and all of the things about the writer life, go for it. Don't apologize for it, don't be embarrassed by it. Embrace it. Go with it.
[00:17:03] Matty: Yeah. I think that it's a good illustration of how being an informed author can help you be a relaxed author, because if you do decide to go exclusive, you're committing for 90 days, right?
[00:17:15] Mark: Yeah, it's 90 days, it's not like you've signed over for a decade or something.
[00:17:18] Matty: Right, and you're for seven years, for example. So you kind of know, I'm not going to have to worry about this for two months. I'm going to set this aside; I'm going to know this is the decision I made. In 60 days I'm going to take a look at it again, or in 75 days, I'm going to take a look at it again and reassess. So it helps you sort of parcel out where you do have to start looking carefully and maybe making a stressful decision about switching. But at least you can isolate it to that period of time.
[00:17:44] Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Or you don't have to select KDP Select. You can publish to Amazon without being exclusive. It's on Amazon, whatever, it's there, a big audience, gigantic audience, and especially in the US and the UK. And not even stress out about the check box that says exclusive.
[00:18:05] Now, if I want to throw it up on my website for a week and sell it directly, I can. You know, they're not going to come and try to kneecap me or whatever the fear is when you violate their terms of service, so yeah, again, relax, whatever's working for you, go for it.
[00:18:19] Matty: The other thing about the relaxed publishing part that I wanted to talk about is deal with cancel culture, bad reviews and haters. This is such a tough one, so just talk a little bit about that topic.
[00:18:32] Mark: So it's multi-layered, right? And when you think about the idea of, you're going to say something to offend someone and how do you go through that? So there's the possibility of getting early readers that can be sensitivity readers to see if you're going to potentially violate somebody's feelings in some way, shape or form, which is always important. It's always going to change and it's a moving target. So you got to recognize you're never going to get it right.
[00:18:58] We talk about, I often write the first draft with the door closed, meaning I can say what I want, I can do the things, and then it's in the editing and the rewriting that I clean it up and I go, well, I shouldn't have said that. And even in THE RELAXED AUTHOR, there were things in the first draft that I'm like, yeah, Mark, you can't say that in public, but I needed to get it off my chest to put it on the page and look at it and then go, okay, I'm going to tweak that or I'm going to remove that or say something different instead that wasn't a spur of the moment thing.
[00:19:27] When it comes to reviews and stuff like that, that is one of the hardest things for writers to deal with. You know, and Jo and I have a different approach to reviews. But every author has to take a look at, am I going to look at my reviews? Am I going to take seriously the five-star reviews? And am I going to take seriously the one-star reviews?
[00:19:46] Am I going to take all of it seriously or none of it seriously? Or am I going to be like most authors who can have 1,000 five-star reviews and glowing, saying everything nice about it, but then there's one little thing that says, yeah, but this one, you know, I didn't like the one character's voice or whatever the little thing is. And most authors I know, it'd be like, it doesn't matter how many glowing things are said about it, but they didn't like that one little thing. I failed. Right? Because we take that to heart often. It happens.
[00:20:12] So, I have a different perspective. I actually look at all my reviews because I always think somebody took the time to express something, positive or negative, about the book and how it impacted them. And I've been able to try to leverage that as a writer to become a better writer. Or to become a better marketer, because I wonder if maybe I marketed it to the wrong people and that's why they weren't my audience.
[00:20:35] But that's a personal decision because you can go down rabbit holes with reviews and it can ruin you. Like, I think Jo admits in the book, she's like, reading a negative review completely ruins my day, which takes away from all the fun and all of the passion and all of those things, where that can really derail her. And she recognizes that, so she doesn't do it.
[00:20:57] It's kind of like, you know, if I'm deciding I'm not going to have any alcoholic drinks during the week so I can have fun indulging on the weekend, I know if I have a sip, not that I have a problem, but I know that if I have one sip, I'm like, oh, well what's another drink? What's another sip, what's another glass, right? That sort of thing, as opposed to being on it's like the 10,000 steps I try to get every day. Once I'm on a track and I'm on this trend, I'm fine, but the minute I get less than 10,000 steps, I derail myself and I'm like, oh well, if I go another day where I don't hit 10,000 steps, who cares?
[00:21:30] So I think reviews can sometimes do that to authors. So understanding yourself and whether or not you're going to be able to compartmentalize and not take it all personally. They're reviewing the book, not the author. That can be an important aspect. But again, as you know Matty, there's no one answer, there's no one way of doing it. Maybe for your fiction titles you approach it one way and for your nonfiction, you approach it another way. Or if I only look at reviews five years after the book's out.
[00:21:58] Matty: Well, that brings to mind another episode, which was Episode 88, which was "How to Receive and Give Critique" with Tiffany Yates Martin, and one of the things we talked about in there was reviews. And I'm extrapolating a little bit from something Tiffany mentioned, but another option is to ask somebody else to read your reviews for you, to share out or point you to the good ones that are going to be an ego boost, but also someone who can keep an eye out for trends that might you know, If several reviewers have said, I just love the first 50 pages and then I set it aside, then that's important to know. And they can sort of gather that data, that important market research data, and feed it to you without you having to muck through it yourself. So just another option for people who are looking to get the best of both worlds in the most relaxed way.
[00:22:44] Mark: Yeah, yeah, and they can maybe sugarcoat it in a way that makes it more palatable as opposed to the way that somebody said it or where there's one character for example, that they maybe didn't find realistic. Yeah, that's another great way, of having an assistant or a trusted person that can disseminate the information, reduce the blow.
[00:23:06] Matty: Well, one really good experience I had reading reviews, that actually wasn’t reviews so much as I run Facebook ads and oftentimes conversation threads start from the ad. And I have to say, fortunately, oftentimes I've never really had anybody say anything super bad. It's either, this looks interesting, or I read it and this was great, and then a little thread ensues. And one of the things someone said is that the ad referenced Charlaine Harris because I got a review that said, "Like Charlaine Harris at her best." Bless the heart of that reviewer. And so I was running ads to Charlaine Harris followers on Facebook with that quote.
[00:23:40] And so someone said, this doesn't sound at all like the Sookie Stackhouse books. And then someone else said, no, it's much more like her Harper Connelly books. And I was like, Harper Connelly, I never read those books. So I read them, and I was like, oh my God, that is the perfect comp because it is quite different than Sookie Stackhouse TRUE BLOOD kind of books but it is an exact comp with that particular kind. And that's an insight I would have missed totally if I hadn't been reading like the social media equivalent of reviews.
[00:24:11] Mark: Well, it could allow you to narrow things down too in a different way with keywords and stuff like that. Future marketing, yeah, perfectly. That probably benefited you way more because you found that out.
[00:24:22] Matty: Yeah. The other thing I kind of like about social media is, whenever somebody says something nice about any of my ads, I heart it, I say thank you, but if somebody says something not nice, then I ignore it. And oftentimes it's gratifying because other people in the thread will sometimes take care of that person for you. They'll correct them, you know, I thought this was on KU, and they'll correct the person. So sometimes you can let somebody else take care of that for you.
[00:24:51] Mark: I've found that publicly addressing reviews of any sort is just, it's always going to be misunderstood, if it's stuff like you, the author. So best to avoid those, if you want to just reduce the amount of anxiety back and forth.
[00:25:06] Matty: So I'm going to use that as an entree to part three, which is relaxed marketing. And actually this is a good segue because one of the things that I wanted to talk about was choose social media that suits you or don't use it at all.
[00:25:21] Mark: You've noticed a common thread. And so this is kind of, social media is not a place to market. Social media is a place for communities to exchange information, idea, inspiration, entertainment, whatever. And so people go to social media, I mean, nobody wakes up in the morning saying, oh my God, I can't wait to be sold to today. You know, I can't wait to go check out my Twitter stream and see what books people want me to buy of theirs or what movies they want me to watch or music to listen to.
[00:25:50] And so when you think about social media as a place where people can engage and exchange information, ideas, inspiration, entertainment, whatever, being a part of a community, a social media community, where you are able to provide value and all of those elements and receive those elements and be part of that community, that's where it all starts.
[00:26:13] And so I think what stresses out a lot of people about social media is I think, well, I have to advertise this, and I have to market that. I was listening back to an interview I did with Hugh Howey at Kobo, because it was like this whatever anniversary of when he was on stage there back in 2014 and I was interviewing him. And it was a really cool thing that he had said, which was, by not talking about my book, a lot of people were interested in me and were like, what? Why didn't you tell me you had a book up? Why didn't you tell me about your book? And they're almost more interested because you're holding back. He was like, what are you holding on to me? It must be really good if you're not talking about it.
[00:26:50] And that reminded me of people buy things from others that they know, like, and trust, and that's part of relationships, that's part of a community, and that's part of providing valuable content in the social media that you're sharing.
[00:27:03] If you're enjoying it, people can tell that you're part of it, you're part of the community. People can tell when you're just broadcasting and trying to be the smarmy guy who's just thrusting his business card into everyone's hand. Or he's got his book out and he's slapping it in everyone's face, because, oh my God, they might like my books.
[00:27:21] It's the same sort of thing. At least that's the approach that I've always taken the social media. And if you're not enjoying it, if you're not actually enjoying the process, why are you wasting your time there? It's going to be obvious you're not enjoying; it's going to be obvious you're not comfortable. It's going to be obvious that it's something that aggravates you. And that kind of goes, in my mind, it goes hand in hand with, you know, obviously he's not uncomfortable at this gathering.
[00:27:47] Matty: Yeah. And I also think it's a matter of knowing how to pull the levers. That sounds a little more mechanical than I mean it to, but the example is that I like Facebook. I like interacting on Facebook. I know how to make my Facebook feed benign so that it's enjoyable and only shows things that I want to see. And so I interact mainly on Facebook. I used to interact for both my fiction Matty Dalrymple account and my nonfiction The Indy Author account on Twitter.
[00:28:16] I totally don't understand how Twitter works. And I found that there was sufficient engagement just for me posting things and then replying to the people who responded to that directly, that it was worth it for me to continue it on The Indy Author side. But I wasn't really seeing much on the fiction side. And so I pretty much just stopped doing it because I was just like, it's got to be clear to these people that this isn't where I want to be. And that was a relaxing moment for me when I just said, you know what? I'm not going to bother with Matty Dalrymple stuff on Twitter anymore. It's not worth it.
[00:28:49] Mark: Yeah, because one of them was working. You were fitting in; you were enjoying it. There was a conversation going on. There were exchanges and it was a good experience. The other one you're like, yeah, not really working for me. It's a dance club. Not liking the beat of the music. I'm going to a different place.
[00:29:05] Matty: Exactly. So the other bullet I wanted to talk about for part three, relaxed marketing, is outsource when you can, this is my ongoing struggle, that I would love to do this and it's a huge stressor for me that I can't figure out, one, the best way to do it, but, two, can I really afford it? So I'm very curious to hear you talk about this one.
[00:29:29] Mark: Yeah. So this is one that I struggled with as well. Cause I know Jo has outsourced a lot of things. But Jo is also a control freak, project manager style. She admits that. I'm not bad mouthing her. And that's why she's an indy author. She's in charge of everything, right? So she can change everything. She can control things. But I think she's also organized and plans way in advance so she can schedule different people that she needs to get things done. And she's going to have them done early always, always ahead of time, even when COVID hits and stuff like that. And she's still so far ahead of the game that, oh, it's no big deal, but just a little blip on the radar because I've already buffered for this.
[00:30:11] One of the challenges I've had is, well, in particular, trying to get a virtual assistant work, A, I often don't plan out that far in advance, or my plans are so loosely, you know, I love working with a good project manager who sets deadlines so I can work to them. I don't like being the one setting the deadlines. And I haven't yet found a virtual assistant that would be able to put up with me and the way that I organize things. Maybe I need a virtual assistant, and in some past lives, I've had people who've had that role in my world where they didn't just bring taking care of tasks and minutiae. They took care of structuring things for me as well, which is interesting, you don't think of a virtual assistant as someone who's going to dictate how you're going to do certain things, but I almost need something like that. And I haven't yet found the right balance.
[00:31:00] Even my podcast, for example, like just getting somebody else to edit the audio for the podcast. Part of the process is I listen back to my interviews and then I cut some of the um's and ah's. And while I'm editing and listening to it the second time is when I'm reflecting on what I've learned, because in the midst of the conversation, which I may have had a month or two earlier, I'm learning then, but I probably forgot what I was thinking about. I listen back to it, and I learn again. And one of the reasons I have a podcast so I can keep learning. And so I get an intrinsic value from that.
[00:31:32] Being able to afford it is a tough one because there were certain things such as editing, and again, there's different prices, you don't have to go with the most expensive editing offers out there. I have paid really minimal for editing and then had to have it done properly by a proper editor. That cost me more in the long run. And so, cover design and stuff like that. Fortunately, I mean, I think you and I have used the same designer for multiple projects and that's been a really great experience and that works well for me.
[00:32:00] So I think, yeah, it's a tough one because there's the Catch-22 of I’d have more time if I hired someone to take care of this and, yeah, that can be a bit of a chicken and egg situation. That's not easy for authors to figure out. Apart from the fact that you can change it if it's not working.
[00:32:20] Matty: Yeah. I think a stress removing piece of advice I have is always make sure that any kind of relationship you enter into gives both you and the other person and it out. So if you find that it's not working, you can extract yourself from that in a less stressful and less expensive way.
[00:32:38] Mark: Yeah, that's true.
[00:32:39] Matty: Yeah, but I just feel like this is probably the most stressful part of my indy author business now is I feel like I've gotten to the point where I've identified the really very few things that I would just feel comfortable offloading and that somebody else is going to be better at than I am, because I do agree with you that working through this stuff often is helpful for me to see other opportunities and things like that.
[00:33:01] But, with the podcast, listeners are going to groan because I complain about this all the time, but it's editing the transcript of the podcast, which also shows up as captions on the video, and it’s something I haven't come up with a good solution for, but I keep thinking, this is the thing that I'm not bringing any value add to.
[00:33:18] I mean, I like you, I like to do the quick pass that is, this snippet of conversation really didn't go anywhere, and I want to get rid of it entirely, but all the changing periods to commas and things like that, somebody else could do better and faster than I could. So, yeah, that's my stressor at the moment. So when I saw the part about outsourcing things that really caught my eye.
[00:33:39] Mark: Yeah. Yeah. And I think I decided in the last year to outsource some. I hired a publicist because that was something that was taking a lot of time. And now that work comes in see, I still think of it as work, doing publicity is work, but having to appear on different podcasts, having to respond to interview requests, or whatever the case might be, that was something that I was able to comfortably outsource.
[00:34:04] And it doesn't mean it outsource all of it. So for example, me being on this podcast did not come through my publicist. It came through you and I knowing one another, and you said, hey, I'd love to talk to you about THE RELAXED AUTHOR when the book comes out. I said, okay, let's do it. As opposed to I have another interview later today that came through my publicist, who hooked me up and sent a press release out and got the host interested in having me on their show. So just because you outsource something doesn't mean it's an all or none deal, as well. You can still have some fingers in the pie if you're comfortable with that or if that's what relaxes you.
[00:34:38] Matty: Exactly. Yeah. So I'm going to move on now to part four relaxed business. And one of the two sections that I selected here to talk about with eliminate tasks and say no more. I'm especially interested to hear you talk about this, cause you're not a saying no kind of guy.
[00:34:56] Mark: Yeah, I'm not, but I do say no to a lot of things. I think the first thing to say no to, before you think about any external saying no, as you say no to, as a writer, you probably said no to a hundred ideas in the last week, so you're already good at it because you're not going to be able to write everything that comes to your mind that you want to write. So you're already good at it.
[00:35:15] The challenge is I'm a people pleaser. And I hate to say no to people. I hate to not be able to help someone if I'm asked for help. And so that is still something I struggle with on a daily basis. However, there come times where I'm not able to follow through on something that I thought I was going to be able to do because of other circumstances.
[00:35:36] Perfect example. Good friend of ours, J. Thorn, Zach Bohannon, they've got the Career Author Summit and I was supposed to go speak at it. I really wanted to, so looking forward to seeing them and everyone there. But because of the challenges of getting across the border with COVID and all of that stuff, logistically it was just not going to happen. So I had to actually back out of that, which I hate to do. And called J. just to talk and say, well, what can I do to make it better because I'm not going to be able to do it. But sometimes you do have to say no to certain things.
[00:36:09] But what I found whenever I say no is the initial fear is, oh my God, they're going to hate me. I'm going to let them down. They're never going to talk to me again, or whatever the case may be. But the reality is people are so understanding if you are clear with them about not being able to do something that you would have wanted to do, or you maybe you're not the right person.
[00:36:28] I mean, I have people ask me if I can teach a workshop and we ran into this, teach a workshop on the craft of writing. I'm not a good teacher of the craft. There are authors who are great craft teachers. I prefer to teach about the business. However, I almost said no to that because I was worried, I wasn't going to deliver what was expected.
[00:36:49] Now, fortunately, Matty, because of the way that you approached it, because we tag teamed on this, you helped ensure that we were providing the content that I think was valuable for the Alliance of Independent Authors virtual Self Pub Con and kept us on track with appropriate content that ensured that the value is there. Had it just been me, I probably would have graciously declined because I don't think I would have been able to do the topic justice.
[00:37:18] So I think there's cases like that where saying no is sometimes a better thing because you don't want to do anything half-assed, right? You want to do it properly. You want to provide. And that would let people down more if you didn't do a good job at something. So that sometimes saying no is actually helping you and the person who is asking you.
[00:37:38] Matty: Yeah. And I think that both of those examples are a good thing that popped into my mind about this. And you may have a different perspective on this, so if you do, I'd be curious to hear that as well. But I think there's the, saying no for things that potentially are going to benefit you, and then they're saying no to things that could potentially benefit other people, which I think in some ways is tougher. And the business decision I've made for myself is that my strategy is to provide content that large groups of people can consume and hopefully get value from. So podcasts and books and online classes that would serve a number of people.
[00:38:14] My business plan is strategy is not providing content or information that's going to help people on a one-on-one basis. And that's partially because, it's a business decision, I don't know that investing my time and that kind of one-on-one interaction is helpful. And also because I don't think that's my forte, it's not my wheelhouse. My wheelhouse is more this kind of format.
[00:38:37] You know, other people may disagree with that. But knowing that about myself, both about my business plan and about my own personal strengths helps me to say no, because if someone gets in touch with me and says, oh, I finished my book and you, can you tell me what I needed to do next? Then normally what I do is I say, what I'd recommend, go to TheCreativePenn.com and Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing. Dale Roberts is another great one, you know, I have a list of people, and subscribe to my podcast and you’re going to find everything you need out there.
[00:39:08] And it makes it easier for me to say no in those circumstances, because I know what's aligned with what I want to do, and I have a backup plan for the person who's approaching me for help.
[00:39:18] Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I mean, yeah. And there are things I say no to. One of the other things, Jo and I talk about this in the book, is I will say yes to requests where there is a mutual benefit of talking to you for your podcast. But if you want to send me a bunch of canned questions that you ask thousands of people, and all it is doing is creating content for your brand only, and it's not going to benefit anyone else, it's kind of like, I go, I don't have time for that. I don't have time to write content for you. Like, so for example, when I get requests like that, I was like, <no>. Now if the New York Times asked for something like that, I would consider the audience like, okay, all right.
[00:39:59] Yeah. The other thing too is answering in auditory fashion is a lot easier than me having to sit down and compose something and then make sure it's cleaned up and edited properly and effective and all this time that is spent. So there's a lot of requests, for example, where it's, interviews for somebody's blog. And I was like, you know, don't play that game anymore. And that's something that I came to realize after time. It was like, I tried it out and I was like, well, all I'm doing is helping someone else build their content empire. It's not actually benefiting me and I'm not seeing it benefiting, like you said, this is going to benefit a whole bunch of other people in the community.
[00:40:38] And so those are some of the decisions that they're not easy to make, but I've had to make over time. Cause again, you don't can't do everything. Or you can't have everything. Where would you put it? That's the old Steven Wright joke.
[00:40:55] Matty: So the last one of the bullets in that section, the relaxed business that I wanted to talk about was find voices you trust and tune out the rest. And I kind of want to start this out saying that I found you and Joanna and a couple of other sources early on, because I could have spent 24/7 researching do or do you not need an ISBN for an e-book? And I thought, you know what, I'm going to pick a couple of people I trust, and I'm going to do whatever they tell me to do. And that was a huge stress reliever. So I'm totally behind this one. Talk a little bit more about the advice you share in the book or the information you share in the book on that topic.
[00:41:38] Mark: Yeah. So I mean, one of the things you said earlier I think is really important here, and it's the understanding enough to make the right decision. So sometimes the first person you encounter, even if it is someone you trust, may be steering you in the wrong direction. Not because they're mean or evil or anything, they're just maybe misinformed.
[00:41:59] And so we do have these silos within the author community of like-think all along. So just being aware that there are different perspectives and in our world of not being able to see the other side or see other people as human or their decisions as reasonable. but being open enough to that and listening. But again, not listening so hard, cause like you said, it could take forever to get through all, like there's so much. And where do you start? But people that you trust and if not trust, do their experiences parallel to yours? Or do they resonate with you?
[00:42:37] So, for example, listening to somebody who specializes in a particular field or area that is just not even close to where I am, I can still be inspired by some ways they approach work, but maybe not necessarily the content itself. So I can take that. And then there can be other people who are like they write and publish in a similar way to what I do. They use similar models, therefore I can more easily adapt what they're doing.
[00:43:02] And I think the other thing that's important is always adapting. There are plenty of people that I know, like, and trust and respect and admire throughout the industry. I don't think I've ever taken any one of them at face value. Even my good friends who do things a certain way, well, I know they do them a certain way because of this experience they have that I don't have. Therefore I look at what they do and go, wow, that's cool. I'm going to learn from that, and it's going to help me readapt that for myself.
[00:43:31] And I think that's the other part of just being a relaxed author in general is recognizing you're not going to be able to completely emulate the way somebody else does something. You may be able to be inspired by and informed by. That's great. you will probably have to readapt it for your passion, for your comfort level, for all the things that make sense for your goals and what you ultimately want out of this author career.
[00:43:56] Matty: Yeah, I think it's also nice to have the relaxation of the trusted group of advisors that you're using in exactly the way you describe, but not letting yourself get in a rut. And the way I've tried to do that, I absorb most of the information I get about the publishing world through podcasts. And so I have maybe five podcasts that I've winnowed down that are my core source of information, my core go-to podcasts. And every once in a while, I'll think, I don't know, this one is starting to get repetitive or they're starting to go in a direction that doesn't resonate with me, as you said, and I'm going to drop that one off and I'm going to go find a new one.
[00:44:36] And so I'm not adding another one that's adding another half hour, hour of podcast listening to my day or to my week. I'm always having like a little inflow of new. And so maybe that one becomes my favorite and then, and a month or two months or six months, another one drops off. And so balancing this doing what's relaxed, but also leaving yourself open to, oh, it's really time for a new idea here. That might not be a relaxing experience, but it's an important experience for either my craft or my business.
[00:45:06] Mark: Oh, for sure. And actually, I do the same thing. I just never really thought of it that way. Like, I start listening to something and like, well, something's got to give because I'm not going to be up another hour or whatever.
[00:45:17] Matty: Yeah, exactly. So here's the last question I want to ask. Early on in the book, you said, I'm giving this advice assuming you're not doing this full time or assuming this isn't your career. I can't remember quite what the phrasing was, but how does your advice stay the same or change between a relaxed author who's doing it as a side gig, let's say, to a day job versus an author who's doing this full time?
[00:45:45] Mark: So I think obviously one of the main differences is when you have full-time work or part-time work where you're doing something else, you probably, even if you're not, you have other passions and things that you like to spend time doing, friends to hang out with, your family, or any of those other responsibilities or commitments that you have. And so I think understanding where your writing fits into that life is really, really important because the answers for you are going to be unique in terms of, well, I can't dedicate every day for two and a half hours I'm going to work on marketing, when all you have is two and a half hours and your entire week for writing. So I think it changes in that regard.
[00:46:27] The other thing, too, the reason I think I talked about that is because oftentimes it takes a while to get to a point where you earn enough as a writer to be able to contemplate being a full-time writer with the expectation that you're going to earn as much as if you were punching a clock somewhere, getting income for some other tasks, as opposed to you create stories that people want to pay for.
[00:46:53] And so I think it's more common in our industry, because the majority of writers, whether they're traditionally published or self-published, the majority of writers are not earning enough money to live on full-time. So there's a huge number of writers that need to consider all of those things they're doing in the writing life that are a part of their life. As opposed to a writer who is working full-time as a writer and earning a full-time income as a writer, it's going to be slightly different. Again, maybe it's percentages of a bigger amount of time.
[00:47:27] Then there's also stresses that come with working as a full-time writer and so, again, it's difficult. When you write a book like that, which is why I think it was important that Jo's approach comes from completely indy author and my approach comes from having experience as a traditionally published author. And so we brought two different perspectives of it, just like you and I did when we co-wrote, we brought two different perspectives, right? Short fiction was a big part of my life. And short fiction was the thing you were wanting to learn more about and get into. So we had different perspectives and approaches.
[00:47:59] And so I think the same thing is true in this book. And so I was always trying to be aware of wanting to be as, as inclusive as possible, for writers, whether they're writing full-time or whether it's something that they're doing on the side. But I think doing it on the side typically comes, usually has to come, with a lot more patience and a lot more relaxation because the expectation of, okay, I better be able to pay the mortgage this month, that comes with some different expectations, I think, in terms of long-term.
[00:48:32] Matty: That's so great. Well, as always, Mark, this has been so fun to talk with you and so informative. I appreciate you sharing it and I love THE RELAXED AUTHOR, so I can highly recommend it to the listeners of the podcast. Please let them know where they can find out more about you and the book and all your work online.
[00:48:50] Mark: Yeah, sure. So you can find out more about me markleslie.ca. That .ca is because I'm Canadian. And you can find links to THE RELAXED AUTHOR available in all the print versions, as well as ebook audio book. You can buy directly from Joanna. You can find all those links at bookstoread.com/TheRelaxedAuthor.
[00:49:08] Matty: Excellent. Thank you.
[00:49:10] Mark: Thanks Matty. It's always a pleasure.
[00:03:11] And because Jo has a gigantic audience, I call The Creative Penn podcast is the NPR podcast compared to the average local station that the rest of us have. And well, at least Americans understand that. When I talk to folks in Canada, it's CBC, or when I talk to folks in the UK, then I say it's BBC. So you've got to think about your audience, right?
[00:03:36] Yeah. Some listeners to our podcast responded and said, oh my God, you should write that book. And we just got so much, so many comments, so many requests that we should write the book that I think within a week, we messaged each other with the same sort of thought, like maybe we should consider it.
[00:03:53] And so we thought, why don't we write this book by doing some Zoom meetings together and just chatting with one another and we'll do a survey, we'll ask people what stresses them out, and then we'll just apply our own perspectives.
[00:04:04] And Jo and I, we have a lot of similarities in terms of our approach to thinking about long-term and stuff like that and wanting authors to not be so stressed out and worried about missing the boat on things, because things can make us so anxious all the time. So we have a different approach, but the end goal is to try to help authors think about the long-term, sustaining a long, relaxed career, as opposed to being all stressed out about all of the highs and lows that obviously come with publishing, the waves.
[00:04:33] And so we recorded, the very first draft was audio recording, which was kind of interesting. We just chatted, we threw out topics and then we took turns answering our perspective on it. We transcribed that and that became the first draft. And then we bounced it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
[00:04:49] So it was a fun process. I mean, it wasn't all that stressful, and it wasn't all that rushed, despite the fact that neither one of us had planned to write and publish this book this year. So it was like an additional entire project.
[00:05:04] Fortunately, when you co-author, you're not doing all the work yourself, so it kind of cuts the work in half, but it creates other work as you and I know. And the other work is that communication piece, so you normally don't have to do. You can communicate with your editor, you can communicate if you have a different proofreader or whatever, but you usually don't have to, well, maybe your cover designer, but you don't have to communicate with the other person and decide, hey, how do you want to do this?
[00:05:28] We had to talk about the formatting. When I write the word eBook, I use small e, capital B, so all of my books under my own imprints, that's the style I use. And Jo doesn't use that style, she uses a different style. But because it was published under Curl Up Press, we always went with Curl Up Press style. Because again, audience expectations. What are they used to? And so there were fun things like that that we encountered along the way.
[00:05:53] Matty: Well, I wanted to take this approach to understand a little bit about the content. So there are four parts. There's relaxed writing, relaxed publishing, relaxed marketing, and relaxed business. And what I did is I went through, and I picked out two of the topics that I thought were especially interesting to me, selfishly, and that I also thought would be especially interesting to our listeners.
[00:06:14] So we're going to start out with relaxed writing and one of the points I picked out was write at your own pace. So talk about that a little bit.
[00:06:21] Mark: I mean, in the author community in particular, there's a lot of, oh my God, you've got to publish a book a month minimum, which means writing fast and trying to get more productive. And one of the challenges is if you're chasing things like that for the sake of chasing them, rather than remembering why you were drawn to writing in the first place, because potentially it was something you found pleasure in, you actually enjoyed, when you take something that you love and are passionate about and start turning it into something that stresses you out because you're trying to keep up with something that maybe isn't your natural pace.
[00:06:54] Similarly, if you're a fast writer, don't force yourself to write slow just because the market dictates to write slow. So go with the pace that works for you. And that's kind of the thing, there is no one right way of doing it. The only right way of doing it is the way that you're most comfortable with. So all we're really trying to do is talk people off the ledge of, oh no, I can't do this if I don't write a book in a weekend, or whatever. So that's the other thing.
[00:07:19] And then alternatively, I remember being disappointed from an author, a Canadian literary author, when I was a kid that said, any book that takes less than four years to write is not a real book. And I was going, no, that can't be true. I don't want to take four years to write a book.
[00:07:36] So again, similarly, we're not just targeting people who write fast, we're targeting pace in general and trying to say there is no right way, the right way is what you're comfortable with. And so I hope that that helps authors understand it's okay if you're a fast writer. It's okay if you're a slow writer. Don't worry.
[00:07:53] Matty: Yeah. There were two episodes that I thought of as I listened to that part of the book. One was Episode 30, which was "Common Writer Wisdom, Is it Right for You?" with Becca Syme. I think it's a great companion piece, listening to Becca's information is a great companion piece to THE RELAXED AUTHOR, I think. And then Episode 94 just recently was "Debunking Writing Myths" with Kristina Adams, similarly about how, you know, don't look at this like word count per day as the ultimate measure of how successful your writing is.
[00:08:25] And I think that that sort of ties nicely into the second bullet of relaxed writing that I picked, which was improve your writing process, but only if it fits with your lifestyle.
[00:08:36] Mark: Yeah, because I mean, the more you write, the better you become at writing. The more you practice, I mean, obviously, so you're going to continually be getting better, ideally, as a writer. So provided you're learning, right? You're taking feedback from your editor and you're applying things and you're like, oh yeah, I did that before, I'm going to adjust that. It's always important.
[00:08:56] But I say that to the effect that you're always learning, you're always incorporating new things, you may be experimenting and trying to get better at it. But not saying it in such a way that if you're not measurably getting better every day, you’re losing and you're ruined. So again, if it fits in with your lifestyle, and hopefully, practicing and writing regularly is going to help you become a better writer.
[00:09:17] And again, I used to try to offer that, try to write every day or write every day. But what if I can't, what if something happens? Well, you know, regular writing habits are good, but if you only can write once a week because you're working a full-time job and balancing a family or whatever, that's that time for you. It's whatever works best for you. Not necessarily, you have to learn something new about writing every single day or I fail. I want to get away from that overly prescriptive approach where there's one way of doing things and that's the only way, and if you don't do it that way, you're not going to make it. So we want to get away from that with authors as much as we can.
[00:09:53] Matty: I think one thing that creates stress sometimes in the writing is when you haven't reached the level you want, the productivity level or the craft level, and you're looking at what else is out there to see what other ideas there are. And you're having to make that choice about, should I give this a try because what I'm doing now, isn't working, or am I fighting against my natural tendency and maybe I haven't written for several days or several weeks or several months because I'm percolating an idea, and that's just the way I go about it. How do you overcome that stress that is related to, do I try something else, or do I stick with what I'm doing now?
[00:10:32] Mark: I think one of the things we often fail to recognize, and this comes back to pace too, when you talked about that. You know, sometimes when you sit down, in an hour you can write X number of words, or maybe it takes four hours to write the same number of words. A lot of the writing happens below the surface, in your heart and mind and soul. Like you said, it percolates. You have to sit on something. Sometimes you don't have to, but other things, you chew on them for a while, you debate, you do a bunch of things.
[00:11:01] I think there's often a lot more going on under the surface that is not visible. So if you only see when I am sitting in front of my chair with a keyboard in front of me, as opposed to, you see me sitting on the beach, sipping a cocktail and just staring off into space, I might be writing. Don't go when you're judging based on those surface level things.
[00:11:20] Matty: Yeah. The part about relaxed writing and I think to an extent, relaxed publishing, which is the next topic we're going to take a look at, came at a good time for me, because I had decided that I was going to try to put out two fiction novels a year. So, one in April, one in October. So I had put out a book last October, I put one out in April and I wanted to put another one out this October.
[00:11:44] And so I was more or less on track to do that, and a couple of things came up and the example of the whole idea of THE RELAXED AUTHOR kind of came out of the blue for you and Joanna. A couple of opportunities came up that I didn't want to say no to, but they were taking me away from time that I would have spent on fiction writing, but I was getting closer and closer to the deadline I had set for editor, in order to hit an October release date.
[00:12:08] And I realized that just a couple of days ago, I finally sent him a note and I said, I'm just not going to make it. And I realized it was because I might be able to write a novel in six months and even have it edited and proofread and all the work that has to go into it, but I really need to have a little time away from it. Like, I have to have a down period. And so I had always planned on having two weeks my husband and I are spending in Maine, that's just coming up in a week, that was going to be my time away from the book. And I wasn't going to be happy with the product if I didn't have that time when I could step away from it. And for me, stepping away from it for like a couple of hours or a day, which I totally believe works for some people, is never going to work for me.
[00:12:52] So it was more relaxing for me as an indy author to be able to say, you know what, I'm in charge of the schedule, I'm going to change it. And also more relaxing, and I think this has also a lead into the publishing conversation, that it was easier for me to do because I hadn't told anybody else that I was aiming for October. I just said, later this year. It was an internal deadline and I’ve been saying, later this year, which I still feel confident I will be able to do. So being careful about how much you share out, both your writing and your publishing deadlines, I think could be another way of having a more relaxed approach to it.
[00:13:28] Mark: Yeah, because you would have been stressed out had it been up for pre-order or had you publicly announced that you were going to do this and then you had to feel foolish or feel like, oh, I guess I don't know myself or whatever. And that, yeah, sometimes that can cause stress.
[00:13:44] For me having external deadlines like that, I find less stressful. Because what I end up doing is if I keep it internal too much, I keep pushing it off because then no one's going to know. If I have a deadline and it's publicly available. Like I pushed WIDE FOR THE WIN back, I had the pre-order up everywhere but Amazon, because I was intelligent enough about that going, well, I could slip, because I've got a lot of stuff to do here. And I would've kept pushing. And this is the problem I know Erin <Wright> ran into when she was writing, she just wanted to keep making it better and add new stuff as it came up and every time you finished a chapter or something, you go, oh, they added this thing. And I had to really stop doing that. You know, draw the line in the sand and say, no, listen, I can't keep updating this or I'll never have it done.
[00:14:30] And so I think recognizing those things about yourself are so critical because, look at how relaxed you are, Matty. It's like, hey, I can have two weeks in Maine, we're going to enjoy ourselves. You need that time to decompress. You're probably working on writing without realizing it in the background anyways.
[00:14:46] Matty: Oh, I'm doing other things, it's just not on that particular novel.
[00:14:49] Mark: Yeah. And you're probably better prepared when you come back to it because you've given yourself the appropriate breathing space and that's critical. So the answer you found for yourself there was the critical answer.
[00:15:00] Matty: Exactly. And I think you're being very good at pointing out that what worked well for me would not necessarily work well for other people. So it's just another good example, and I think you and Joanna make a good point of this in the book, you're not being prescriptive about what to do to be relaxed, you're discussing the things that can cause either stress or relaxation and then encouraging people to think through them intentionally for themselves.
[00:15:22] Mark: Yeah, especially with advice from so many of the people who filled out the survey, because often we say, well, how do you deal with this? And so we did, we took a lot of that content and said, well, here's what Matty does or here's what, whatever, right? Here's some suggestions. Because you may find, in some other author's answer, you may find something that you can adapt for yourself.
[00:15:42] Matty: Yep. So let's jump into the part two, which is relaxed publishing. And this one cracked me up. So one of the topics was publish wide, or don't. Talk about publish wide or don't, as a relaxed author.
[00:15:58] Mark: Both Jo and I are well-known advocates for publishing wide and broad and not being dependent on any single source of income, diversifying your income is really important for having a good safety net.
[00:16:09] But the reality is, publishing can be stressful to authors, because they have to learn multiple systems, or they may have to log in to six different accounts to do one thing on that single book. And, given that Amazon is the world's largest bookstore and search engine, et cetera, it may make sense to reduce your stress to only have to worry about one. As long as you understand, there's pros and cons. And that's the whole idea.
[00:16:36] So, while we advocate for wide, we're not saying the only way to be relaxed is to publish wide, because some people are more than happy to pick one store and just go with it and enjoy the ride. And if that is what makes you less stressed and you're able to enjoy returning to the page and the publishing process and all of the things about the writer life, go for it. Don't apologize for it, don't be embarrassed by it. Embrace it. Go with it.
[00:17:03] Matty: Yeah. I think that it's a good illustration of how being an informed author can help you be a relaxed author, because if you do decide to go exclusive, you're committing for 90 days, right?
[00:17:15] Mark: Yeah, it's 90 days, it's not like you've signed over for a decade or something.
[00:17:18] Matty: Right, and you're for seven years, for example. So you kind of know, I'm not going to have to worry about this for two months. I'm going to set this aside; I'm going to know this is the decision I made. In 60 days I'm going to take a look at it again, or in 75 days, I'm going to take a look at it again and reassess. So it helps you sort of parcel out where you do have to start looking carefully and maybe making a stressful decision about switching. But at least you can isolate it to that period of time.
[00:17:44] Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Or you don't have to select KDP Select. You can publish to Amazon without being exclusive. It's on Amazon, whatever, it's there, a big audience, gigantic audience, and especially in the US and the UK. And not even stress out about the check box that says exclusive.
[00:18:05] Now, if I want to throw it up on my website for a week and sell it directly, I can. You know, they're not going to come and try to kneecap me or whatever the fear is when you violate their terms of service, so yeah, again, relax, whatever's working for you, go for it.
[00:18:19] Matty: The other thing about the relaxed publishing part that I wanted to talk about is deal with cancel culture, bad reviews and haters. This is such a tough one, so just talk a little bit about that topic.
[00:18:32] Mark: So it's multi-layered, right? And when you think about the idea of, you're going to say something to offend someone and how do you go through that? So there's the possibility of getting early readers that can be sensitivity readers to see if you're going to potentially violate somebody's feelings in some way, shape or form, which is always important. It's always going to change and it's a moving target. So you got to recognize you're never going to get it right.
[00:18:58] We talk about, I often write the first draft with the door closed, meaning I can say what I want, I can do the things, and then it's in the editing and the rewriting that I clean it up and I go, well, I shouldn't have said that. And even in THE RELAXED AUTHOR, there were things in the first draft that I'm like, yeah, Mark, you can't say that in public, but I needed to get it off my chest to put it on the page and look at it and then go, okay, I'm going to tweak that or I'm going to remove that or say something different instead that wasn't a spur of the moment thing.
[00:19:27] When it comes to reviews and stuff like that, that is one of the hardest things for writers to deal with. You know, and Jo and I have a different approach to reviews. But every author has to take a look at, am I going to look at my reviews? Am I going to take seriously the five-star reviews? And am I going to take seriously the one-star reviews?
[00:19:46] Am I going to take all of it seriously or none of it seriously? Or am I going to be like most authors who can have 1,000 five-star reviews and glowing, saying everything nice about it, but then there's one little thing that says, yeah, but this one, you know, I didn't like the one character's voice or whatever the little thing is. And most authors I know, it'd be like, it doesn't matter how many glowing things are said about it, but they didn't like that one little thing. I failed. Right? Because we take that to heart often. It happens.
[00:20:12] So, I have a different perspective. I actually look at all my reviews because I always think somebody took the time to express something, positive or negative, about the book and how it impacted them. And I've been able to try to leverage that as a writer to become a better writer. Or to become a better marketer, because I wonder if maybe I marketed it to the wrong people and that's why they weren't my audience.
[00:20:35] But that's a personal decision because you can go down rabbit holes with reviews and it can ruin you. Like, I think Jo admits in the book, she's like, reading a negative review completely ruins my day, which takes away from all the fun and all of the passion and all of those things, where that can really derail her. And she recognizes that, so she doesn't do it.
[00:20:57] It's kind of like, you know, if I'm deciding I'm not going to have any alcoholic drinks during the week so I can have fun indulging on the weekend, I know if I have a sip, not that I have a problem, but I know that if I have one sip, I'm like, oh, well what's another drink? What's another sip, what's another glass, right? That sort of thing, as opposed to being on it's like the 10,000 steps I try to get every day. Once I'm on a track and I'm on this trend, I'm fine, but the minute I get less than 10,000 steps, I derail myself and I'm like, oh well, if I go another day where I don't hit 10,000 steps, who cares?
[00:21:30] So I think reviews can sometimes do that to authors. So understanding yourself and whether or not you're going to be able to compartmentalize and not take it all personally. They're reviewing the book, not the author. That can be an important aspect. But again, as you know Matty, there's no one answer, there's no one way of doing it. Maybe for your fiction titles you approach it one way and for your nonfiction, you approach it another way. Or if I only look at reviews five years after the book's out.
[00:21:58] Matty: Well, that brings to mind another episode, which was Episode 88, which was "How to Receive and Give Critique" with Tiffany Yates Martin, and one of the things we talked about in there was reviews. And I'm extrapolating a little bit from something Tiffany mentioned, but another option is to ask somebody else to read your reviews for you, to share out or point you to the good ones that are going to be an ego boost, but also someone who can keep an eye out for trends that might you know, If several reviewers have said, I just love the first 50 pages and then I set it aside, then that's important to know. And they can sort of gather that data, that important market research data, and feed it to you without you having to muck through it yourself. So just another option for people who are looking to get the best of both worlds in the most relaxed way.
[00:22:44] Mark: Yeah, yeah, and they can maybe sugarcoat it in a way that makes it more palatable as opposed to the way that somebody said it or where there's one character for example, that they maybe didn't find realistic. Yeah, that's another great way, of having an assistant or a trusted person that can disseminate the information, reduce the blow.
[00:23:06] Matty: Well, one really good experience I had reading reviews, that actually wasn’t reviews so much as I run Facebook ads and oftentimes conversation threads start from the ad. And I have to say, fortunately, oftentimes I've never really had anybody say anything super bad. It's either, this looks interesting, or I read it and this was great, and then a little thread ensues. And one of the things someone said is that the ad referenced Charlaine Harris because I got a review that said, "Like Charlaine Harris at her best." Bless the heart of that reviewer. And so I was running ads to Charlaine Harris followers on Facebook with that quote.
[00:23:40] And so someone said, this doesn't sound at all like the Sookie Stackhouse books. And then someone else said, no, it's much more like her Harper Connelly books. And I was like, Harper Connelly, I never read those books. So I read them, and I was like, oh my God, that is the perfect comp because it is quite different than Sookie Stackhouse TRUE BLOOD kind of books but it is an exact comp with that particular kind. And that's an insight I would have missed totally if I hadn't been reading like the social media equivalent of reviews.
[00:24:11] Mark: Well, it could allow you to narrow things down too in a different way with keywords and stuff like that. Future marketing, yeah, perfectly. That probably benefited you way more because you found that out.
[00:24:22] Matty: Yeah. The other thing I kind of like about social media is, whenever somebody says something nice about any of my ads, I heart it, I say thank you, but if somebody says something not nice, then I ignore it. And oftentimes it's gratifying because other people in the thread will sometimes take care of that person for you. They'll correct them, you know, I thought this was on KU, and they'll correct the person. So sometimes you can let somebody else take care of that for you.
[00:24:51] Mark: I've found that publicly addressing reviews of any sort is just, it's always going to be misunderstood, if it's stuff like you, the author. So best to avoid those, if you want to just reduce the amount of anxiety back and forth.
[00:25:06] Matty: So I'm going to use that as an entree to part three, which is relaxed marketing. And actually this is a good segue because one of the things that I wanted to talk about was choose social media that suits you or don't use it at all.
[00:25:21] Mark: You've noticed a common thread. And so this is kind of, social media is not a place to market. Social media is a place for communities to exchange information, idea, inspiration, entertainment, whatever. And so people go to social media, I mean, nobody wakes up in the morning saying, oh my God, I can't wait to be sold to today. You know, I can't wait to go check out my Twitter stream and see what books people want me to buy of theirs or what movies they want me to watch or music to listen to.
[00:25:50] And so when you think about social media as a place where people can engage and exchange information, ideas, inspiration, entertainment, whatever, being a part of a community, a social media community, where you are able to provide value and all of those elements and receive those elements and be part of that community, that's where it all starts.
[00:26:13] And so I think what stresses out a lot of people about social media is I think, well, I have to advertise this, and I have to market that. I was listening back to an interview I did with Hugh Howey at Kobo, because it was like this whatever anniversary of when he was on stage there back in 2014 and I was interviewing him. And it was a really cool thing that he had said, which was, by not talking about my book, a lot of people were interested in me and were like, what? Why didn't you tell me you had a book up? Why didn't you tell me about your book? And they're almost more interested because you're holding back. He was like, what are you holding on to me? It must be really good if you're not talking about it.
[00:26:50] And that reminded me of people buy things from others that they know, like, and trust, and that's part of relationships, that's part of a community, and that's part of providing valuable content in the social media that you're sharing.
[00:27:03] If you're enjoying it, people can tell that you're part of it, you're part of the community. People can tell when you're just broadcasting and trying to be the smarmy guy who's just thrusting his business card into everyone's hand. Or he's got his book out and he's slapping it in everyone's face, because, oh my God, they might like my books.
[00:27:21] It's the same sort of thing. At least that's the approach that I've always taken the social media. And if you're not enjoying it, if you're not actually enjoying the process, why are you wasting your time there? It's going to be obvious you're not enjoying; it's going to be obvious you're not comfortable. It's going to be obvious that it's something that aggravates you. And that kind of goes, in my mind, it goes hand in hand with, you know, obviously he's not uncomfortable at this gathering.
[00:27:47] Matty: Yeah. And I also think it's a matter of knowing how to pull the levers. That sounds a little more mechanical than I mean it to, but the example is that I like Facebook. I like interacting on Facebook. I know how to make my Facebook feed benign so that it's enjoyable and only shows things that I want to see. And so I interact mainly on Facebook. I used to interact for both my fiction Matty Dalrymple account and my nonfiction The Indy Author account on Twitter.
[00:28:16] I totally don't understand how Twitter works. And I found that there was sufficient engagement just for me posting things and then replying to the people who responded to that directly, that it was worth it for me to continue it on The Indy Author side. But I wasn't really seeing much on the fiction side. And so I pretty much just stopped doing it because I was just like, it's got to be clear to these people that this isn't where I want to be. And that was a relaxing moment for me when I just said, you know what? I'm not going to bother with Matty Dalrymple stuff on Twitter anymore. It's not worth it.
[00:28:49] Mark: Yeah, because one of them was working. You were fitting in; you were enjoying it. There was a conversation going on. There were exchanges and it was a good experience. The other one you're like, yeah, not really working for me. It's a dance club. Not liking the beat of the music. I'm going to a different place.
[00:29:05] Matty: Exactly. So the other bullet I wanted to talk about for part three, relaxed marketing, is outsource when you can, this is my ongoing struggle, that I would love to do this and it's a huge stressor for me that I can't figure out, one, the best way to do it, but, two, can I really afford it? So I'm very curious to hear you talk about this one.
[00:29:29] Mark: Yeah. So this is one that I struggled with as well. Cause I know Jo has outsourced a lot of things. But Jo is also a control freak, project manager style. She admits that. I'm not bad mouthing her. And that's why she's an indy author. She's in charge of everything, right? So she can change everything. She can control things. But I think she's also organized and plans way in advance so she can schedule different people that she needs to get things done. And she's going to have them done early always, always ahead of time, even when COVID hits and stuff like that. And she's still so far ahead of the game that, oh, it's no big deal, but just a little blip on the radar because I've already buffered for this.
[00:30:11] One of the challenges I've had is, well, in particular, trying to get a virtual assistant work, A, I often don't plan out that far in advance, or my plans are so loosely, you know, I love working with a good project manager who sets deadlines so I can work to them. I don't like being the one setting the deadlines. And I haven't yet found a virtual assistant that would be able to put up with me and the way that I organize things. Maybe I need a virtual assistant, and in some past lives, I've had people who've had that role in my world where they didn't just bring taking care of tasks and minutiae. They took care of structuring things for me as well, which is interesting, you don't think of a virtual assistant as someone who's going to dictate how you're going to do certain things, but I almost need something like that. And I haven't yet found the right balance.
[00:31:00] Even my podcast, for example, like just getting somebody else to edit the audio for the podcast. Part of the process is I listen back to my interviews and then I cut some of the um's and ah's. And while I'm editing and listening to it the second time is when I'm reflecting on what I've learned, because in the midst of the conversation, which I may have had a month or two earlier, I'm learning then, but I probably forgot what I was thinking about. I listen back to it, and I learn again. And one of the reasons I have a podcast so I can keep learning. And so I get an intrinsic value from that.
[00:31:32] Being able to afford it is a tough one because there were certain things such as editing, and again, there's different prices, you don't have to go with the most expensive editing offers out there. I have paid really minimal for editing and then had to have it done properly by a proper editor. That cost me more in the long run. And so, cover design and stuff like that. Fortunately, I mean, I think you and I have used the same designer for multiple projects and that's been a really great experience and that works well for me.
[00:32:00] So I think, yeah, it's a tough one because there's the Catch-22 of I’d have more time if I hired someone to take care of this and, yeah, that can be a bit of a chicken and egg situation. That's not easy for authors to figure out. Apart from the fact that you can change it if it's not working.
[00:32:20] Matty: Yeah. I think a stress removing piece of advice I have is always make sure that any kind of relationship you enter into gives both you and the other person and it out. So if you find that it's not working, you can extract yourself from that in a less stressful and less expensive way.
[00:32:38] Mark: Yeah, that's true.
[00:32:39] Matty: Yeah, but I just feel like this is probably the most stressful part of my indy author business now is I feel like I've gotten to the point where I've identified the really very few things that I would just feel comfortable offloading and that somebody else is going to be better at than I am, because I do agree with you that working through this stuff often is helpful for me to see other opportunities and things like that.
[00:33:01] But, with the podcast, listeners are going to groan because I complain about this all the time, but it's editing the transcript of the podcast, which also shows up as captions on the video, and it’s something I haven't come up with a good solution for, but I keep thinking, this is the thing that I'm not bringing any value add to.
[00:33:18] I mean, I like you, I like to do the quick pass that is, this snippet of conversation really didn't go anywhere, and I want to get rid of it entirely, but all the changing periods to commas and things like that, somebody else could do better and faster than I could. So, yeah, that's my stressor at the moment. So when I saw the part about outsourcing things that really caught my eye.
[00:33:39] Mark: Yeah. Yeah. And I think I decided in the last year to outsource some. I hired a publicist because that was something that was taking a lot of time. And now that work comes in see, I still think of it as work, doing publicity is work, but having to appear on different podcasts, having to respond to interview requests, or whatever the case might be, that was something that I was able to comfortably outsource.
[00:34:04] And it doesn't mean it outsource all of it. So for example, me being on this podcast did not come through my publicist. It came through you and I knowing one another, and you said, hey, I'd love to talk to you about THE RELAXED AUTHOR when the book comes out. I said, okay, let's do it. As opposed to I have another interview later today that came through my publicist, who hooked me up and sent a press release out and got the host interested in having me on their show. So just because you outsource something doesn't mean it's an all or none deal, as well. You can still have some fingers in the pie if you're comfortable with that or if that's what relaxes you.
[00:34:38] Matty: Exactly. Yeah. So I'm going to move on now to part four relaxed business. And one of the two sections that I selected here to talk about with eliminate tasks and say no more. I'm especially interested to hear you talk about this, cause you're not a saying no kind of guy.
[00:34:56] Mark: Yeah, I'm not, but I do say no to a lot of things. I think the first thing to say no to, before you think about any external saying no, as you say no to, as a writer, you probably said no to a hundred ideas in the last week, so you're already good at it because you're not going to be able to write everything that comes to your mind that you want to write. So you're already good at it.
[00:35:15] The challenge is I'm a people pleaser. And I hate to say no to people. I hate to not be able to help someone if I'm asked for help. And so that is still something I struggle with on a daily basis. However, there come times where I'm not able to follow through on something that I thought I was going to be able to do because of other circumstances.
[00:35:36] Perfect example. Good friend of ours, J. Thorn, Zach Bohannon, they've got the Career Author Summit and I was supposed to go speak at it. I really wanted to, so looking forward to seeing them and everyone there. But because of the challenges of getting across the border with COVID and all of that stuff, logistically it was just not going to happen. So I had to actually back out of that, which I hate to do. And called J. just to talk and say, well, what can I do to make it better because I'm not going to be able to do it. But sometimes you do have to say no to certain things.
[00:36:09] But what I found whenever I say no is the initial fear is, oh my God, they're going to hate me. I'm going to let them down. They're never going to talk to me again, or whatever the case may be. But the reality is people are so understanding if you are clear with them about not being able to do something that you would have wanted to do, or you maybe you're not the right person.
[00:36:28] I mean, I have people ask me if I can teach a workshop and we ran into this, teach a workshop on the craft of writing. I'm not a good teacher of the craft. There are authors who are great craft teachers. I prefer to teach about the business. However, I almost said no to that because I was worried, I wasn't going to deliver what was expected.
[00:36:49] Now, fortunately, Matty, because of the way that you approached it, because we tag teamed on this, you helped ensure that we were providing the content that I think was valuable for the Alliance of Independent Authors virtual Self Pub Con and kept us on track with appropriate content that ensured that the value is there. Had it just been me, I probably would have graciously declined because I don't think I would have been able to do the topic justice.
[00:37:18] So I think there's cases like that where saying no is sometimes a better thing because you don't want to do anything half-assed, right? You want to do it properly. You want to provide. And that would let people down more if you didn't do a good job at something. So that sometimes saying no is actually helping you and the person who is asking you.
[00:37:38] Matty: Yeah. And I think that both of those examples are a good thing that popped into my mind about this. And you may have a different perspective on this, so if you do, I'd be curious to hear that as well. But I think there's the, saying no for things that potentially are going to benefit you, and then they're saying no to things that could potentially benefit other people, which I think in some ways is tougher. And the business decision I've made for myself is that my strategy is to provide content that large groups of people can consume and hopefully get value from. So podcasts and books and online classes that would serve a number of people.
[00:38:14] My business plan is strategy is not providing content or information that's going to help people on a one-on-one basis. And that's partially because, it's a business decision, I don't know that investing my time and that kind of one-on-one interaction is helpful. And also because I don't think that's my forte, it's not my wheelhouse. My wheelhouse is more this kind of format.
[00:38:37] You know, other people may disagree with that. But knowing that about myself, both about my business plan and about my own personal strengths helps me to say no, because if someone gets in touch with me and says, oh, I finished my book and you, can you tell me what I needed to do next? Then normally what I do is I say, what I'd recommend, go to TheCreativePenn.com and Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing. Dale Roberts is another great one, you know, I have a list of people, and subscribe to my podcast and you’re going to find everything you need out there.
[00:39:08] And it makes it easier for me to say no in those circumstances, because I know what's aligned with what I want to do, and I have a backup plan for the person who's approaching me for help.
[00:39:18] Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I mean, yeah. And there are things I say no to. One of the other things, Jo and I talk about this in the book, is I will say yes to requests where there is a mutual benefit of talking to you for your podcast. But if you want to send me a bunch of canned questions that you ask thousands of people, and all it is doing is creating content for your brand only, and it's not going to benefit anyone else, it's kind of like, I go, I don't have time for that. I don't have time to write content for you. Like, so for example, when I get requests like that, I was like, <no>. Now if the New York Times asked for something like that, I would consider the audience like, okay, all right.
[00:39:59] Yeah. The other thing too is answering in auditory fashion is a lot easier than me having to sit down and compose something and then make sure it's cleaned up and edited properly and effective and all this time that is spent. So there's a lot of requests, for example, where it's, interviews for somebody's blog. And I was like, you know, don't play that game anymore. And that's something that I came to realize after time. It was like, I tried it out and I was like, well, all I'm doing is helping someone else build their content empire. It's not actually benefiting me and I'm not seeing it benefiting, like you said, this is going to benefit a whole bunch of other people in the community.
[00:40:38] And so those are some of the decisions that they're not easy to make, but I've had to make over time. Cause again, you don't can't do everything. Or you can't have everything. Where would you put it? That's the old Steven Wright joke.
[00:40:55] Matty: So the last one of the bullets in that section, the relaxed business that I wanted to talk about was find voices you trust and tune out the rest. And I kind of want to start this out saying that I found you and Joanna and a couple of other sources early on, because I could have spent 24/7 researching do or do you not need an ISBN for an e-book? And I thought, you know what, I'm going to pick a couple of people I trust, and I'm going to do whatever they tell me to do. And that was a huge stress reliever. So I'm totally behind this one. Talk a little bit more about the advice you share in the book or the information you share in the book on that topic.
[00:41:38] Mark: Yeah. So I mean, one of the things you said earlier I think is really important here, and it's the understanding enough to make the right decision. So sometimes the first person you encounter, even if it is someone you trust, may be steering you in the wrong direction. Not because they're mean or evil or anything, they're just maybe misinformed.
[00:41:59] And so we do have these silos within the author community of like-think all along. So just being aware that there are different perspectives and in our world of not being able to see the other side or see other people as human or their decisions as reasonable. but being open enough to that and listening. But again, not listening so hard, cause like you said, it could take forever to get through all, like there's so much. And where do you start? But people that you trust and if not trust, do their experiences parallel to yours? Or do they resonate with you?
[00:42:37] So, for example, listening to somebody who specializes in a particular field or area that is just not even close to where I am, I can still be inspired by some ways they approach work, but maybe not necessarily the content itself. So I can take that. And then there can be other people who are like they write and publish in a similar way to what I do. They use similar models, therefore I can more easily adapt what they're doing.
[00:43:02] And I think the other thing that's important is always adapting. There are plenty of people that I know, like, and trust and respect and admire throughout the industry. I don't think I've ever taken any one of them at face value. Even my good friends who do things a certain way, well, I know they do them a certain way because of this experience they have that I don't have. Therefore I look at what they do and go, wow, that's cool. I'm going to learn from that, and it's going to help me readapt that for myself.
[00:43:31] And I think that's the other part of just being a relaxed author in general is recognizing you're not going to be able to completely emulate the way somebody else does something. You may be able to be inspired by and informed by. That's great. you will probably have to readapt it for your passion, for your comfort level, for all the things that make sense for your goals and what you ultimately want out of this author career.
[00:43:56] Matty: Yeah, I think it's also nice to have the relaxation of the trusted group of advisors that you're using in exactly the way you describe, but not letting yourself get in a rut. And the way I've tried to do that, I absorb most of the information I get about the publishing world through podcasts. And so I have maybe five podcasts that I've winnowed down that are my core source of information, my core go-to podcasts. And every once in a while, I'll think, I don't know, this one is starting to get repetitive or they're starting to go in a direction that doesn't resonate with me, as you said, and I'm going to drop that one off and I'm going to go find a new one.
[00:44:36] And so I'm not adding another one that's adding another half hour, hour of podcast listening to my day or to my week. I'm always having like a little inflow of new. And so maybe that one becomes my favorite and then, and a month or two months or six months, another one drops off. And so balancing this doing what's relaxed, but also leaving yourself open to, oh, it's really time for a new idea here. That might not be a relaxing experience, but it's an important experience for either my craft or my business.
[00:45:06] Mark: Oh, for sure. And actually, I do the same thing. I just never really thought of it that way. Like, I start listening to something and like, well, something's got to give because I'm not going to be up another hour or whatever.
[00:45:17] Matty: Yeah, exactly. So here's the last question I want to ask. Early on in the book, you said, I'm giving this advice assuming you're not doing this full time or assuming this isn't your career. I can't remember quite what the phrasing was, but how does your advice stay the same or change between a relaxed author who's doing it as a side gig, let's say, to a day job versus an author who's doing this full time?
[00:45:45] Mark: So I think obviously one of the main differences is when you have full-time work or part-time work where you're doing something else, you probably, even if you're not, you have other passions and things that you like to spend time doing, friends to hang out with, your family, or any of those other responsibilities or commitments that you have. And so I think understanding where your writing fits into that life is really, really important because the answers for you are going to be unique in terms of, well, I can't dedicate every day for two and a half hours I'm going to work on marketing, when all you have is two and a half hours and your entire week for writing. So I think it changes in that regard.
[00:46:27] The other thing, too, the reason I think I talked about that is because oftentimes it takes a while to get to a point where you earn enough as a writer to be able to contemplate being a full-time writer with the expectation that you're going to earn as much as if you were punching a clock somewhere, getting income for some other tasks, as opposed to you create stories that people want to pay for.
[00:46:53] And so I think it's more common in our industry, because the majority of writers, whether they're traditionally published or self-published, the majority of writers are not earning enough money to live on full-time. So there's a huge number of writers that need to consider all of those things they're doing in the writing life that are a part of their life. As opposed to a writer who is working full-time as a writer and earning a full-time income as a writer, it's going to be slightly different. Again, maybe it's percentages of a bigger amount of time.
[00:47:27] Then there's also stresses that come with working as a full-time writer and so, again, it's difficult. When you write a book like that, which is why I think it was important that Jo's approach comes from completely indy author and my approach comes from having experience as a traditionally published author. And so we brought two different perspectives of it, just like you and I did when we co-wrote, we brought two different perspectives, right? Short fiction was a big part of my life. And short fiction was the thing you were wanting to learn more about and get into. So we had different perspectives and approaches.
[00:47:59] And so I think the same thing is true in this book. And so I was always trying to be aware of wanting to be as, as inclusive as possible, for writers, whether they're writing full-time or whether it's something that they're doing on the side. But I think doing it on the side typically comes, usually has to come, with a lot more patience and a lot more relaxation because the expectation of, okay, I better be able to pay the mortgage this month, that comes with some different expectations, I think, in terms of long-term.
[00:48:32] Matty: That's so great. Well, as always, Mark, this has been so fun to talk with you and so informative. I appreciate you sharing it and I love THE RELAXED AUTHOR, so I can highly recommend it to the listeners of the podcast. Please let them know where they can find out more about you and the book and all your work online.
[00:48:50] Mark: Yeah, sure. So you can find out more about me markleslie.ca. That .ca is because I'm Canadian. And you can find links to THE RELAXED AUTHOR available in all the print versions, as well as ebook audio book. You can buy directly from Joanna. You can find all those links at bookstoread.com/TheRelaxedAuthor.
[00:49:08] Matty: Excellent. Thank you.
[00:49:10] Mark: Thanks Matty. It's always a pleasure.
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