Episode 225 - Right-Timing Your Release Strategy with Kristina Adams
February 13, 2024
"Everyone was saying, if you're not publishing this amount of books a year, you're going to lose readers, and you're not going to have the read through, and you're not going to make as much money, and blah blah blah. I really had to re evaluate my priorities and take a step back and ask, do I want to rely on my creativity all day, every day, writing eight hours a day, like Nora Roberts? Or do I want to really keep that as sacred for me and enjoy that process?" —Kristina Adams
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Kristina Adams discusses RIGHT-TIMING YOUR RELEASE STRATEGY, including the creative price of too-rapid release and the importance of choosing your own “right-timed” schedule; the need for sustainability in an author career; the influence of the writing communities you join or create; distinguishing burnout from temporary boredom; the importance of keeping the writing sacred and the red flag of writing out of a sense of obligation; pursuing the trifecta of fun, energy, and money; deciding what to stop; and the creative value of stepping away from the work.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
Kristina Adams is the author of 17 novels, 3 books for writers, and too many blog posts to count. She publishes mother / daughter ghost stories as K.C. Adams. When she’s not writing, she’s playing with her dog or inflicting cooking experiments on her boyfriend.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
Kristina Adams is the author of 17 novels, 3 books for writers, and too many blog posts to count. She publishes mother / daughter ghost stories as K.C. Adams. When she’s not writing, she’s playing with her dog or inflicting cooking experiments on her boyfriend.
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Links
Kristina's Links:
www.kristinaadamsauthor.com
www.kristinaproffitt.com
https://www.facebook.com/KristinaAdamsAuthor/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC60CK8JT885rHT2RSe_HCPA
Kristina's previous podcast episode: Episode 094 - Debunking Writing Myths with Kristina Adams
Companion episodes:
If the conversation with Kristina about her decision to bring her podcast to an end resonated with you, you might want to check out Episode 090 - Bringing a Creative Endeavor to an End with Michael La Ronn
And for anyone who, like me struggles with incorporating movement into a creative life, please check out Episode 129 - Moving for Creativity with Mike Kuczala
Referenced in the interview:
On "Quitting" YouTube - Marques Brownlee - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQAvce3MA44
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
www.kristinaadamsauthor.com
www.kristinaproffitt.com
https://www.facebook.com/KristinaAdamsAuthor/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC60CK8JT885rHT2RSe_HCPA
Kristina's previous podcast episode: Episode 094 - Debunking Writing Myths with Kristina Adams
Companion episodes:
If the conversation with Kristina about her decision to bring her podcast to an end resonated with you, you might want to check out Episode 090 - Bringing a Creative Endeavor to an End with Michael La Ronn
And for anyone who, like me struggles with incorporating movement into a creative life, please check out Episode 129 - Moving for Creativity with Mike Kuczala
Referenced in the interview:
On "Quitting" YouTube - Marques Brownlee - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQAvce3MA44
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Kristina! Have you encountered the kind of burnout Kristina described and, if yes, how did you deal with it?
Please post your comments on YouTube--and I'd love it if you would subscribe while you're there!
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Kristina Adams. Hey Kristina, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Kristina: Hello, thanks for having me back. I'm good, how are you?
[00:00:09] Matty: I'm doing great, and it is lovely to have you back.
Meet Kristina Adams
[00:00:11] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Kristina Adams is the author of 17 novels, 3 books for writers, and too many blog posts to count. She publishes mother-daughter ghost stories as Casey Adams. When she's not writing, she's playing with her dog or inflicting cooking experiments on her boyfriend. Kristina was a guest on a podcast way back in episode 94, debunking writing myths.
I invited Kristina back to talk about "Right Timed Release." We're going to be talking about a couple of aspects here. I think when people care about the idea of a release schedule, their thought is, you know, what are the professional, what are the sales, what are the marketing drivers for it?
What drove Kristina's release schedule?
[00:00:46] Matty: And I thought that would be a good place to start, but we're not going to stop there. But I thought to give some context for the conversation, Kristina, why don't you just describe at different points of your author career, what was the schedule on which you were releasing books and what were the business reasons behind the decisions you have made about that release schedule.
[00:01:04] Kristina: So when I started out, I was still working a full-time job, and I was doing about one a year. “What Happened in New York” was 2016. “What Happened in London” was 2017. I think I did my first non-fiction "Productivity for Writers" in the same year, about six months later. I did one book in 2018, and then from 2019 to basically the start of 2023, I was doing three to five books a year.
That was from finishing the "What Happens In" series, starting "Afterlife Calls," and moving on to the "What Happens In" spin-off, "Hollywood Gossip." The sales for "What Happened in" didn't really take off until the penultimate book in the series came out. So I was always like, I'm not going to judge a series until I've got three or four books in that series out because I don't know if it's going to be successful. I do tend to write things that are quite serial as well, and I don't class them as cliffhangers. Certain readers class how I write as cliffhangers, so I need to give people a satisfactory ending, to a point, so that if I do have that gap in publication, then they're not coming after me with pitchforks and stuff. You know, and so I was constantly chasing that.
Then in January 2020, I became full-time self-employed. So then I had more time on my hands to work on my books. I was trying to recreate the success of "What Happened in" books. That didn't happen with my second series. It doesn't resonate with people as much. It's almost more of an experimental series at this point. When I interviewed Lee Savino, she described it as the weird donkey in the back. I, and you have the fancy show ponies or whatever it is. I'm not really into horses; I'm a dog person. But you have the show ponies that lure people in, and you get them in that way, which would be the "What Happens In" or "Afterlife Course" series. Then you've got the weird donkeys in the back, which is the "Hollywood Gossip" books for me.
And it's such an analogy; three years ago, she said it, and it still sticks with me. But it is because Hollywood gossip is heavy. It covers so many things and a lot of detail. It covers alcoholism, eating disorders, death, grief, bullying in the workplace, and so many more things I can't even remember because it was just emotionally exhausting to write. It taught me a lot about myself, about writing, about my audience. I tend to find the people who love the Hollywood gossip books are the ones who will literally inhale anything I write, so they are like my super fans when they enjoy the Hollywood gossip books.
[00:03:41] Matty: And just orient me. The “Hollywood Gossip” ones, are they the show ponies or are they the weird donkeys?
[00:03:46] Kristina: They're the donkeys in the back. And this the show pony is "What Happened in New York."
And this is the first book anyway, and then there's five books in this series, and that leads into this series, which is a spin-off set in the same universe. So the Hollywood gossip books are more told from the perspective of the celebrities, whereas "What Happened in New York" and the books in that series are more told from the perspective of people like you and me, who are like, "What is this madness?" and then "Afterlife Calls" is Ghosts.
Based on what I'd experienced with the "What Happens In" books, I was trying to make sure I'd got four or five books in the series before I started marketing it properly, you know, doing the emails and doing the ads and stuff like that. That meant that I was writing Hollywood gossip and Afterlife Calls kind of alongside each other.
The creative price of too-rapid release
[00:04:43] Kristina: And it's, I do get bored easily, so it's nice to have that change of pace between the two. So I'd kind of alternate between which series I was working on. And it got to the point where after how stressful "Hollywood Heartbreak" was, and how far I pushed myself as a writer in later "Afterlife Calls " books, I just had no creative energy left.
I was like, I can't keep writing at this speed because I'm just going to quit altogether. And that was when I was like, Okay, so I need to slow down on my writing so that the quality doesn't suffer. Also, if I'm relying on my books as my sole source of income, I don't feel like I can enjoy the writing process, which is the thing I actually like. I hate publishing. I hate that process. But I also don't know how to outsource it for a bunch of reasons. So I had to find a way to do it that worked for me, and that has been slowing down. It's meant going back to doing writing. It's meant that the last Hollywood gossip book is with beta readers at the moment, and then I've got drafts of the next three "Afterlife Calls" books already just because I've been going back to writing and enjoying that writing process and thinking about some of the upcoming lore that I'm going to need. But the next lot of "Afterlife Calls" books, because there's a lot more, that book six expands on a lot of what's happened in the first five books.
If I was still releasing four to five books a year, there is no way I could have done that on this level. I couldn't have really done the research that I needed for some of the next books. I couldn't have enjoyed the process; I wouldn't have had the energy to grow other aspects of my business that make me money and still give me the dopamine from having finished something. And I would have been a shriveled heap on the floor, you know? I just couldn't do it.
And for me, when I was younger, I always said I wanted to make money from writing. I never specified what kind of writing it was. There was definitely a part of me that was like, am I a failure because I'm not doing it purely from writing fiction? But I can't keep publishing at that pace. It's not good for any of my health issues. It's not good for my books. It's not good for my readers. So I would much rather pull back and have that quality and enjoy writing for HR businesses as well, which I do.
What drove Kristina's rapid release schedule?
[00:07:09] Matty: When you were deciding to move to a more rapid release schedule than you originally had been doing, what were the drivers behind that? Because of things you are hearing in the industry, like other authors whose careers were models for you, primarily clamor from your readers, what was the impetus there?
[00:07:33] Kristina: It was always one of my goals to be able to publish four or five books in a year, just because, I don't know, mentally, that's what I wanted to be able to do. But yeah, it was that whole, everyone was saying, if you're not publishing this amount of books a year, you're going to lose readers, and you're not going to have the read-through, and you're not going to make as much money, and blah blah blah.
Keeping the writing sacred
[00:07:51] Kristina: I really had to reevaluate my priorities and take a step back and be like, well, do I want to rely on my creativity all day, every day, writing eight hours a day, like Nora Roberts? Or do I want to really keep that as sacred for me and enjoy that process? And if I had just kept going on that scale, I would have well and truly hated it, and I don't think I'd finish "The Afterlife Calls" books or "Hollywood Romance," to be honest. Because I can't express to you how much I was resenting having to finish the last book that I released back in March last year, which was "The Mean Girls Murder." And, you know, my readers have all said it's my best book ever, and their reviews have been amazing for it. But because I put so much work into it, and I'd put so much work into the previous "Afterlife Calls" book, and then found "Hollywood Heartbreak" so draining, it just got to the point where I needed to recharge and kind of reset because those goals of following the industry trends and doing what other people told me to do just didn't work for me.
Never say "I'm only" about your writing
[00:09:03] Matty: Yeah. I think that there are two things that this topic reminded me of. One is that I hear this somewhat less than I used to, but I still occasionally hear people saying, "I'm only writing a book a year." And I want to say, Dude, you're writing a book a year! that is a super impressive accomplishment, and I'm sure that there's some multi-millionaire author out there who's saying, "I only have 30 books, if I had 50, you know, then I'd be a real writer," or something like that, and anything I can do to encourage people not to have that kind of attitude about their work is good.
[00:09:40] Matty: But it also makes me think that, I think goals are so easily influenced by the community that you put yourself in. I realized this a couple of years ago that I was joining a lot of virtual groups, taking a lot of classes, and reading a lot of stuff or listening to podcasts. Almost by accident, I had affiliated myself with rapid-release authors, authors who were writing three or four or five books a year. Without really thinking about it critically, I started applying those standards to myself.
It wasn't until I started looking at how I was similar to and different from those authors that I realized trying to apply that business approach to my own writing just wasn't working, both for personal reasons, like you're describing, and for professional reasons. So, I do think it's important for people not to, especially early in their author career, affiliate themselves with groups before they are aware of these nuances and then stick with it uncritically.
Always be assessing whether the group of people you're surrounding yourself with is aligned with what you want to accomplish. It's not that one of the goals is good and one is bad, but one is more appropriate and one is less appropriate. You can really mess yourself up if you start holding yourself up to a measuring stick that is different than what's appropriate for you.
The need for sustainability in an author career
[00:11:04] Kristina: Yeah, I saw a really good video the other day by the YouTuber Marques Brownlee. He does tech videos and he's noticed a pattern where a lot of YouTubers have been quitting lately. He did a really good video on creative burnout, talking about it in comparison to YouTubers, but a lot of it resonated with me as well. He was saying, you know, you can love what you do, but it will still burn you out. He had this good analogy where he compared it to a Daft Punk music video that I forgot to look up. In the music video, a character starts walking, then running, sprinting, becomes a robot, and at the end, disintegrates because they're running so fast. It's a metaphor for burnout. You're running so fast; there is nothing left of you.
Just because you love something, it doesn't mean it can't exhaust you. That's what happened with me in fiction writing, and that's why I had to separate out what I was doing because it just wasn't sustainable. I loved it, but I hated it at the same time.
[00:12:14] Matty: Yeah, I think that point about burnout, people associate it with having to do things they don't want to. That reminder that no, you can burn out doing the things you love is a great one.
[00:12:24] Kristina: Well, it's interesting because I wish I could remember what psychologist said it, but apparently you're more likely to burn out if you love what you do because you will put more effort in. That really resonated with me. I was putting so much effort in, but the extra effort wasn't necessarily increasing my profits. And it's like, well, am I doing the wrong thing? Do I need to try this tactic instead?
Actually, you just need to put the brakes on. Because it's not chasing publishing that fulfills me. It's spending time with my characters and seeing my reader reactions. So that kind of middle bit is where I was spending all my time, when actually it's the beginning and the end that I enjoy. If I'm too focused on the publishing part of it, I never get time to actually enjoy the fun parts, at which point it gets to, well, why am I bothering?
Distinguishing burnout from temporary boredom
[00:13:14] Matty: Do you have any tips for how to distinguish true burnout from something more passing? As an example, I'm working on a non-fiction book; I'm now on my, I don't know, third or fourth or fifth pass through it, and I just have to say at this point I'm pretty bored with it. But that's just a passing thing. I recognize that as just a passing thing; pretty soon, I'm going to slog through the 150 pages, and then it'll be done, and that'll be great. But I think that's quite different than burnout. Are there markers that you noticed in yourself or you've noticed in other authors that say, no, this is truly burnout and now you have to look at changing things?
[00:13:53] Kristina: So I've learned a few authors get burnout, and quite often they will say, oh, I'm feeling depressed. It often starts with feeling depressed or feeling a bit more anxious or maybe they get sick more often. They tend to have more germs because the increased stress kills your good gut bacteria. So the bad bacteria comes in and has a party, and then you get the flu for three weeks.
Yeah, it does mess with you. So some of the other things, I suffer from hair loss. I developed new allergies that I never had before. I can't have rosemary oil on my scalp because it burns, and I've never had an issue with rosemary before. But it's little things, like you might be a bit snippier, you might lose your temper a bit more, feel angrier, get annoyed at something, like, you know, the dog's barking because another dog's walking past and you lose your temper.
If you've got other health conditions, like I've got asthma, for example, you might find they get exacerbated. My asthma is a lot more sensitive to things like candles than it used to be, or deodorant even.
You may find that you're just empty. I think that's the biggest thing, is there is nothing left in the tank. You open your work in progress and you go, what are words? And you want to write, you want to spend time with your characters, but you have absolutely no idea what to do, even if there's an outline right in front of you. You might try to type and you're like, is that a complete sentence? And then you might write that sentence and then you're like, I can't keep going.
The red flag of writing out of a sense of obligation
[00:15:19] Kristina: You might even resent opening your work in progress because it feels like you're doing it out of obligation. And I definitely think if it ever feels like you're writing something out of obligation, it is time to take a break from it. And that's part of why I took so long to do Hollywood Romance because it is very different from the previous book in that it is more of a romance, whereas Hollywood Heartbreak was, let's turn my characters to shreds emotionally. Because of that, it did rip me to shreds emotionally as well. When you're writing about grief, eating disorders, alcoholism, and all these things in one book, on top of having it overlap with previous books that you've written, worrying about the timeline and stuff, it really messes with your head.
The other thing is, I became a lot more scatterbrained, and it was through that that I realized I probably got ADHD. It really heightened that, to the point where I could not function, and it probably took me, well, I don't know if I'm fully recovered now, if I'm entirely honest with you. It was part of why we put the Writer's Mindset on hold because I could not keep going. I had to cut back. We spoke to Becca Syme on September 22 about burnout. We talked about people who burn out repeatedly. She said it's the people who want to go back to how things were before they burn out that are more likely to burn out again because you are repeating the same pattern.
To avoid that burnout, you have to stop and change how you do things. That's why I stopped and changed how I did things, doing client work, publishing my books, doing the podcast, juggling my health issues, juggling the dog's health issues, it's a lot. Sometimes those little things that you don't consciously realize do drain you. So it is those little things, I think.
[00:17:31] Matty: Yeah, I like the example that you had given earlier about the fact that you sometimes had multiple projects going on. This is more a way to address those things that are more temporary, not true burnout, but just exhaustion with a particular project. I'm almost always only working on one fiction work at a time, but I always have a little pool of non-fiction work. If I start thinking, I really don't want to write another chapter of this novel, I'll have something to switch to. Then I find that refreshes me because it's using a different part of my brain, exercising different muscles. I can go back to the fiction work more refreshed.
Deciding what to stop
[00:18:11] Matty: The example of the Writer's Cookbook, that you did the work but continued the podcast, that's a whole different flavor of decision-making. I imagine that decision to stop doing something you've been doing for so long and were so invested in was quite difficult but necessary for you to avoid this burnout. Can you talk a little bit about that decision?
[00:18:35] Kristina: Yeah, so I'd been feeling pretty exhausted anyway for most of 2021-2022. We had the talks with Becca Syme in August-September 2022, and then Ellie and I went away for a few days for a business conference. Ellie suggested to me, you know, do you want to put this on hold because it is eating into so much of your time?
I did the math and thought, well, I have limited time and energy. The podcast was taking up a significant amount of my time, leaving me with less time for novel writing (the fun stuff) and less time for client work (the thing that pays the bills). And the client work, I kind of see how the nonfiction serves as a reset, a change of pace, a change of focus, but it's still the writing muscles.
Analyzing the trifecta: fun, energy, and money
We got to the point where, you know what? I think it's better to put this on hold because I truly did not want to do it anymore. I hated it. Ellie works full time and has her own stuff to deal with.
It got to the point where it wasn't fun; it was draining and felt more like an obligation. The same happened with the blogs on the Writer's Cookbook. I didn't want to write them anymore. It didn't feel fun, had a lower ROI than everything else I was doing, and took a lot of energy. That's kind of the trifecta, if you will. Is it fun? How much energy does it take? Is it making me money? If the answer is no to all those things, I'm quite harsh these days, and it ends up going in the bin.
I don't always enjoy posting to LinkedIn, but it gets me client work. It's semi-fun because I get to talk to people, raise awareness about things that matter to me, like disability in the workplace, and I get money from it. Whereas the podcast won't make a minimum wage, and I hated doing it, and Ellie didn't have the time to do it. So there was no reason for us to keep going.
[00:20:48] Matty: That sounds like a pretty straightforward decision.
[00:20:51] Kristina: Well, exactly. The fun part for me is talking to other people. And I can do that by being a guest on their podcast.
[00:20:56] Matty: Yeah. I like that trifecta, and I think the trick is taking a moment to step back and apply those considerations to the work you're doing. It's a whole other thing. Every once in a while, after spending hours editing a podcast episode or whatever, I think, can I justify continuing to do this? So far, I have because I love it. It takes a lot of time and doesn't make me a lot of money. It's hard balancing personal considerations like I love doing this against the business considerations, which is, I could be spending my time some other way and making more money. I think the pointer to step back and remember to do that assessment periodically is super important.
The creative value of stepping away from the work
[00:21:41] Kristina: I get asked quite a lot how you let go because you seem so good at sacrificing things. I'm like, because I don't have a choice. When you get to the point where getting out of bed is painful and more tiring than staying in bed, you have to prioritize. You have to choose to do those few stretches and a meditation over doing some podcast editing. Personally, if I don't walk the dog, if I don't do some stretches, if I don't take a hot or an exceptionally cold shower, the blood flow is not going, and everything hurts more. So I need that movement to relax the muscles and be able to do more work. I've not done as much exercise the last few days, and I can feel it. Several of my muscles that are bad are a lot more painful than they would normally be if I'd taken 10, 15, 20 minutes out of my day to do some yoga.
So, obviously, that's my fault because I've not been prioritizing it. But this whole "you need to rest," it's not always as simple as you need to spend more time in bed. It's about that change of pace and reassessing your priorities. Is it more important to get out, get some fresh air, spend some time in nature, or is it more important to give yourself eye strain from editing that next chapter when you don't really want to do it?
[00:23:07] Matty: Yeah, this is something I continually struggle with. So this is more of a "do as I say, not as I do." But one approach I used to try to trick myself into this is to treat those things that are easy to set aside like a business assignment. Putting an entry on my calendar that says after my writing sprint, "Go for a walk," and it's on my calendar like a business meeting. So it's a little bit harder to say, "I could go for a walk, or I could go review and refine my Facebook ads," because it's, you know, you go review and refine your Facebook ads, you get a little hopefully more or less immediate sense of accomplishment by doing that. Maybe you get an actual bump in financial payback by doing that. Trying to keep in mind that the walk is just as important for different reasons for your long-term well-being, personally and professionally. It's very hard.
I mean, I've interviewed a number of people, and I'll try to remember to put links to these episodes in the show notes for this one, but I've interviewed a bunch of people about incorporating exercise and movement into a creative life. And you know what, this shouldn't be this hard, but it's this hard. It's hard to do.
[00:24:26] Kristina: It's so hard because you want to spend all your time writing. But legitimately, no one can spend all their time writing. I remember with my previous book, "The Mean Girls Murder," the first round of beta readers, they were like, "I get what you're trying to do. It's not working." It's not working because I upped the ante so much with the previous book, "The Witch’s Sacrifice," that when I tried to tone it down and make it a bit more cutesy with Book five, no. No, you need to redo this. So I was like, crap, what do I do? And that was probably the most significant rewrite I've done since some of my early books. And I had no idea what to do.
But I decided to just take Millie for a walk to clear my head. And I actually discovered somewhere new in our local area, which is where the books are set. It was the most gorgeous graveyard, and it's so pretty to walk around. The way the light comes through the trees, it's so atmospheric. And when you're writing ghost stories, come on. From walking around that, I came up with the new antagonist for the book, who is a psychopathic Victorian doctor. If I hadn't taken that time out to take Millie for a walk, I never would have come up with him. But it was walking through that Victorian graveyard, with the light coming through the trees, and the layout of it, and the church, and how secluded it is, even though it's right in the middle of town. That helped me come up with these ideas.
I think that's the thing—when you're stuck, or bored, or restless, or pick any negative emotion, snapping yourself out of it by getting out of the house can be quite underestimated. I don't know if you find this, Matty, but I find having a dog quite useful because when I don't want to get up and get out, she won't give me a choice. She won't go to the toilet in the back garden. So to make sure she's been to the toilet, we have to leave the house.
[00:26:27] Matty: Yeah, letting your dog relieve herself is probably the ultimate incentive to get out of the house, but yes, having dogs does help. I would also encourage, because I'm suspecting that a lot of the people who are listening have this same issue of, "I'm just going to do this one more thing, one more thing, one more thing," and then you realize it's the end of the day and you don't have time anymore. It's dark, you can't go for a walk. I would encourage people, if nothing else, to try this experiment of actually putting an item on your calendar that says, "Get outside, go for a walk, go to your coffee shop," and don't write, maybe.
[00:27:00] Kristina: Socialize. I find that really helpful. I've made some new friends locally in the last year, and when I'm in a bad mood, I will either text one of them and say, "Do you want to go for a walk?" or I will go to my other friend who runs a dog-friendly cafe, so I can vent to one of them and get it out of my system, either get food or exercise, and I feel like a different person when I get home an hour or two later. And that does make a difference, to have those friends that you see in person, and that exercise, that nutrition, that, you know, a problem shared is a problem halved, and all of those things, it does make a massive difference.
[00:27:40] Matty: Yeah, this isn't seeing people in person, but I do have a daily writing sprint between 12 o'clock every day except Friday, and it's with a small group of fellow writers. I really like that because we don't socialize a lot. That's part of the rule. This is mainly sprinting, but there's always like a minute or two at the beginning, a minute or two at the end where we kind of catch each other up. The other thing that's helpful is it's a marker in the day. So when I am successful at exercising, it is usually because that's what I do right after the sprint. Like I know 12:30 to two is the sprint and then two to three is when I go for the walk. It's also a marker. like it keeps me from just doing administrative stuff that trickles through the whole day because what I always try to do is restrict anything I'm doing other than writing to the time before 12:30. It is kind of a marker like that.
Right-timed release
[00:29:05] Matty: Well, I think we've shared a bunch of great tips about avoiding burnout, recognizing burnout, and avoiding burnout. Let's take the conversation back to the idea of right-timed release. So, as somebody who puts out more or less one fiction book a year—one of my pieces of advice is don't let anybody say I'm only publishing one book a year. That's just wrong. But as a way to wrap up, talk a little bit about the right-timed release schedule that you set for yourself once you've recognized that we're contending with this burnout.
[00:29:37] Kristina: Yeah, all I knew was that after I finished "The Mean Girls Murder" and "Hollywood Heartbreak," the characters in both series were in a decent enough place where it wasn't a massive cliffhanger readers were waiting for, and so I could leave them for a little bit. And then I thought, well, I'm going to go back to basics. I'm going to write the sixth "Afterlife Calls" book. Then I got to a certain point in book six, and I was like, well, this is going to directly affect the next few books, if not the entire series, because of, like I mentioned earlier, building on the lore and expanding it, introducing new characters, all those things.
And so I skipped ahead, and I wrote book 7, and I wrote book 8, and I outlined part of book 9 and started writing it as well. Because I wasn't sure what I needed. It was through writing the opening of book 9 that I realized. And then, weirdly, after I had the flu, I started to hear the characters from "Hollywood Romance" again and went back to that.
It's only because I've slowed down, I feel like the books are in a better place. That sounds like they've crossed over or something. I'm happy with the books. For me, I think what it is a case of is that periodically I go into, like, a period of hibernation, if you will, where I recharge. I am exploring that creativity again.
My plan this year is to release two books. There's a possibility that it will be three, but that's only because I took the time last year to write them. If I hadn't given myself that room to explore, I don't think I'd be as happy with where they are now. In terms of the actual plot, I like to plan slightly far ahead, but not too far. That allows me to foreshadow without getting bored. I'm sitting on book six, but I'm writing book twelve, and that's a bit much for me.
When I get to a certain point, I just want to finish the book and share it with people because it's been in my head for so long. I came up with "Afterlife Calls" in 2020, published the first book in 2021, and I was already thinking about book 5. By the time book 3 was out, I was thinking about book 10. In my head, the characters have done a lot more than what other people have read, and there's a lot more in the cast. There's some really new stuff that I'm so excited to share with people, and I'm trying not to give stuff away. It's really hard.
Involving your readers
[00:32:13] Matty: I think the consideration of reader expectations is really important. One of the lessons people could take from what you just said is that you don't necessarily need to choose a release schedule and stick with it forever. The trick is making sure that readers understand what the ride is going to be like. If you have multiple series as you do, then a good approach might be having different schedules for different ones. If you publish a couple of books and set an expectation that they're going to get one every four months or something like that, it requires a certain level of communication with the reader base to say, "This is why there's going to be a little bit of a stretch before the next one." Or you organize your release schedule across series in a way that they're consistent among the series, but they don't have to be consistent with each other. You might have one that you're publishing once a year, you might have one that you're publishing three times a year, and the readers of each of those series will have that expectation.
[00:33:13] Kristina: Yeah, and I think this is a good tip when people go, "I don't know what to write about in my newsletter on my socials." Talk about your writing process because I've been honest with my authors and my authors with my readers and said, look, I'm knackered. I can't write “Hollywood Romance” yet because “Hollywood Heartbreak” destroyed me. It did, you know. There is a piece of my soul in every one of my books, but that one—I cried reading it every single time I got to a certain scene, I cried.
I've never had that with any of my other books, and I've published 20. I was in pieces every time. That book took so much effort. I said to people, "Look, Hollywood Romance is coming eventually, but I can't tell you when." I've been quite frank since the Mean Girls murder came out, saying how drained I have been and how I've needed to recharge. Some people are afraid to be open and honest with their readers. If that's you, fair enough, but I was upfront and said, "I cannot keep going at this pace."
I need to slow down. Every single one of my readers, whether they've been with me from the start or found me from my last September book, has said, "We would rather you look after yourself and be in this for the long haul than exhaust yourself." I go through Hollywood romance, and I feel I can spot more minute details in it that add to the world and really bring it out than if I had been just constantly trying to focus on, "Is this going to hit the release date? Is this going to be out on exactly the date I've set?"
So when I do pre-orders, I will always set it for the furthest date possible. I say to my readers, "I've set this for a year's time. This is where the book is now. It will probably be out sooner, but, you know, I have six chronic health issues. Occasionally, that does put a spanner in the works." They understand that, and that makes a massive difference because it almost feels like it's a load off. For them to understand and know that they will still be there, still enjoying my books, still sharing them with their friends, that they are the kind of readers that you want. Yes, you'll need the casual readers as well because they do make a difference as well, but it is the superfans who will help you grow that platform and turn into friends sometimes.
Matty: Yeah, and I think that people, your superfans are going to personally want you to do whatever's most healthy for you. But I think maybe a final tip that I'm gleaning from what you're saying is that I think sometimes people force themselves through burnout, through personal burnout, because they think they're achieving a professional goal.
But I think in the end, your personal well-being is so caught up in the quality of the work you can put out that it's not just a personal decision, it's a professional decision if you say exactly as you're saying, "Look, I need to give myself another month, I need to ask my publisher for another month, another six months, whatever it is." Because that's not only going to be a better personal result for me, but it's going to be a better professional result for the reader, a better experience for the reader.
Kristina: Totally. I was originally planning to release Mean Girl October 22. I'd got it up for pre-order on everywhere but Amazon, basically. And it got to September when I had those beta reader comments, and I was like, "I can't put this out. I know it needs changing." I was upfront and told them I was pushing it until the end of March.
The amount of comments I got from people saying, "We understand, take a break, make it the best you can be, we will still be there." Then the level of comments I got when it came out in March, saying it was the best book I'd ever written. This from people who've read every single one of my books.
You know, I don't want to say that the burnout was worth it, but slowing down was worth it because, isn't that the kind of comments people want from their readers? Saying how good the book is? You don't get comments like one of my readers, the only review that I can remember verbatim, is one of my ARC readers called me “the queen of character writing.” And that's always stuck with me. You don't get that from constantly burning yourself out and resenting what you're doing. You get that from loving the craft, from loving your characters, from spending time with the world, and engaging with your readers.
Matty: So great. Well, I can't think of a better way to wrap up a conversation about the right time to release. So, Kristina, thank you so much. Please let the listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and your work and everything you do online.
Kristina: Yeah, so the best place to find me is KristinaAdamsAuthor.com, and that's where you'll find all of my books, including the stuff that I plan to release this year. I've been doing a few blog posts about stuff that happened in 2023 as well, like my five days of power dressing experiment and stuff I've learned about the microbiome. It's really random stuff, but it kind of helps me to think and digest it, if you will, when I write that kind of stuff. And if you want to find my HR stuff that I've been talking about, that's KristinaProffitt.com.
Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
Kristina: Thank you for having me.
[00:00:06] Kristina: Hello, thanks for having me back. I'm good, how are you?
[00:00:09] Matty: I'm doing great, and it is lovely to have you back.
Meet Kristina Adams
[00:00:11] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Kristina Adams is the author of 17 novels, 3 books for writers, and too many blog posts to count. She publishes mother-daughter ghost stories as Casey Adams. When she's not writing, she's playing with her dog or inflicting cooking experiments on her boyfriend. Kristina was a guest on a podcast way back in episode 94, debunking writing myths.
I invited Kristina back to talk about "Right Timed Release." We're going to be talking about a couple of aspects here. I think when people care about the idea of a release schedule, their thought is, you know, what are the professional, what are the sales, what are the marketing drivers for it?
What drove Kristina's release schedule?
[00:00:46] Matty: And I thought that would be a good place to start, but we're not going to stop there. But I thought to give some context for the conversation, Kristina, why don't you just describe at different points of your author career, what was the schedule on which you were releasing books and what were the business reasons behind the decisions you have made about that release schedule.
[00:01:04] Kristina: So when I started out, I was still working a full-time job, and I was doing about one a year. “What Happened in New York” was 2016. “What Happened in London” was 2017. I think I did my first non-fiction "Productivity for Writers" in the same year, about six months later. I did one book in 2018, and then from 2019 to basically the start of 2023, I was doing three to five books a year.
That was from finishing the "What Happens In" series, starting "Afterlife Calls," and moving on to the "What Happens In" spin-off, "Hollywood Gossip." The sales for "What Happened in" didn't really take off until the penultimate book in the series came out. So I was always like, I'm not going to judge a series until I've got three or four books in that series out because I don't know if it's going to be successful. I do tend to write things that are quite serial as well, and I don't class them as cliffhangers. Certain readers class how I write as cliffhangers, so I need to give people a satisfactory ending, to a point, so that if I do have that gap in publication, then they're not coming after me with pitchforks and stuff. You know, and so I was constantly chasing that.
Then in January 2020, I became full-time self-employed. So then I had more time on my hands to work on my books. I was trying to recreate the success of "What Happened in" books. That didn't happen with my second series. It doesn't resonate with people as much. It's almost more of an experimental series at this point. When I interviewed Lee Savino, she described it as the weird donkey in the back. I, and you have the fancy show ponies or whatever it is. I'm not really into horses; I'm a dog person. But you have the show ponies that lure people in, and you get them in that way, which would be the "What Happens In" or "Afterlife Course" series. Then you've got the weird donkeys in the back, which is the "Hollywood Gossip" books for me.
And it's such an analogy; three years ago, she said it, and it still sticks with me. But it is because Hollywood gossip is heavy. It covers so many things and a lot of detail. It covers alcoholism, eating disorders, death, grief, bullying in the workplace, and so many more things I can't even remember because it was just emotionally exhausting to write. It taught me a lot about myself, about writing, about my audience. I tend to find the people who love the Hollywood gossip books are the ones who will literally inhale anything I write, so they are like my super fans when they enjoy the Hollywood gossip books.
[00:03:41] Matty: And just orient me. The “Hollywood Gossip” ones, are they the show ponies or are they the weird donkeys?
[00:03:46] Kristina: They're the donkeys in the back. And this the show pony is "What Happened in New York."
And this is the first book anyway, and then there's five books in this series, and that leads into this series, which is a spin-off set in the same universe. So the Hollywood gossip books are more told from the perspective of the celebrities, whereas "What Happened in New York" and the books in that series are more told from the perspective of people like you and me, who are like, "What is this madness?" and then "Afterlife Calls" is Ghosts.
Based on what I'd experienced with the "What Happens In" books, I was trying to make sure I'd got four or five books in the series before I started marketing it properly, you know, doing the emails and doing the ads and stuff like that. That meant that I was writing Hollywood gossip and Afterlife Calls kind of alongside each other.
The creative price of too-rapid release
[00:04:43] Kristina: And it's, I do get bored easily, so it's nice to have that change of pace between the two. So I'd kind of alternate between which series I was working on. And it got to the point where after how stressful "Hollywood Heartbreak" was, and how far I pushed myself as a writer in later "Afterlife Calls " books, I just had no creative energy left.
I was like, I can't keep writing at this speed because I'm just going to quit altogether. And that was when I was like, Okay, so I need to slow down on my writing so that the quality doesn't suffer. Also, if I'm relying on my books as my sole source of income, I don't feel like I can enjoy the writing process, which is the thing I actually like. I hate publishing. I hate that process. But I also don't know how to outsource it for a bunch of reasons. So I had to find a way to do it that worked for me, and that has been slowing down. It's meant going back to doing writing. It's meant that the last Hollywood gossip book is with beta readers at the moment, and then I've got drafts of the next three "Afterlife Calls" books already just because I've been going back to writing and enjoying that writing process and thinking about some of the upcoming lore that I'm going to need. But the next lot of "Afterlife Calls" books, because there's a lot more, that book six expands on a lot of what's happened in the first five books.
If I was still releasing four to five books a year, there is no way I could have done that on this level. I couldn't have really done the research that I needed for some of the next books. I couldn't have enjoyed the process; I wouldn't have had the energy to grow other aspects of my business that make me money and still give me the dopamine from having finished something. And I would have been a shriveled heap on the floor, you know? I just couldn't do it.
And for me, when I was younger, I always said I wanted to make money from writing. I never specified what kind of writing it was. There was definitely a part of me that was like, am I a failure because I'm not doing it purely from writing fiction? But I can't keep publishing at that pace. It's not good for any of my health issues. It's not good for my books. It's not good for my readers. So I would much rather pull back and have that quality and enjoy writing for HR businesses as well, which I do.
What drove Kristina's rapid release schedule?
[00:07:09] Matty: When you were deciding to move to a more rapid release schedule than you originally had been doing, what were the drivers behind that? Because of things you are hearing in the industry, like other authors whose careers were models for you, primarily clamor from your readers, what was the impetus there?
[00:07:33] Kristina: It was always one of my goals to be able to publish four or five books in a year, just because, I don't know, mentally, that's what I wanted to be able to do. But yeah, it was that whole, everyone was saying, if you're not publishing this amount of books a year, you're going to lose readers, and you're not going to have the read-through, and you're not going to make as much money, and blah blah blah.
Keeping the writing sacred
[00:07:51] Kristina: I really had to reevaluate my priorities and take a step back and be like, well, do I want to rely on my creativity all day, every day, writing eight hours a day, like Nora Roberts? Or do I want to really keep that as sacred for me and enjoy that process? And if I had just kept going on that scale, I would have well and truly hated it, and I don't think I'd finish "The Afterlife Calls" books or "Hollywood Romance," to be honest. Because I can't express to you how much I was resenting having to finish the last book that I released back in March last year, which was "The Mean Girls Murder." And, you know, my readers have all said it's my best book ever, and their reviews have been amazing for it. But because I put so much work into it, and I'd put so much work into the previous "Afterlife Calls" book, and then found "Hollywood Heartbreak" so draining, it just got to the point where I needed to recharge and kind of reset because those goals of following the industry trends and doing what other people told me to do just didn't work for me.
Never say "I'm only" about your writing
[00:09:03] Matty: Yeah. I think that there are two things that this topic reminded me of. One is that I hear this somewhat less than I used to, but I still occasionally hear people saying, "I'm only writing a book a year." And I want to say, Dude, you're writing a book a year! that is a super impressive accomplishment, and I'm sure that there's some multi-millionaire author out there who's saying, "I only have 30 books, if I had 50, you know, then I'd be a real writer," or something like that, and anything I can do to encourage people not to have that kind of attitude about their work is good.
[00:09:40] Matty: But it also makes me think that, I think goals are so easily influenced by the community that you put yourself in. I realized this a couple of years ago that I was joining a lot of virtual groups, taking a lot of classes, and reading a lot of stuff or listening to podcasts. Almost by accident, I had affiliated myself with rapid-release authors, authors who were writing three or four or five books a year. Without really thinking about it critically, I started applying those standards to myself.
It wasn't until I started looking at how I was similar to and different from those authors that I realized trying to apply that business approach to my own writing just wasn't working, both for personal reasons, like you're describing, and for professional reasons. So, I do think it's important for people not to, especially early in their author career, affiliate themselves with groups before they are aware of these nuances and then stick with it uncritically.
Always be assessing whether the group of people you're surrounding yourself with is aligned with what you want to accomplish. It's not that one of the goals is good and one is bad, but one is more appropriate and one is less appropriate. You can really mess yourself up if you start holding yourself up to a measuring stick that is different than what's appropriate for you.
The need for sustainability in an author career
[00:11:04] Kristina: Yeah, I saw a really good video the other day by the YouTuber Marques Brownlee. He does tech videos and he's noticed a pattern where a lot of YouTubers have been quitting lately. He did a really good video on creative burnout, talking about it in comparison to YouTubers, but a lot of it resonated with me as well. He was saying, you know, you can love what you do, but it will still burn you out. He had this good analogy where he compared it to a Daft Punk music video that I forgot to look up. In the music video, a character starts walking, then running, sprinting, becomes a robot, and at the end, disintegrates because they're running so fast. It's a metaphor for burnout. You're running so fast; there is nothing left of you.
Just because you love something, it doesn't mean it can't exhaust you. That's what happened with me in fiction writing, and that's why I had to separate out what I was doing because it just wasn't sustainable. I loved it, but I hated it at the same time.
[00:12:14] Matty: Yeah, I think that point about burnout, people associate it with having to do things they don't want to. That reminder that no, you can burn out doing the things you love is a great one.
[00:12:24] Kristina: Well, it's interesting because I wish I could remember what psychologist said it, but apparently you're more likely to burn out if you love what you do because you will put more effort in. That really resonated with me. I was putting so much effort in, but the extra effort wasn't necessarily increasing my profits. And it's like, well, am I doing the wrong thing? Do I need to try this tactic instead?
Actually, you just need to put the brakes on. Because it's not chasing publishing that fulfills me. It's spending time with my characters and seeing my reader reactions. So that kind of middle bit is where I was spending all my time, when actually it's the beginning and the end that I enjoy. If I'm too focused on the publishing part of it, I never get time to actually enjoy the fun parts, at which point it gets to, well, why am I bothering?
Distinguishing burnout from temporary boredom
[00:13:14] Matty: Do you have any tips for how to distinguish true burnout from something more passing? As an example, I'm working on a non-fiction book; I'm now on my, I don't know, third or fourth or fifth pass through it, and I just have to say at this point I'm pretty bored with it. But that's just a passing thing. I recognize that as just a passing thing; pretty soon, I'm going to slog through the 150 pages, and then it'll be done, and that'll be great. But I think that's quite different than burnout. Are there markers that you noticed in yourself or you've noticed in other authors that say, no, this is truly burnout and now you have to look at changing things?
[00:13:53] Kristina: So I've learned a few authors get burnout, and quite often they will say, oh, I'm feeling depressed. It often starts with feeling depressed or feeling a bit more anxious or maybe they get sick more often. They tend to have more germs because the increased stress kills your good gut bacteria. So the bad bacteria comes in and has a party, and then you get the flu for three weeks.
Yeah, it does mess with you. So some of the other things, I suffer from hair loss. I developed new allergies that I never had before. I can't have rosemary oil on my scalp because it burns, and I've never had an issue with rosemary before. But it's little things, like you might be a bit snippier, you might lose your temper a bit more, feel angrier, get annoyed at something, like, you know, the dog's barking because another dog's walking past and you lose your temper.
If you've got other health conditions, like I've got asthma, for example, you might find they get exacerbated. My asthma is a lot more sensitive to things like candles than it used to be, or deodorant even.
You may find that you're just empty. I think that's the biggest thing, is there is nothing left in the tank. You open your work in progress and you go, what are words? And you want to write, you want to spend time with your characters, but you have absolutely no idea what to do, even if there's an outline right in front of you. You might try to type and you're like, is that a complete sentence? And then you might write that sentence and then you're like, I can't keep going.
The red flag of writing out of a sense of obligation
[00:15:19] Kristina: You might even resent opening your work in progress because it feels like you're doing it out of obligation. And I definitely think if it ever feels like you're writing something out of obligation, it is time to take a break from it. And that's part of why I took so long to do Hollywood Romance because it is very different from the previous book in that it is more of a romance, whereas Hollywood Heartbreak was, let's turn my characters to shreds emotionally. Because of that, it did rip me to shreds emotionally as well. When you're writing about grief, eating disorders, alcoholism, and all these things in one book, on top of having it overlap with previous books that you've written, worrying about the timeline and stuff, it really messes with your head.
The other thing is, I became a lot more scatterbrained, and it was through that that I realized I probably got ADHD. It really heightened that, to the point where I could not function, and it probably took me, well, I don't know if I'm fully recovered now, if I'm entirely honest with you. It was part of why we put the Writer's Mindset on hold because I could not keep going. I had to cut back. We spoke to Becca Syme on September 22 about burnout. We talked about people who burn out repeatedly. She said it's the people who want to go back to how things were before they burn out that are more likely to burn out again because you are repeating the same pattern.
To avoid that burnout, you have to stop and change how you do things. That's why I stopped and changed how I did things, doing client work, publishing my books, doing the podcast, juggling my health issues, juggling the dog's health issues, it's a lot. Sometimes those little things that you don't consciously realize do drain you. So it is those little things, I think.
[00:17:31] Matty: Yeah, I like the example that you had given earlier about the fact that you sometimes had multiple projects going on. This is more a way to address those things that are more temporary, not true burnout, but just exhaustion with a particular project. I'm almost always only working on one fiction work at a time, but I always have a little pool of non-fiction work. If I start thinking, I really don't want to write another chapter of this novel, I'll have something to switch to. Then I find that refreshes me because it's using a different part of my brain, exercising different muscles. I can go back to the fiction work more refreshed.
Deciding what to stop
[00:18:11] Matty: The example of the Writer's Cookbook, that you did the work but continued the podcast, that's a whole different flavor of decision-making. I imagine that decision to stop doing something you've been doing for so long and were so invested in was quite difficult but necessary for you to avoid this burnout. Can you talk a little bit about that decision?
[00:18:35] Kristina: Yeah, so I'd been feeling pretty exhausted anyway for most of 2021-2022. We had the talks with Becca Syme in August-September 2022, and then Ellie and I went away for a few days for a business conference. Ellie suggested to me, you know, do you want to put this on hold because it is eating into so much of your time?
I did the math and thought, well, I have limited time and energy. The podcast was taking up a significant amount of my time, leaving me with less time for novel writing (the fun stuff) and less time for client work (the thing that pays the bills). And the client work, I kind of see how the nonfiction serves as a reset, a change of pace, a change of focus, but it's still the writing muscles.
Analyzing the trifecta: fun, energy, and money
We got to the point where, you know what? I think it's better to put this on hold because I truly did not want to do it anymore. I hated it. Ellie works full time and has her own stuff to deal with.
It got to the point where it wasn't fun; it was draining and felt more like an obligation. The same happened with the blogs on the Writer's Cookbook. I didn't want to write them anymore. It didn't feel fun, had a lower ROI than everything else I was doing, and took a lot of energy. That's kind of the trifecta, if you will. Is it fun? How much energy does it take? Is it making me money? If the answer is no to all those things, I'm quite harsh these days, and it ends up going in the bin.
I don't always enjoy posting to LinkedIn, but it gets me client work. It's semi-fun because I get to talk to people, raise awareness about things that matter to me, like disability in the workplace, and I get money from it. Whereas the podcast won't make a minimum wage, and I hated doing it, and Ellie didn't have the time to do it. So there was no reason for us to keep going.
[00:20:48] Matty: That sounds like a pretty straightforward decision.
[00:20:51] Kristina: Well, exactly. The fun part for me is talking to other people. And I can do that by being a guest on their podcast.
[00:20:56] Matty: Yeah. I like that trifecta, and I think the trick is taking a moment to step back and apply those considerations to the work you're doing. It's a whole other thing. Every once in a while, after spending hours editing a podcast episode or whatever, I think, can I justify continuing to do this? So far, I have because I love it. It takes a lot of time and doesn't make me a lot of money. It's hard balancing personal considerations like I love doing this against the business considerations, which is, I could be spending my time some other way and making more money. I think the pointer to step back and remember to do that assessment periodically is super important.
The creative value of stepping away from the work
[00:21:41] Kristina: I get asked quite a lot how you let go because you seem so good at sacrificing things. I'm like, because I don't have a choice. When you get to the point where getting out of bed is painful and more tiring than staying in bed, you have to prioritize. You have to choose to do those few stretches and a meditation over doing some podcast editing. Personally, if I don't walk the dog, if I don't do some stretches, if I don't take a hot or an exceptionally cold shower, the blood flow is not going, and everything hurts more. So I need that movement to relax the muscles and be able to do more work. I've not done as much exercise the last few days, and I can feel it. Several of my muscles that are bad are a lot more painful than they would normally be if I'd taken 10, 15, 20 minutes out of my day to do some yoga.
So, obviously, that's my fault because I've not been prioritizing it. But this whole "you need to rest," it's not always as simple as you need to spend more time in bed. It's about that change of pace and reassessing your priorities. Is it more important to get out, get some fresh air, spend some time in nature, or is it more important to give yourself eye strain from editing that next chapter when you don't really want to do it?
[00:23:07] Matty: Yeah, this is something I continually struggle with. So this is more of a "do as I say, not as I do." But one approach I used to try to trick myself into this is to treat those things that are easy to set aside like a business assignment. Putting an entry on my calendar that says after my writing sprint, "Go for a walk," and it's on my calendar like a business meeting. So it's a little bit harder to say, "I could go for a walk, or I could go review and refine my Facebook ads," because it's, you know, you go review and refine your Facebook ads, you get a little hopefully more or less immediate sense of accomplishment by doing that. Maybe you get an actual bump in financial payback by doing that. Trying to keep in mind that the walk is just as important for different reasons for your long-term well-being, personally and professionally. It's very hard.
I mean, I've interviewed a number of people, and I'll try to remember to put links to these episodes in the show notes for this one, but I've interviewed a bunch of people about incorporating exercise and movement into a creative life. And you know what, this shouldn't be this hard, but it's this hard. It's hard to do.
[00:24:26] Kristina: It's so hard because you want to spend all your time writing. But legitimately, no one can spend all their time writing. I remember with my previous book, "The Mean Girls Murder," the first round of beta readers, they were like, "I get what you're trying to do. It's not working." It's not working because I upped the ante so much with the previous book, "The Witch’s Sacrifice," that when I tried to tone it down and make it a bit more cutesy with Book five, no. No, you need to redo this. So I was like, crap, what do I do? And that was probably the most significant rewrite I've done since some of my early books. And I had no idea what to do.
But I decided to just take Millie for a walk to clear my head. And I actually discovered somewhere new in our local area, which is where the books are set. It was the most gorgeous graveyard, and it's so pretty to walk around. The way the light comes through the trees, it's so atmospheric. And when you're writing ghost stories, come on. From walking around that, I came up with the new antagonist for the book, who is a psychopathic Victorian doctor. If I hadn't taken that time out to take Millie for a walk, I never would have come up with him. But it was walking through that Victorian graveyard, with the light coming through the trees, and the layout of it, and the church, and how secluded it is, even though it's right in the middle of town. That helped me come up with these ideas.
I think that's the thing—when you're stuck, or bored, or restless, or pick any negative emotion, snapping yourself out of it by getting out of the house can be quite underestimated. I don't know if you find this, Matty, but I find having a dog quite useful because when I don't want to get up and get out, she won't give me a choice. She won't go to the toilet in the back garden. So to make sure she's been to the toilet, we have to leave the house.
[00:26:27] Matty: Yeah, letting your dog relieve herself is probably the ultimate incentive to get out of the house, but yes, having dogs does help. I would also encourage, because I'm suspecting that a lot of the people who are listening have this same issue of, "I'm just going to do this one more thing, one more thing, one more thing," and then you realize it's the end of the day and you don't have time anymore. It's dark, you can't go for a walk. I would encourage people, if nothing else, to try this experiment of actually putting an item on your calendar that says, "Get outside, go for a walk, go to your coffee shop," and don't write, maybe.
[00:27:00] Kristina: Socialize. I find that really helpful. I've made some new friends locally in the last year, and when I'm in a bad mood, I will either text one of them and say, "Do you want to go for a walk?" or I will go to my other friend who runs a dog-friendly cafe, so I can vent to one of them and get it out of my system, either get food or exercise, and I feel like a different person when I get home an hour or two later. And that does make a difference, to have those friends that you see in person, and that exercise, that nutrition, that, you know, a problem shared is a problem halved, and all of those things, it does make a massive difference.
[00:27:40] Matty: Yeah, this isn't seeing people in person, but I do have a daily writing sprint between 12 o'clock every day except Friday, and it's with a small group of fellow writers. I really like that because we don't socialize a lot. That's part of the rule. This is mainly sprinting, but there's always like a minute or two at the beginning, a minute or two at the end where we kind of catch each other up. The other thing that's helpful is it's a marker in the day. So when I am successful at exercising, it is usually because that's what I do right after the sprint. Like I know 12:30 to two is the sprint and then two to three is when I go for the walk. It's also a marker. like it keeps me from just doing administrative stuff that trickles through the whole day because what I always try to do is restrict anything I'm doing other than writing to the time before 12:30. It is kind of a marker like that.
Right-timed release
[00:29:05] Matty: Well, I think we've shared a bunch of great tips about avoiding burnout, recognizing burnout, and avoiding burnout. Let's take the conversation back to the idea of right-timed release. So, as somebody who puts out more or less one fiction book a year—one of my pieces of advice is don't let anybody say I'm only publishing one book a year. That's just wrong. But as a way to wrap up, talk a little bit about the right-timed release schedule that you set for yourself once you've recognized that we're contending with this burnout.
[00:29:37] Kristina: Yeah, all I knew was that after I finished "The Mean Girls Murder" and "Hollywood Heartbreak," the characters in both series were in a decent enough place where it wasn't a massive cliffhanger readers were waiting for, and so I could leave them for a little bit. And then I thought, well, I'm going to go back to basics. I'm going to write the sixth "Afterlife Calls" book. Then I got to a certain point in book six, and I was like, well, this is going to directly affect the next few books, if not the entire series, because of, like I mentioned earlier, building on the lore and expanding it, introducing new characters, all those things.
And so I skipped ahead, and I wrote book 7, and I wrote book 8, and I outlined part of book 9 and started writing it as well. Because I wasn't sure what I needed. It was through writing the opening of book 9 that I realized. And then, weirdly, after I had the flu, I started to hear the characters from "Hollywood Romance" again and went back to that.
It's only because I've slowed down, I feel like the books are in a better place. That sounds like they've crossed over or something. I'm happy with the books. For me, I think what it is a case of is that periodically I go into, like, a period of hibernation, if you will, where I recharge. I am exploring that creativity again.
My plan this year is to release two books. There's a possibility that it will be three, but that's only because I took the time last year to write them. If I hadn't given myself that room to explore, I don't think I'd be as happy with where they are now. In terms of the actual plot, I like to plan slightly far ahead, but not too far. That allows me to foreshadow without getting bored. I'm sitting on book six, but I'm writing book twelve, and that's a bit much for me.
When I get to a certain point, I just want to finish the book and share it with people because it's been in my head for so long. I came up with "Afterlife Calls" in 2020, published the first book in 2021, and I was already thinking about book 5. By the time book 3 was out, I was thinking about book 10. In my head, the characters have done a lot more than what other people have read, and there's a lot more in the cast. There's some really new stuff that I'm so excited to share with people, and I'm trying not to give stuff away. It's really hard.
Involving your readers
[00:32:13] Matty: I think the consideration of reader expectations is really important. One of the lessons people could take from what you just said is that you don't necessarily need to choose a release schedule and stick with it forever. The trick is making sure that readers understand what the ride is going to be like. If you have multiple series as you do, then a good approach might be having different schedules for different ones. If you publish a couple of books and set an expectation that they're going to get one every four months or something like that, it requires a certain level of communication with the reader base to say, "This is why there's going to be a little bit of a stretch before the next one." Or you organize your release schedule across series in a way that they're consistent among the series, but they don't have to be consistent with each other. You might have one that you're publishing once a year, you might have one that you're publishing three times a year, and the readers of each of those series will have that expectation.
[00:33:13] Kristina: Yeah, and I think this is a good tip when people go, "I don't know what to write about in my newsletter on my socials." Talk about your writing process because I've been honest with my authors and my authors with my readers and said, look, I'm knackered. I can't write “Hollywood Romance” yet because “Hollywood Heartbreak” destroyed me. It did, you know. There is a piece of my soul in every one of my books, but that one—I cried reading it every single time I got to a certain scene, I cried.
I've never had that with any of my other books, and I've published 20. I was in pieces every time. That book took so much effort. I said to people, "Look, Hollywood Romance is coming eventually, but I can't tell you when." I've been quite frank since the Mean Girls murder came out, saying how drained I have been and how I've needed to recharge. Some people are afraid to be open and honest with their readers. If that's you, fair enough, but I was upfront and said, "I cannot keep going at this pace."
I need to slow down. Every single one of my readers, whether they've been with me from the start or found me from my last September book, has said, "We would rather you look after yourself and be in this for the long haul than exhaust yourself." I go through Hollywood romance, and I feel I can spot more minute details in it that add to the world and really bring it out than if I had been just constantly trying to focus on, "Is this going to hit the release date? Is this going to be out on exactly the date I've set?"
So when I do pre-orders, I will always set it for the furthest date possible. I say to my readers, "I've set this for a year's time. This is where the book is now. It will probably be out sooner, but, you know, I have six chronic health issues. Occasionally, that does put a spanner in the works." They understand that, and that makes a massive difference because it almost feels like it's a load off. For them to understand and know that they will still be there, still enjoying my books, still sharing them with their friends, that they are the kind of readers that you want. Yes, you'll need the casual readers as well because they do make a difference as well, but it is the superfans who will help you grow that platform and turn into friends sometimes.
Matty: Yeah, and I think that people, your superfans are going to personally want you to do whatever's most healthy for you. But I think maybe a final tip that I'm gleaning from what you're saying is that I think sometimes people force themselves through burnout, through personal burnout, because they think they're achieving a professional goal.
But I think in the end, your personal well-being is so caught up in the quality of the work you can put out that it's not just a personal decision, it's a professional decision if you say exactly as you're saying, "Look, I need to give myself another month, I need to ask my publisher for another month, another six months, whatever it is." Because that's not only going to be a better personal result for me, but it's going to be a better professional result for the reader, a better experience for the reader.
Kristina: Totally. I was originally planning to release Mean Girl October 22. I'd got it up for pre-order on everywhere but Amazon, basically. And it got to September when I had those beta reader comments, and I was like, "I can't put this out. I know it needs changing." I was upfront and told them I was pushing it until the end of March.
The amount of comments I got from people saying, "We understand, take a break, make it the best you can be, we will still be there." Then the level of comments I got when it came out in March, saying it was the best book I'd ever written. This from people who've read every single one of my books.
You know, I don't want to say that the burnout was worth it, but slowing down was worth it because, isn't that the kind of comments people want from their readers? Saying how good the book is? You don't get comments like one of my readers, the only review that I can remember verbatim, is one of my ARC readers called me “the queen of character writing.” And that's always stuck with me. You don't get that from constantly burning yourself out and resenting what you're doing. You get that from loving the craft, from loving your characters, from spending time with the world, and engaging with your readers.
Matty: So great. Well, I can't think of a better way to wrap up a conversation about the right time to release. So, Kristina, thank you so much. Please let the listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and your work and everything you do online.
Kristina: Yeah, so the best place to find me is KristinaAdamsAuthor.com, and that's where you'll find all of my books, including the stuff that I plan to release this year. I've been doing a few blog posts about stuff that happened in 2023 as well, like my five days of power dressing experiment and stuff I've learned about the microbiome. It's really random stuff, but it kind of helps me to think and digest it, if you will, when I write that kind of stuff. And if you want to find my HR stuff that I've been talking about, that's KristinaProffitt.com.
Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
Kristina: Thank you for having me.
