Episode 210 - Constructing a Compelling Series with Sara Rosett

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Sara Rosett discusses Constructing a Compelling Series, including the three types of series; how to extend your series beyond your original plan; preparing your readers for changes in your series; what happens when the flat arc protagonist is overshadowed by the antagonist; using a spin-off to extend a series; supplementing a series with short stories, or using a short story to experiment with a series concept; dealing with the challenges of being locked into your story world; and bringing a series to an end.

Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of 30 mysteries for readers who enjoy atmospheric settings and puzzling whodunits. She hosts two podcasts: MYSTERY BOOKS PODCAST for readers and, for writers, the WISH I’D KNOWN THEN PODCAST with Jami Albright. Sara also writes nonfiction for authors, including HOW TO OUTLINE A COZY MYSTERY and HOW TO WRITE A SERIES.

Episode Links

Author website: https://www.SaraRosett.com
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/sararosett/

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Sara Rosette. Hey, Sara, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:05] Sara: Good, how are you?
 
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great. Thank you.
 
Meet Sara Rosett
 
[00:00:08] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Sara Rosette is the USA Today bestselling author of 30 mysteries for readers who enjoy atmospheric settings and puzzling whodunits.
 
She hosts two podcasts, the Mystery Book Podcast, that sounds good, for readers and for writers. The Wish I'd Known Then podcast, which I love, she co-hosts that with Jami Albright, and she also writes nonfiction for authors, including "How to Outline a Cozy Mystery" and "How to Write a Series."
 
Sara's background as a series author
 
[00:00:33] Matty: I was very intrigued with the "How to Write a Series" topic, so I invited Sara to the podcast to talk about that very topic.
 
And I thought it would be helpful, Sara, to just start out, give us a little background on your own series, so we have some context for the conversation.
 
[00:00:48] Sara: Sure. Yeah. I started out writing cozy mysteries. I was traditionally published first, and I wrote a 10-book cozy mystery series about a military spouse, which is what I was. Somehow, I thought this could be the hook for the series, that it's about a person who moves around a lot and is involved in military life, because that's something people don't know about.
 
And then, I transitioned into a hybrid author, still doing traditional cozies. I also did some indie books. So, I have a series that is a throwback to classic romantic suspense. It's more in the style of Mary Stewart and Elizabeth Peters, if you're familiar with those authors. It involves travel, mystery, intrigue, some murders, some not, and art theft. It's a mix of all the things I love. These books are cozy-ish but not purely cozy. They have mysteries, but they're not straight mysteries. They don't fit neatly into any one category. It's my first foray into indie publishing.
 
Then, I thought I might do better if I wrote a straight cozy as an indie author. So, I wrote a series about a location scout who's working in England, trying to find locations for a Jane Austen adaptation. It's a modern mystery set in England, and I got to indulge my love for all things Jane Austen and country houses. I got to explore these locations, and it did well. After that, I was really into reading 1920s and 1930s Golden Age mysteries, and I thought it would be great to write a series set in that time period.
 
So, I took the same location from the series about the location scout in England and went back to the 1920s, setting a series in that village. That's how my "High Society Lady Detective" series came about. It's by far the most popular series I have, and I'm continuing to write it. The other two series, I've kind of tapered off, and I'm not writing novels in them anymore. I might write short stories or do some special projects with the other series. But for now, I'm focused on the 1920s country house mystery genre.
 
[00:03:21] Matty: Oh, my goodness. We have hours and hours worth of conversation to have here. We'll have to try to control ourselves.
 
Complying (or not) with Genre Expectations
 
[00:03:28] Matty: So, the one you mentioned had some murder, some not. Is that a series or was it? A series, were those standalones.
 
[00:03:35] Sara: I originally thought, okay, this will be a trilogy. It'll consist of three books. And I wrote those three books. It's one of those series that, once it finds its reader, the readers are super passionate about it, but it doesn't have a really big audience. However, the readers who love it, really love it.
 
So they would email me, asking, "Can you write more?" And I thought, okay, I could do another book. So I wrote another book. We may talk about this later in the context of extending a series. Because when I got to the end of that fourth book, I thought, "Oh, I have an idea for how I could continue the series in a new story arc." A new story arc, like the first story arc was complete in the first three books. The fourth book is a transition. Then I continued the series for a couple more books because I found a new direction for my character to explore. So it turned into a longer series than I had originally plAnnd.
 
[00:04:28] Matty: That's really interesting and something, I don't know if this is just a one-shot answer or something that maybe we can, as you mentioned, weave through the rest of our conversation, is the idea that some have murder, some do not. I was just at a book club where they were reading my Ann Kinnear suspense novel, "The Falcon and the Owl," and it's the first one that has a whodunit aspect. But there's a murder right at the beginning, and the whodunit is not related to the murder at the beginning. It's a death that doesn't appear to be a murder until later, spoiler alert, later in the story. And we had this whole conversation, as I often do on this podcast, about the trickiness of maintaining consistency in a series, such as characters, tone, and theme, but not consistency in the sense of whether it's a whodunit or not.
 
[00:05:15] Sara: The dead body?
 
[00:05:16] Matty: Yeah, where's the dead body? I'd be curious as we're talking to discuss how consistent one has to be throughout the series and those kinds of things. Any initial thoughts about that?
 
[00:05:26] Sara: Well, I think I'm always very clear in my mysteries, especially the ones that are whodunits. I make sure to introduce the murder and the cast of suspects right from the start, so readers know that these are definitely whodunits and that's the type of story they are. With these other ones, I try to convey through the blurb and the cover that they're not cozy mysteries, but they do have elements of mystery and intrigue in them. Some of the books do involve murder, but not all of them. The murder isn't the main focus. The main focus is, in the beginning, she's trying to find her ex who has disappeared, and she's involved in this more conspiratorial type of plot. That's the primary storyline. Hopefully, the cover, blurb, and the way the book starts convey that it's not a whodunit. It's more about suspense, possibly with intrigue and travel. There are more travel cozies now, but because this one includes travel and international settings, people realize it may not be a Small Town Cozy.
 
The three types of series
 
[00:07:12] Matty: So in your book, "How to Write a Series," you talk about three basic types of series. So what are those?
 
[00:07:17] Sara: Okay, so you've got the multi-protagonist series, which is like this: you have a new protagonist with each book, and the books are linked somehow. This is very common in romance; a lot of times, it'll be like a family or a group of friends, and each book is about a different friend.
 
Then you have a single-protagonist series where you follow one protagonist throughout the series. These can be broken down into two different types. You've got the flat-arc protagonist who doesn't change a whole lot. This is like, for example, James Bond or Mary Poppins; people who don't undergo a significant change throughout the story, but because they're in the story, things change. I mean, if Poirot hadn't been on the Orient Express, it would be a completely different story, right? So because he's there, he causes things to happen, and things change. A lot of times, there will be small character arcs throughout the series, but it's not a massive change.
 
That's what you get in the third type, which I think of as the robust character arc, where you've got a significant change. It's kind of the classic hero's journey. You start out, go through a big adventure or quest, and then at the end, your character has changed, and that type has a natural endpoint.
 
If you think about Harry Potter, he goes through all these adventures, and at the end, there's a resolution, and it's complete, usually marking the end of that series. So, the robust character arc series lends itself well to trilogies, fantasy, and sci-fi. The flat arc, which is more episodic, is seen more in mystery series, especially those that can go on for a long time because they're more episodic. So that's a high-level overview of the different types.
 
[00:09:16] Matty: And I suppose a benefit of that first type with the multi-protagonist is that if you get bored with one, you can switch to another.
 
[00:09:24] Sara: That is right.
 
[00:09:25] Matty: And you could go almost endlessly with that, I suppose.
 
Creating variations in a multi-protagonist series
 
[00:09:28] Sara: and you can keep creating variations. For example, if it's a small town, you can just keep writing about different characters in your town, or you can have new people move in. Or if it's a family, it could be like, well, guess what? We've heard the stories of all the sisters. Now we've got cousins moving in, you know, to explore their stories. So yeah, it can be endless. Focus on getting the first book written before worrying about what type of series it might be a part of
 
[00:09:50] Matty: So in the authors that you speak with and work with, do you find that people usually know what they're going to write as they're writing their first book? Even if they don't know or aren't sophisticated enough to refer to it in the terminology that you use, do they already have a sense?
 
Or are there cases where somebody wants to write a series and they're thinking through it, and are there flats that would make you say, "Oh, I would point you here, I would point you there," based on what they want to accomplish or what they, either creatively or from a business point of view.
 
[00:10:25] Sara: Yeah, I think that's really hard because when you're first starting out, you're just trying to get the book finished. And for me, I read mysteries. I loved mystery. That was what I knew I wanted to write, and that was pretty much what I was familiar with. So I've learned all this and figured it out in my mind. I've categorized these things this way to help me figure things out as I've learned more about genres, different types of stories, story arcs, and characters. So I think a lot of that may come as you learn more. So, I think probably, in the beginning, you're just worried about finishing the first book, but I do think it is good to have a plan. For me, I knew my book was going to be a cozy, and cozies are always part of a series.
 
I mean, it's not like I've never seen cozies. They're not marketed that way anyway. So I knew it was going to be a series, and I had some vague ideas for my first series about the next books, like what the mystery plots could be about. But I did not think at all about my character, and she was a flat character. I look back now and go, "Okay, so she was a flat character." That's why a lot of the advice about the hero's journey, I was like, "This doesn't really work for Cozy." I mean, you can make it work, but she doesn't have a big "aha" moment at the end of book one and then have another "aha" moment at the end of book two. It just doesn't work like that. So yeah, I think a lot of it, you kind of work your way into it. You get the book done, and especially if you know, "Okay, my genre normally has trilogies or normally has five books," then you know that's what readers expect. That's probably what you're going to write toward anyway.
 
Are there trends in flat- versus robust-arc series?
 
[00:12:08] Matty: Do you think there are fashions or trends in that? Because on the surface, a flat arc sounds like an insult. And, I think that if one had been able to go back in time and ask the authors what their plan was, they would probably have said, "Oh, yeah, I don't plan to have this character change over time. Like it was intentional."
 
[00:12:30] Sara: It wasn't like a craft failure on their part. Do you think that's still true? Are either the robust character arc or the flat character arc still desirable among readers? Or is one more popular currently? Well, I think a lot of it depends on the genre because in mystery, readers expect mystery series to go on for like 10, 15, 20 books. They're like, "This is great." I think, and in thriller too, like Jack Reacher, that's, I would say, more of a flat character arc. He doesn't change that much, but that's a long series.
 
And then I think readers like going back to that world if they enjoy whatever world it is, fantasy, mystery, whatever. They enjoy going back to it. There's a comfort and familiarity of going, "Okay, I know who this character is. I know what I'm going to get," even if it's book 17 or whatever. The drawback is you can get bored with that as an author. You may be like, "Huh, I've written everything I can think of in this world or this series or this character."
 
And I do think modern readers expect a little bit of a character arc. Like I was reading the books from the twenties and thirties; those mysteries were basically puzzle mysteries. And you didn't really learn a whole lot about the sleuths' personal lives, just little tidbits here and there, but it wasn't like they changed and grew that much. It was more like, "here's a mystery, can you solve it?"
 
And I feel like readers want more than that now. They want something extra. They need a little bit more. They still want a good puzzle; in my genre, they want a good puzzle, but they want a little bit extra, even if it's an episodic series. I think the through-line for your episodic series, your flat arc, is really what's happening in the main character's life and all the subplots that are going on, all the other relationships. People get heavily invested in those.
 
[00:14:29] Matty: Well, I would think that if you're writing more of a flat arc series, then you have to rely more heavily on the other characters, not the secondary characters, but whoever are kind of the co-protagonists of that particular book. The cast, yeah, exactly, because, like, I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't admit this, but my only exposure to Jack Reacher is I watched one of the TV shows, and I was really more interested in the characters that were surrounding Jack Reacher than I was in Jack Reacher himself, which I thought was very interesting.
 
Now, I'll see if I get angry emails about this, but I was really not compelled by the Jack Reacher character, and then somehow I happened upon an interview with the actor who played him, and he was very engaging and entertaining, you know, seemed like the kind of guy you'd want to go out to a bar for a beer with, and I thought, man, I would have liked it a lot better if more of that had come through in the characterization. But then I said that to someone who's more familiar with the books, and they said, well, yeah, but that really wouldn't be true to the books then; that's not the kind of character he is. So, um, yeah, but I was relying on what was going on with the other characters more to retain my interest in the show.
 
[00:15:39] Sara: Yeah. And I think that happens. I mean, with a flat arc character that's compelling, you're interested in that. Hopefully, you're interested in what's going on with them, but then all the other things that are going on in the world around them, that's the thread that's going to pull people through, I think, because you're not only ready to find out what happens to Poirot or Mary Poppins; you want to know what's going on in the family or the relationships.
 
[00:16:09] Sara: And a lot of times, the flat arc characters, if they have an antagonist, sometimes the antagonist is way more interesting and fun than the protagonists. You think about James Bond and the villains; those are the fun ones that you're like, "Oh, this is interesting, what's going on here?" Sometimes the antagonist can almost overshadow the protagonist in some ways, like Moriarty and Holmes, you know, Moriarty is fascinating, Holmes is fascinating too, but you're interested in Moriarty as well.
 
[00:16:44] Matty: Yeah, well, it does seem as if I'm relying on unreliable memory a little bit for this. Holmes was fascinating right from the get-go because of his idiosyncrasies, and then after a while, you know that he's going to do whatever the things that Holmes does, but then Moriarty gets added to the mix. So, I wonder if Conan Doyle was doing that because he was kind of tired of leaning on Holmes's idiosyncrasies to keep it interesting. He's throwing in this new person to kind of shake things up.
 
[00:17:22] Sara: Yeah, and that's a great way to keep things fresh. As you bring in somebody new, you introduce a different variable. Because after a couple of books, you kind of know what your character is like, your flat character. You know their reactions and their quirky little habits that are entertaining. But after six or seven books, after all these books, or even after three books, maybe you're ready for something new as a writer and a reader.
 
How to extend your series beyond your original plan
 
[00:17:49] Matty: Well, that's kind of a nice lead into one of the other things I wanted to talk about, which is extending your series beyond your original plan. So I guess some of this also goes back to the character arc. Let's say you've started out, and you think you're going to have three books, and then you and the readers continue to be interested. So you're extending it, but now maybe you have to not only adjust the idea for additional books but also the arc.
 
Can you talk a little bit about extending your series beyond the original plan?
 
[00:18:15] Sara: Yeah. So if you have a plan, and you're like, um, like that series I had, the first three books were like a quest. Could she figure out what had happened and unravel this conspiracy? So when that was done, and they were called "On the Run," I was like, okay, if I'm going to extend this, I can't have them being on the run indefinitely. That's just crazy. So I had to figure out something else. Sometimes you have to tie off one arc and then come up with something new. So with that series, I was like, okay, what if she went to work for somebody, and she gets involved in art recovery? So it's an entrepreneurial arc after that. It's like, can she get the job? Can she solve her first case? That's the next arc. Sometimes you have to figure out how your character retires. And then what are they going to do in retirement? Maybe they're a retired police detective or a magician, and they have to figure out what's going to happen next.
 
If you have a transition point, you can maybe find a new jumping-off storyline from that. There's a new challenge somehow. Maybe there's a new rival or competition. Something happens that gives you a new mix of challenges. Maybe they have a backstory you haven't explored, or maybe one of the side characters has a backstory that somehow your character is involved in, and it's a quest, like at the end, instead of the beginning, like my book. So you can just I think, you take your world you have, and you go, what have I not explored in here? And, if it's a town, are there people in the town, are there locations that you haven't delved into? For my 1920s series, it's set in different country homes in England. In the most recent one, "The Eight," I take her to Europe. She goes to Switzerland in the winter, goes to see the Alps, St. Moritz, and all that. So it's just like a whole new area to explore, which will keep you interested as well as the reader, hopefully.
 
Considering how your readers will react to changes in your series
 
[00:20:31] Matty: would be interesting, or important, I guess, to track what about the series your characters really like. Because I'm thinking of, I mean, Conan Doyle tried killing Holmes because he was so tired of it, so that's
 
[00:20:42] Sara: And that was a no-go.
 
[00:20:43] Matty: That was a no-go, but whoops, but I can imagine he might have said, "Oh, you know, I'm so bored with this. I'm going to mix things up. I'm going to have Watson, you know, move to the country, and I'm going to give Holmes a new partner."
 
[00:20:56] Sara: Yeah.
 
[00:20:57] Matty: If people were reading that series in part because they loved Watson, then that was going to be unsuccessful.
 
And so, those are things that apply to both extending a series and addressing the situation where you yourself are becoming bored with it. Understanding what you can change or extend that isn't going to violate the implicit contract you've made with your readers.
 
How do you assess those kinds of considerations?
 
[00:21:21] Sara: Well, for me, whenever I think about it, I know that my readers are reading most of my books because they like the character, they like the setting, and they like the supporting cast. If I'm going to take my character and do something new and different, and maybe she, maybe I'm like, "Oh, she's always been in this little town, but now I want to write a book set in Asia or Europe." If I just take her, my readers are going to be like, "Oh, what's going on with all these other 10 people? I want to know what's happening in their lives." So sometimes that's when you get those books where it's like the whole village goes and travels, you know, and sometimes you can make that happen, but you have to think about why are my readers reading this?
 
And if they want those interactions in a certain location with a lot of people, it's probably smarter to keep the action where it is, instead of trying to go to a new location, unless you're going to do like a complete reset. And sometimes people do that. They'll take a series and basically end it and have your character move to a totally new location and totally start over.
 
I wouldn't recommend that. I think that's kind of risky, but I mean, you could do it. Yeah.
 
[00:22:37] Matty: It's as if you're starting over with a new series, so even if there's a continuing character, the protagonist, you're going to lose some people, but pick up some people. But if you go into it with the expectation that you're not necessarily bringing along all your previous readers, that could be helpful.
 
Using a spin-off to extend a series
 
[00:22:54] Sara: Yeah, I think in that case, it might be smarter to do just a spin-off. Just take a character and, if you want to move your story to a new location or have a new tone, especially, you probably want to have a spin-off, but then they'd be linked, and then your readers who found one would probably try the other one or vice versa. If they start with a spin-off, they might go, "Oh, there's more books. Let me go back and read how it all started."
 
[00:23:25] Matty: When you're thinking about a spin-off, I've occasionally had people say that they like some of the secondary characters in my Ann Kinnear books and ask if I've ever thought about doing a spin-off. When I play it out in my mind, I think some of those characters, they're good in small doses, but I think a whole book of that particular character would be
 
[00:23:45] Sara: might be a little much.
 
[00:23:46] Matty: A little much.
 
Spin-offs are for more than just characters
 
[00:23:46] Matty: Yeah. So when you're assessing possible characters for a spinoff or maybe it's not just characters. Can you describe when you think of spin-offs, are there other flavors than spinning off a character, like a location, for example?
 
[00:23:59] Sara: Yeah, I would say you can do the character. You could take a side character, you know, and give them their whole story, but that is the problem. Maybe it's not ideal for a protagonist. Maybe they're better in a side character role. But then, like you could, like I did the location thing where it's this village in modern times, contemporary, and then this is the village in the past.
 
So that way you're linking the village, at least.
 
[00:24:25] Matty: Yeah, that's very cool. I've never heard that before, but that's super cool.
 
[00:24:28] Sara: Yeah, and I don't know how much read-through I get from that, but I mean, I figure it's a way that if people are interested, they might pick up the other series just because of the name. Other ways you could link or spin off would be like, I would think this might work in romance, like maybe you would have a shop or a store, and you would have different, or a hotel. They do that a lot. You know, like you have different stories with different people checking in and out. You know, like you could
 
[00:24:56] Matty: The Love Boat.
 
[00:24:57] Sara: Yes. Fantasy Island. There we go.
 
[00:24:59] Matty: Fantasy Island, exactly.
 
[00:25:01] Sara: Yeah.
 
[00:25:03] Matty: And if you're assessing a character as a spinoff, are there any either green flags or red flags that would say this is likely to be a good or not such a good idea?
 
[00:25:13] Sara: Well, I guess it depends on what type of series you're writing. So if you're doing a flat arc, do you have enough story around that person? Can you create enough story around that person to make it interesting and make it more than one book if you want a series? And if it's a robust character, like what characteristics, what change are they going to go through that's going to make it compelling that readers will want to read?
 
Because I do know what you're saying, like some of those characters are so fun to write as the comic relief or whatever, but then can you sustain a whole book or a whole series with them being the comic relief? And then are you going to bring in somebody else to be the straight man? You know, like you have to kind of think through these things down the line and can you do that for three, four, or five books?
 
Supplementing a series with short stories
 
[00:26:02] Matty: Well, one of the things you said that I love was that you write short stories, and whenever I hear short stories, I'm always immediately intrigued. And I think that's a great way to explore that. So one of the characters that people often say they would like to see in a spinoff is named Garrick Masser. He's in the Ann Kinnear novels. And basically, he's in there to be both Ann's mentor in the early books and then her kind of both colleague and competitor in later books. And he's very gruff and eccentric and won't eat anything but bread and drink water when he's in public, but then someone's in his house one time and notices that there's a pizza box in the garbage can. So, that would be fun for a short story, but not, I think, for a novel-length work.
 
Talk a little bit about how you've used short stories in conjunction with your series.
 
[00:26:47] Sara: Well, in my Murder on Location series, the one that's set in contemporary times about the location scout, I feel like it has kind of run its course. I've told the story I wanted to convey between the characters, and it's essentially done. However, my readers are like, "Oh, can you do something else? We want more, you know?" I mean, that's a good thing to have, but I just can't think of a story arc and a plot for a whole novel. But I did have some small ideas like, "Oh, I could do this." So I've written some short stories that continue the story, like taking little baby steps.
 
And then, recently with my first Kickstarter, I had an idea. I was looking for a short story, and I thought, "What if I turn this into letters?" Because I've seen some mysteries in the mail or these letter subscriptions that you can get. So I thought, "What if I turned it into letters from my main character? She gets involved in this mystery, and it's not big enough for a novel." I wrote eight letters, and that was part of the Kickstarter. They could sign up to get a special edition hardcover, the letters, or both. So they were mailed to you over eight weeks. Each one is like an installment, kind of like a mini-series, you know, like an episodic story. Here's what's happening in this town. This is what happened. This is the mystery. I'll write more when I know more, you know, and then the next one comes a week later. And it's a fun way for me to try a different writing style. I've always written long, so writing short is a challenge. But somehow, writing the letters made it easier and a totally different style of writing.
 
So, to me, that's a short form that I can explore. The first one was about my main character going to visit her eccentric aunt, who keeps peacocks and such. One of her peacocks had gone missing, and she wanted her niece, who's good at solving problems, to come find it. She's like, "This is not what I do, and I don't know how to do this." It's kind of funny, and you know, it could fit into a shorter form.
 
[00:29:06] Matty: Yeah, I have found that I'll have ideas. Sometimes I'll get interested in something that's not thematic, but something that's just topical, maybe the opposite. The example I always use is in 2019, I went on a cruise with my husband and some friends, and we cruised around the Hawaiian islands. Then we cruised from Hawaii to Vancouver. I got fascinated with the idea of what happens if somebody goes overboard. I wanted to write a story about what happens if somebody goes overboard, but I didn't want to base a whole novel on it.
 
So I wrote a short story called "Sea of Troubles" about that, just like four or 5,000 words, maybe 6,000 words about exploring that. But it was a topic, not a theme. When I'm thinking of novel-length works, it's more about how someone balances privacy and celebrity or how someone recovers from the guilt they feel about an act in their past. Those are more thematic, not topical.
 
[00:30:06] Sara: Right. And then a novel that's, you get to really explore all those levels, and it's much deeper. I think like the short story can be deep in a way, but it's so short. It lets you hit that situation and kind of, it's almost cathartic, you know, like you've got these ideas and you're like, "Oh, I want to write about this, but I don't really want to write a whole book or a whole series on this one thing or this one situation." So yeah, it makes perfect sense.
 
Using a short story to experiment with a series concept.
 
[00:30:38] Matty: And, sort of to loop back to the whole spinoff idea, a short story can be nice because you could experiment with a character. And I think that people would enjoy, you know, a short story of Garrick Masser, the character I was talking about from the Ann Kinnear ones, but I think it would confirm my belief that a novel like the work with Garrick is not going to be good.
 
[00:30:57] Sara: Right. Yeah. It lets you kind of try things out.
 
[00:31:01] Matty: And I did have the experience recently of having written the three Lizzy Ballard thrillers, and then I was working on the fourth Lizzy Ballard thriller, and I realized that a logistical problem I had is that the thing that happens to Lizzy Ballard after her last scene in book three could be days, weeks, or even months later, but the thing that happens to the antagonist at the end of book three is going to happen seconds after the end of the book.
 
And so I was really struggling with how to handle that without having the first five chapters of book four be about the antagonist, which I didn't want, and so I ended up writing a novella, kind of a long, short story, short novella, length work that is just taking the antagonist from the end of book three to the beginning of book four, where their chronologies match up.
 
And that's one where I truly love this antagonist, Louise Mortensen, for anyone who has read the Lizzy Ballard books, but I'm not sure other people would want an entire novel about the bad guy, but I had a lot of fun with it.
 
[00:32:01] Sara: Yeah. But that's a good solution because you get this. Any of your readers who are very into that can read that and it will bridge for them. Yeah. I think that's a great solution.
 
[00:32:13] Matty: And I think from a marketing point of view, it'll be sort of a nice tease as I'm leading up to the launch of book four. I can be offering that as something too.
 
[00:32:21] Sara: Yeah.
 
Dealing with the challenges of being locked into your story world.
 
[00:32:22] Matty: To bring people forward, one of the other things you address in your book is how do you deal with the problems that result from being locked into a story world? And I think this is, we probably kind of talked about this a little bit about expanding things in a way that's going to be interesting for you. Any other tips there that we haven't hit yet?
 
[00:32:38] Sara: Well, for me, I'm a high input person, so if I can just find something that's related to the story world, like the Jane Austen Country House Location Scout, if I can just find a book about it, right? Yeah. Well, thank you. A location scout or about country houses and just start reading it, or you know, watch a documentary or something.
 
I will get ideas from that. The same thing in the 1920s. If I read some biographies, if I read about something that happened during that time period, like how they traveled, and I mean, that will fire ideas for me. So that may be something that would help other people, for me.
 
And maybe look at a theme and say, "Okay, so this first part of the series is about X, what else can we explore?" So, maybe it's a very strong romantic subplot in the beginning, and now you want to transition to something else. You know, you just have to think about, I mean, it could be something, like revenge; something happens, and you explore the possibility of revenge or the push-pull of, "Do I want revenge? Will revenge help?" You know, things like that. I'm a murder mystery enthusiast, so, of course, I go to revenge and dark themes like that, but it could be anything, you know? So sometimes it's like maybe a theme could help you figure out something else you could explore.
 
[00:34:02] Matty: Yeah, I think even rereading your old books can help because I'm realizing that the way this has played out is that Ann Kinnear is a woman who can communicate with the dead. I mentioned in book one that her parents both died in a car crash when she was in college to emphasize the fact that it's her and her brother.
 
She has, at the beginning, a very insular world. It's basically her, her brother, and her brother's husband, and I didn't want her to have parents or another kind of support structure beyond that. But then I was working on, I don't know, book six or something like that, and I thought, you know, it's weird that a woman who can talk to dead people, we've never addressed this question about, has she ever tried to contact her parents? So I started putting that in; I needed a subplot for Book six because normally, Ann doesn't get involved in a case until later, so I need something else going on to introduce her early, and she's working on that, and so I started using that as a subplot, and then I thought, you know, if you have the protagonist trying to contact her dead mother, that's probably not a story by itself.
 
[00:35:11] Sara: And isn't that funny? It's something that you didn't explore early on, but it's something that, as you're describing it now, I'm like, of course, people would be curious about that, and they would be interested in that. So, you know, sometimes just going over what drives your characters and motivates them and things that they're involved with can give you new ideas too.
 
[00:35:36] Matty: So we've talked about ways that we can reignite our own interest and readers' interest, but at some point, it probably has to come to an end. What are the signs that might be happening, and how do you do that gracefully?
 
[00:35:48] Sara: So this is something I've struggled with a lot because, like I said, mystery readers expect a series to just continue. They want it to go on forever, and I can't write every series forever. So for me, I thought if I become bored with the characters, if you're bored and you don't want to write the books, if you don't want to go back to those characters, then that might be a sign that it's time to wrap things up.
 
If you're out of ideas on how to make it interesting, if you're like, "Okay, I've written about all the stuff I want to write about with this character." I heard one author one time say she knew she was out of ideas when she was writing the amnesia book. She was like, "Okay, if I'm going to amnesia, then basically it's time to end this thing."
 
And I was like, "Okay, that is kind of..."
 
[00:36:38] Matty: It was all a dream!
 
[00:36:39] Sara: That's right. Yeah.
 
[00:36:40] Matty: Then it's time to call it quits.
 
[00:36:42] Sara: Yeah. And then I feel like if there's no more potential for character growth, even in your flat art characters, usually you've got some challenges, some small things that are happening. And if you've kind of reached the end of what you want to write about or what you can explore with that character, then, you know, it's probably time to move on.
 
And for me, I was very worried about how my readers would react. So there's like the question of, "How will readers react?" And then there's the concern of, "How will it impact my writing, like my income?" Because if you have a workhorse series that, you know, if I release a book, I'll make this much money, that can be stressful to decide to end that. So there's a lot of anxiety around it that I don't think people really talk about.
 
So what I did was I've done two different things. One time I just kind of quietly stepped away and just didn't really mention the series and started emphasizing my other series. Then another time I said, "Hey, this series is ending." And I think for me, that was better because my readers weren't constantly going, "Oh, is there more?" So I just said, "This series is done. I've pretty much told the story I want to tell, and these characters, they're happy and they're content. They're not discovering any more dead bodies. So we can move on."
 
And I told my readers that I didn't have any more ideas that would support a novel. And I had so many nice emails from people saying, "Oh, thank you for letting us know. I appreciate that you're not going to basically flog a dead horse." And I was like, "Okay, that's nice."
 
And then for marketing, I tried to, what I've learned to do is if you can link your new series, if you're writing a new series, if you can link it somehow to the one you're closing off, that's smart. I didn't always do that. But if you can find some way, like through setting or character or some story world, like magic, if you're using some sort of magic, if the magic can continue in another person or setting, you know, then you can keep part of that element going to pull readers onto the next series.
 
[00:38:55] Matty: And I suppose if your goal is to write one very long series and keep your engagement and the reader's engagement, you could go into it knowing, "I'm going to start out with protagonist A, and I'm going to have secondary protagonist B be a big part, but clearly secondary, but then I'm going to have B's role become larger and larger, so I could kind of fade out A if I get tired of A, and now I can switch it, so it's the 'Life on a Spaceship' series and you're moving from the person who's the captain to the person who's the first officer, I don't know, but having that plan to say, 'Oh, I'm going to have somebody in the wings whose story and character really does support them being, moving into the A position.'
 
[00:39:35] Sara: Yeah. And I'm seeing more and more books, especially in the mystery genre, that are ensemble cast. And I think that would be a way you could maybe start out with the focus on one character, but you have, you know, four or five other characters that your readers are just as interested in. And, you know, like you can kind of, they can wax and wane as the story goes, and you can highlight somebody's story in maybe book three or book seven that didn't have as big a role in book one. And that can give you different. And, you know, it can just keep you interested, and the readers interested, too.
 
[00:40:10] Matty: And I think another thing to consider is, are you tired of this for all time, or are you just tired of it now? Because with my two series, I wrote two Ann Kinnear novels, then I wrote three Lizzy Ballard thrillers, and then I wrote four more Ann Kinnear novels. By the time I'd gotten to the sixth Ann Kinnear book, I was missing the Lizzy characters.
 
And part of it was that I was missing the characters because they do become like your friends. And part of it, too, was that I realized that my books had gotten, well, I don't really want to use the word "cozier," but cozier and cozier, shading toward the cozy end more with each book. I was really looking forward to writing some kick-ass fight scenes and letting people get stabbed and things like that. I thought, I just need to switch back to Lizzy because her world is a little more action-packed. I just needed that as a refresher. I'm going to be going back to the Ann Kinnear books. But if you have something you can switch to, if you can leave one series at a satisfying point but open so that if you want to go back to it, you can, and then switch to something else, then you might go back to it refreshed.
 
And I think, as you were saying, letting people know, letting your readers know kind of what's going on because I think they appreciate that. They not only appreciate that you're taking the time to let them know, but they kind of enjoy the glimpse behind the scenes of what's going on in a writer's mind and in a writer's life.
 
[00:41:36] Sara: Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a lot to be said for, like you're talking about switching tones and stuff. It's almost like a palate cleanser. Okay, I'm going to have this one. I'm going to leave it open in case I want to come back to it, but it's on hiatus right now. I'm working on this. And then when you're ready, you can go back to the other.
 
And I totally understand about writing super cozy. That's why my second series that I wrote was just like, I had everything in it. The first series I wrote had a mom, and she had little kids, so she had to be, you know, she had little kids and had to be, I didn't want to be one of those writers who put kids in danger as a story element.
 
So I was always having to shuffle all the kids off to the babysitter. So my next series, I was like, she's not going to have any kids. She's going to be impulsive. She's going to do whatever she wants because I wanted that change, you know, to explore something different.
 
[00:42:29] Matty: So interesting. Well, Sara, this has been such a fun conversation. Thank you so much for joining me to have the conversation. And please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
 
[00:42:40] Sara: My website is SaraRosett.com. My books, you can find them for sale at Sararosettebooks.com. And then if you're interested in the website, it's the "Wish I'd Known Them" podcast with Jami Albright. And if you're a mystery reader, there's the Mystery Books podcast.
 
[00:42:56] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
 
[00:42:58] Sara: Thank you for having me. It's been a lot of fun.

Episode 209 - Natural Orders and Author Email with Matt Treacey

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Matt Treacey discusses NATURAL ORDERS AND AUTHOR EMAIL, including the parallels Matt sees between email marketing and systems in the natural world; the importance of using email to educate, inspire, and entertain (not just sell); the challenge of writing effective emails if you're not an enthusiastic email subscriber; dealing with what can seem like a one-way relationship with your email recipients; the power of awareness automation; how constructing an email sequence is both like writing a story and like writing a business plan; and, related to the cover of Matt’s book NATURAL ORDERS, the pros and cons of bucking cover genre conventions.

Matt Treacey is an Author and Email Marketing Strategist. Combining a decade in email marketing automation with a background in ecology, Matt is an expert at building systems designed for growth. His uniquely designed framework currently generates millions of dollars in email revenue for dozens of small online businesses across the US and Oceania. In his best-selling book NATURAL ORDERS, he describes how to develop a healthy, engaged, and profitable email marketing database, mimicking the timeless growth strategies used by the most successful systems of the natural world.

Episode Links

Author website: naturalordersbook.com
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-symbios/
Other social media platforms: https://twitter.com/matt_treacey

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Matt Treacey. Hey, Matt, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Matt: Good. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
 
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you here.
 
Meet Matt Treacey
 
[00:00:10] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Matt Treacey is an author and email marketing strategist. Combining a decade in email marketing automation with a background in ecology, Matt is an expert at building systems designed for growth. His uniquely designed framework currently generates millions of dollars in email revenue for dozens of small online businesses across the U.S. and Oceania. In his best-selling book, Natural Orders, he describes how to develop a healthy, engaged, and profitable email marketing database, mimicking the timeless growth strategies used by the most successful systems of the natural world. So, we are going to be talking about how authors can build a business with email marketing.
 
What parallels did Matt see between email marketing and systems in the natural world?
 
[00:00:45] Matty: And I was immediately grabbed by this idea of using systems in the natural world as a basis for email marketing, because just on the surface, they're not two things that I can imagine being more different than the natural world and email marketing. So I'm very curious about the parallels you saw that made it a good metaphor for this.
 
[00:01:06] Matt: Interesting. I guess, at a surface level, it doesn't seem like an immediate match. However, like you said, my background is in ecology. I studied ecology, worked in the field very briefly before getting into marketing. And it was quite apparent to me when I got into marketing. I guess I was already looking through that lens. I noticed a lot of similarities between marketing more broadly as a discipline and some of these ecological elements of it. So some of this stuff, like, you have niches in an ecosystem, you have niches in the market that you choose, right? Or even some things like your total addressable market being similar to the carrying capacity of an ecosystem. There are a lot of these similarities that I noticed straight away.
 
But I noticed them particularly when I got into email marketing, that there are some really strong parallels that justified the idea behind the book. So without delving too deeply into it, the idea is that your email marketing list, your email marketing database should be managed and approached as though it were a little ecosystem, right? The number one reason for that, that I talk about is when you take that approach, you avoid some of the common mistakes people make when they first get started with the channel, such as getting really low open rates, high unsubscribes, and having what I call your list dynamics end up being poor. It's kind of like the mortalities and the births in an ecosystem, right? Getting those dynamics correct. There are some similarities there.
 
And I mean, the end result of that is poor deliverability, and it collapses in on itself a bit, a little bit like an ecosystem, right? But the second thing, and probably the more powerful thing, is that when you start looking at your email database and email list as an ecosystem, you avoid some of the risks of relying on other platforms that a lot of authors typically do. So if you've got a big audience on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, that can be taken away from you at a moment's notice; it's a platform risk, right? And when you build your email list, you're avoiding that. You're mitigating it to some degree.
 
And I kind of refer to this in the book as building your own walled garden. So the analogy has two sides to it. One is that really strict, yeah, look at it like an ecosystem because it is a little ecosystem, but more powerfully, it's a little walled garden that you need to have your own. And I think just taking that whole view of it helps you avoid some of these tactics that sometimes come to mind when you think about email marketing as well. Like spamming people or sending some of these tactics that you sometimes associate with email marketing. If you think there's this little ecosystem you have to nurture and grow, you instinctually.
 
[00:03:52] Matty: Yeah, I really like the term "nurturing," and I think that this idea of thinking of it as a meta, having the natural word to be a metaphor for email marketing is really nice because it also gets past that idea of people just feeling creepy about it. You know, I think people find it hard to accept that sending an email into someone's inbox can be and should be a desirable thing, not a spammy thing. So, in that sense, about getting people over the hump of wanting to show up in people's email boxes and feeling good about that, is there some metaphor from the natural world that is a good analogy for that?
 
[00:04:33] Matt: Yeah, with that, going straight into the natural metaphor for it. I just have to say that is definitely something that I deal with. I mean, I've built my career around email marketing, and even now today, when you tell some people that I do email, people really do have this knee-jerk reaction of, "Oh, it's like you're sending spam to people." And look, that still exists. I mean, even in some high-profile industries like e-commerce, there are still spammy tactics going on.
 
What I've really come to the conclusion of is that doesn't get you anywhere, and that's the whole impetus behind this book. The whole idea of natural orders is it's like the system collapses in on itself as soon as you start doing it. So, once you shift the metaphor, that helps you kind of avoid some of that stuff and makes it really more about value. And to answer your question, that's really the shift that has to happen. I say it over and over again in my book. Every time you communicate with someone on your email list, it has to be valuable. I've got this kind of framework that I use in the book for the early stages when you're building the foundations, the list, the health of it all, for how you can segment people into different groups to make sure that no matter what stage you're at, they're always getting a valuable experience. It's like you should. It's just good business practice, right? Underpromise, overdeliver.
 
[00:05:54] Matty: I used to work at QVC, and that was like the battle cry at QVC: underpromise and overdeliver.
 
[00:06:01] Matt: Right.
 
Avoiding falling into the spam trap
 
[00:06:02] Matty: So, I think it's apparent, I mean, it's obvious on the surface that one shouldn't be sending out spammy emails. But can you offer guidelines if someone is trying to step back and read their emails as a recipient is going to read them? Are there red flags that you can call out that would say, this is something that might actually catch the email in a technical spam filter, or it's just going to feel spammy to the person who receives it?
 
[00:06:27] Matt: Okay. Yeah, two parts of that. So the first part is the spam filters. It's pretty easy to bypass in the sense that don't do anything spammy. Don't send anything like "Make big bucks today" or anything that the spam filters are built to detect. And I mean, that's a great initial filter because if you're talking about that sort of stuff anyway, you're probably sending spam.
 
Aim to educate, inspire, and entertain
 
[00:06:49] Matt: The second thing is, again, I always say educate, inspire, entertain. If you're doing at least one of those things with every email that you send, you're probably going to be sending a valuable email. So if every time you go to send an email, think, "Am I educating, inspiring, or entertaining, or ideally doing two or more of those things?" then send the email. If not, then take a look at yourself.
 
[00:07:15] Matty: Yeah, we had talked a little bit earlier, and you were saying that your clients are nonfiction authors. You were focusing on the nonfiction world, not the fiction author world. But I said that as someone with email lists in both worlds, I would try to tease out the learnings that fiction authors can take from this.

 
And it's my perennial question. I could probably create a playlist of people I've spoken to on the podcast with this very issue, but I have no idea. I send a weekly email to my non-fiction platform for the Indy Author, and it's basically, you know, a summary of that week's podcast episode and recommended resources that I, as a writer, feel good about recommending to other writers. It's very heavily focused on the informative part, but it's always difficult to figure out how to translate that into the fiction world and not have it be "buy this, buy this, buy this."
When you're advising your clients on how to determine the content that they're going to put in their emails, what are some of the guidance you give them to make sure that it is compliant with "educate, inspire, entertain"? Did I remember that correctly?
 
[00:08:24] Matt: "Educate, inspire, entertain," but yeah,
 
[00:08:26] Matty: "Educate, inspire, entertain."
 
An author's product is their writing.
 
[00:08:28] Matt: I would, to be honest, I haven't done a lot of work with fiction authors, but I would suspect that the principles translate directly. So, if I've found a fiction author, and I enjoy their writing, and I've signed up for their email list, and they send me emails about their writing that contain their writing, that's hugely valuable.
 
So then I would imagine that their newsletter doesn't look so much like if they were doing a newsletter, or their sequence, or however they choose to go about it. It wouldn't be so much about, "hey, buy my book, my book's on sale, promotion, promotion." There would be a time for that, but the majority of the emails that they send should be content, their writing.
The thing that I've signed up for, their product, I mean, if they're thinking of themselves as a business, their product is their writing, so if they're giving that away for free, or they're writing unique content for people who are on their email list, that suddenly becomes quite a value proposition to be on that list in the first place, right?
 
And I'll start to look forward to the writing of that author. The exact same thing applies to content in a business context for non-fiction authors, for example, right? Like I've got guys where they'll just publish a really long article every two weeks. And people love it. They wait for it because they know it's going to be really valuable, and they know they're going to enjoy reading it. And there's no spam in that relationship at all, right? It's like, "Wow, I can't wait for this next email I'm going to get from this author." The same thing applies to fiction people, I'd say.
 
Being a better email writer, even if you're not an enthusiastic email recipient.
 
[00:09:57] Matty: I think the difficult thing for me certainly is that I'm not someone who enjoys receiving any kind of email, even from people that I really like. For example, I'm a podcast listener, so the people that I follow, that I look forward to in the same way that the recipients of that email newsletter probably look forward to getting that very long article from the person they're following, I'd much prefer to listen to that content than I would to read that content. So, it's very difficult when you're trying to produce content for people who have a different preference. You know, you're accommodating the people who want to read that, and you almost, by definition, have to write an email that's not the email that you yourself would want to get. Do you have any advice on how to get over that hump?
 
[00:10:41] Matt: That's very interesting. I suppose you could... And I have done this before. You can send emails with links to different formats of content, right? So if you're predominantly a YouTube person, then every email you send out can be a link to a different YouTube video, right? Structured in a way that introduces your ideas and progresses awareness and builds engagement and all these other things I talk about in the book. Yeah, you can link out to any type of content. My personal affinity for email is the fact that it is a written medium, and the type of audience that you're engaging with are typically readers. I think that's a strength to the channel among the myriad of others.
 
[00:11:22] Matt: I mean, just going back to what we were saying before about why email marketing? I mean, once you get over the whole spammy perception of it, it's the largest and most active group of people on the internet. It's the highest engagement. They're the most ready to buy. It's the highest ROI channel. It's the only one that allows you to own the data of your audience.
 
[00:11:43] Matty: Yeah. And as you're saying, you know, the idea that it's the audience you own, you're not having a social media platform mediate it for you. I think that one thing that's more specific to nonfiction authors, although this is true of fiction authors too, but you're ideally meeting a need, right? If you're sending out a newsletter marketing for a service you're offering, for example, then you're hopefully, by definition, doing it because there's a problem that your audience may have that you can help them solve.
 
Now for fiction authors, maybe that issue is finding entertaining reading, and you could approach it that way. But if I'm sending out a newsletter, for example, to people who are writers, probably earlier in their writing career, and could be either independently published authors or traditionally published authors or pre-published authors that are pursuing either one of those. Is there a way that I can figure out what that problem is that my audience is solving that I would be able to help them with that would make my newsletter educational for them, for example?
 
[00:12:46] Matt: Yeah, I guess, like anything in business, there's a little bit of testing involved. You have your initial assumptions about it. And then you kind of refine it over time. You learn more about your audience and you refine your messaging based on what your audience responds to, right? That's what it's all about.
 
[00:13:02] Matt: And really, I mean, one of the other good things about email is it's all timeless marketing principles, right? And there's nothing more timeless than the fact that your marketing is going to be stronger the better you know and understand your audience, right? I also talk about that in the book. I think that very much applies to fiction authors.
 
So you could look at it from the top-level lens of, okay, I'm entertaining people, I'm providing an escape. Okay, that's probably true for every fiction author, but then you can probably be a bit more granular in that. I mean, someone writing romance novels is fulfilling a very different need within that entertainment umbrella than someone, compared to someone writing a thriller novel or a sci-fi novel, right? They're fulfilling a different need, so it changes the way that you go about that.
 
The challenges of a one-way relationship via email
 
[00:13:51] Matty: I think one of the things that's tough about email marketing is that, and I'm picturing this playing out in the natural world, that if you do something in the natural world, you can kind of see the impact it has on your surroundings. But with email, it feels, at least initially, very one-way. I mean, I think that maybe ideally it becomes more interactive, but unlike social media, where you can immediately see the things that people like, the things that people don't like, and the things they respond to or don't respond to, with email, you can send it out there, send it out there. For example, I very rarely have people unsubscribe from my email lists. I'm super careful about how I go about adding people to the list. And when I add them, I'm strategizing in a way that I think what I'm sending them is what they want, and that they're going to stick with me, and that has proved to be the case.
 
But I also very rarely get any feedback, even when I put an invitation in an email to just hit reply to get back to me. Do you have any advice on how to collect data in what seems, on the surface, like a one-way communication?
 
[00:14:58] Matt: That's interesting. Yeah. So I suppose there you're thinking about the ecosystem dynamic in terms of the interaction between the audience and yourself. I tend to think of it more about the dynamics of the system itself. The same thing could apply to a degree with your social media audience, but I think it is stronger in email marketing.
 
So in your case, if you're sending emails out regularly and you're not getting any unsubscribes, I mean, there's, it means there's no deaths in your system, you're just having a very slow birth rate, and no one's ever dying. So what does that mean? And they're not responding to your emails, so it means that your engagement is probably, there's probably something interesting going on with your engagement. That's how I'd think about it.
 
Alternatives to inaccurate open rate stats
 
[00:15:44] Matt: And that's how I'd use the ecosystem lens to look at it, especially. I think this sort of stuff is more important than ever, and you have to be more critical than ever because, I'm not sure if your audience is aware of this, but open rates and click rates are becoming increasingly unreliable. In fact, open rates, you basically cannot rely on at all anymore. As of about this time last year, with the Apple Mail privacy updates, which are getting more and more strict.
 
So I think it's something like, I saw a thing from Litmus, which does email deliverability stuff, something like 50 percent of opens are misattributed at the moment. So your open rates aren't a good measure of your engagement anymore. You really need to start looking at these things like what you're speaking about: are people replying? Are people interacting with your emails? Are people going from the email that you've sent to the landing page you've specified on your site? Does the traffic add up to what the email marketing system is saying? You really need to look at that now. And unsubscribes are a really big one. That's a huge marker of whether people like it. I would argue that it is actually healthy to have some turnover in the system. You want some people, you know, I'm sure you do have a very small unsubscribe rate.
 
[00:16:56] Matty: Yeah, I think that one of the things that I have not done a good job of is poking around in my email service stats. So, you know, I have just a general sense of how many people I'm sending out to, but the idea of going in periodically and looking at people who are inactive in whatever way the system is defining that and clearing out people who maybe are skewing your deliverability by not opening, like not unsubscribing but not opening, does that happen?
 
[00:17:27] Matt: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And it's actually quite a complex dynamic. There's deliverability on the side of making sure your technical deliverability stuff is set up - DKIM and all of that, on the domain side. Then there's something called sender score inside your email marketing system itself. Which is this interplay between what servers they decide to put you on and how much that's going to reach people. That's not exactly like that. That's a crude oversimplification, but that kind of gets us somewhere the way there. And then, yeah, this idea of the top-level engagement, how many people are actually opening your emails and clicking them and interacting with them at all those different stages, right? The funnel analysis of it. So, yeah, there is a bit to that.
 
[00:18:14] Matty: I'm sure a lot of people are in the same situation I'm in, that they have an email list they're sending out at some to be determined intervals, like for my non-fiction platform, it's weekly, but for my fiction platform, I just send something out when I have something to say. Like, oh, I'm going to be at this bookstore signing books, or, you know, one of my books is on sale. It's very much event-driven.
 
Matt's guidelines for target email performance
 
[00:18:32] Matty: Are there statistics or other factors people should be looking at? Like people always say you should look at open rate. Now we've found out that maybe that isn't true after all, but I never hear numbers like your open rate should be over this amount or you should have a certain amount of good subscriber churn. What should people be looking at to see if they need to make tweaks in how they're approaching their email?
 
[00:18:56] Matt: Oh yeah, I can give you stats. That's no problem. I can't link you to anything or I'll mention anything regarding your sending schedule, which is what you referred to earlier, but that's definitely a good idea. In fact, that's one of the first things you should really cement in place. Say, okay, I'm just going to commit to something. If you're going the newsletter route, and newsletters are trendy at the moment, there are some other ways you can go about this. I talk about all of this stuff in my writing, but let's just say you only have time to send one email every so often. Just say, okay, I'm going to send it on every second Wednesday, and commit to that. Then you can build up the system around that, have an automated email go out every week, every first Friday, right? And then put in slots for everything, and that avoids a lot of headaches down the track. So you should have a sending schedule to answer that first part of your question.
 
But in terms of just some offhand best practice metrics, look, open rates are fraught with danger these days. They are still a good lagging indicator, so if you have above a 25 percent open rate, you're probably okay. But you should be getting a lot more than that, especially now that Apple Mail and mail privacy stuff, which is extended to other mail servers, is triggering opens. So a lot of people saw their opens just jump dramatically recently.
 
So look, the rule always was like, okay, above 25 percent, you're doing okay. 35 percent plus, you're probably, it's probably good engagement. That's not as reliable anymore, but it's still a lag indicator. So if you are sitting at 35 percent engagement, and that drops down to 15 percent, you know something's gone wrong. Whereas if it goes up to 65 percent, you know something's probably gone right, right? So it's a good lagging indicator, but not gospel truth. So that's how I approach open rates.
 
Unsubscribes, I typically say it does depend on the audience and your turnover and a lot of other factors that you have to look at individually. But below 0.35 percent unsubscribe rate, if you can achieve that, that's probably good because you don't want it to be zero because that would suggest to me there's probably some problem with engagement that has not yet been uncovered, right? People should naturally opt out of the system to some degree. But if you keep it below 0.35, that's good.
 
Email marketing beyond the newsletter
 
[00:21:11]
Matty: Well, you made an interesting comment, which is, I think that whenever an author hears email, we always think of an email newsletter. But I'm realizing that that's just one small niche of email marketing more generally. Can you talk about other ways that authors should be using email that aren't specific to newsletters?
 
[00:21:32] Matt: Yeah, I mean, that's really my specialty, right? I run newsletters for people. Newsletters are hot, and for a good reason. There are some incredible businesses built off newsletters that are sent once a week, generating multi-million-dollar businesses. They're great and provide a lot of value. They're also relatively simple. If you're just sending one email, it makes the whole system a lot easier to manage, right?
 
But some of the power of email, one of the other benefits I didn't really go into is the fact that you can automate the entire subscriber journey, the customer journey from when they come onto your site and join your email list, everything after that, you control in email. It allows you to do really interesting things like building up a narrative, progress awareness, which I've touched on briefly since we've been talking, but I haven't gone into it in depth.
 
So you can nurture someone from the point where they don't really know much about you, your value proposition, or what you're all about to the point where they're really into it. I use something called Schwartz's five stages of awareness, which is really helpful and ensures that you're sending value all the time. They go from being vaguely aware of the problem you're solving for themselves to understanding the solutions available and the products that can help them. You can build on this over time, right?
 
The power of awareness automation
 
[00:22:57] Matt: And you can only do that with automation. So I really recommend to people that one of the foundation pieces of their system is something I call an awareness automation or something similar, where you take people on a subscriber journey and introduce the ideas from your books or your work or your business over time in a very structured way. That's when you tend to get the best results.
 
The email sequence as a story
 
[00:23:56] Matty: So that might be a good introduction to the other thing we were going to talk about, which is the idea of an email sequence as a story. Is this what you were talking about, this journey that you take the subscriber through?
 
[00:24:07] Matt: Absolutely. Yeah, this is something I haven't explored in too much depth, but I really nerd out on this. I think it's one of the underlooked benefits of email. Let's compare it to having an audience on, let's say, Instagram. I don't know what the post reach is like on Instagram now, but if I've got a series of 10 posts that all build on each other to create a narrative and convey a series of ideas, you might see only five or three of those posts over the whole two or three weeks that I'm putting them out, right?"
 
Whereas with email, I know every time that those emails are going into their inbox. And if my engagement and my list health fundamentals are in place, I can be quite sure that they're going to see every email, at least the subject line, right? So the actual visibility of every message, every point in the story is there and it's there in perpetuity. So if they read the last email and they want to go back to the first one, it's still in their inbox, right?
 
So the ability to build a narrative and construct a story, like you're saying, is something unique, I think, to the channel in the way that you can deliver it. This is not a new concept. One of the old OG email marketing guys is Jeff Walker. He wrote this book called "Launch: The Product Launch Formula." I mean, I don't know when that came out, but it's an absolute classic, still works today.
 
But one of the things he talks about is the power of narrative and it's just the arc that you create. With the emails you send, I mean, we've all heard of Joseph Campbell, Hero's Journey and that, that's one side to it. I actually think we're moving into a stage where it's less like this very linear journey with the reader as the hero and more like this kind of episodic sequence, a serial on TV, right, where you dip in and out at different stages. If you structure the story that way, that can be a lot more interesting, where it's like, it's like watching Friends or Seinfeld or something, right? Everything is a piece in itself, but it's part of this larger whole. You're creating a world that people enter into, and each one is its own little mini narrative that kind of ties to a larger narrative but doesn't at the same time.
 
I think there's a lot to this; it's not just "Hey, hit all of these points in the Circular Hero's journey in the email sequence you're sending." It's okay, what world are you building? What are the ideas that this world is based on? And how does that relate to the problem you're solving and your value proposition, all of that? I think that can be really powerful when you get into that stuff.
 
Matty: That's so interesting. I mean, it does suggest that that sequence has to be planned out in a way that's much different than I have thought about it in the past. So my email sequence, and I just want to preface this by saying I'm not recommending this, just saying this is what it is, is when someone signs up, I think they get two or three follow-up emails, and each of them is a very short email, and it's a link to a different resource. So I think it's something like, the first one is a link to my website, the second one is a link to a playlist on my YouTube channel, and the third one is a link to a different playlist on my YouTube channel. You know, three different resources that I think will be useful to people, mainly just as a way of continuing that engagement and pointing out to them that I have more things than just the way they found me. If they found me in the podcast, then they should be aware that I also have a website and YouTube channel.
 
But that isn't a story arc in any sense. It's just three, it's not even Seinfeld episodes. It's just like three pieces of information. When you're counseling your nonfiction author clients on how to create that story, are there guidelines you give them? Do you have your own, uh, hero's journey sort of structure that you recommend they use?
 
Matt: I'm working on it, and it's very much not The Hero's Journey. I mean, it's more like, uh, The Odyssey. Very much. It's like a Homeric form. No doubt on
 
Matty: This is sounding more alarming with each passing moment. I mean, that sounds difficult.
 
[00:28:15] Matt: No, I mean, it's just a different narrative form, but I think if we're looking at your particular case, right, what I would immediately think is that I see the way you're going about it. It's very logical, but you probably have a huge backlog of content, right? Both on YouTube and your podcast, and you've probably repurposed it in multiple different ways. I would think about where the audience is intercepting you in their journey. Are they aware of the problem they're dealing with? How far along in that problem recognition are they? It's that classic Robert Collier line of entering the conversation going on in the prospect's mind, right? So meet them exactly where they are when they join your email list, and then send them that piece of content. Then begin their entrance into your world with that piece of content and build on that over time. So over the subsequent weeks, you drip out other pieces of content that slowly start to piece together this puzzle, a picture of what you're all about, and what your brand's all about. If they skip one or two, it doesn't matter because they're dipping in and out.
 
How to segment an audience
 
[00:29:14] Matty: Right. So, I'm realizing that I think one of the things I linked to, and if I haven't yet, I'm going to, is that episodes 101 through 107 were with Orna Ross on the seven processes of publishing, and that's a great entry for people who are new to publishing, especially the indie publishing world. But not every person who joins my list is going to be part of a homogeneous group of people with a similar skill set. They're going to be people who haven't even started writing their first book, and they're going to be people who are traditionally published and now they're thinking of changing to indie, or they're indie published and they're thinking of pursuing a traditional deal or something like that. So if you don't have enough information to segment it so that you're creating that journey specific to different people's levels of experience, is there a way around that?
 
[00:30:04] Matt: Yeah. So the first level of segmentation would depend on where people are coming into your list, right? So you probably have opt-in lead magnets at different points. I mean, either you've got CTAs that you've got at the end of this podcast or if I go to your site, there's probably different places where I can give you my email address, right?
 
[00:30:25] Matty: Yes, but not as much as I could, for sure.
 
[00:30:29] Matt: Okay, sure. Yeah. Oh, just as a side note, that's one of the highest leverage areas when it comes to email. I mean, it's very hard to double your traffic, but it's very, very easy to double what I call your traffic-to-subscribe conversion. There's a lot you can do there. You can rapidly grow your list by improving that level. So anyway, that's the first level of segmentation. Look at the traffic coming to your site, tailor your opt-ins to possible different segments of your audience. You mentioned one of those segments, people who are just starting out, right?
 
[00:31:00] Matty: Yeah, like people who are just, let's say, just finishing their first book.
 
[00:31:04] Matt: Okay. Yeah. So say you've got a lot of organic traffic coming to a page, like "How to Finally Get Your Book Out the Door." And then you're offering them something really valuable. It has to be actually valuable. Again, under-promise, over-deliver. It can't be a PDF with the top 10 tips on how to finish that book, although that would be helpful, I'm sure.
 
[00:31:27] Matty: Sure, I think I could get a lot of people signed up for that one.
 
[00:31:31] Matt: Yeah, but I mean, you've got to think bigger than that. You've got to think of something like, I don't know what you're doing in that specific case, but it has to be something really valuable, something they'd probably pay money for, right? So when I do give you my email address, I'm like, okay, well, I've got something really good right off the bat. And then by the time I get your first email, I'm going to think, "Wow, this is just value on value on value," right? And I'm more inclined to enter that world you're building up, right? Exploring the value of email marketing for an author
 
[00:31:55] Matty: So here's my anathema question. Is, what is the value of me doing that? Because, if I think about the Indie author world, for example, I have thought about my email list in a very admittedly limited way, as a way for me to build a relationship so that I'm retaining podcast listeners. And, you know, sometimes I'm pointing them to resources I have that I actually earn money from, like a book about podcasting. If you're interested in podcasting, buy my book on podcasting. So, there's that opportunity. There's the opportunity to maybe introduce them to my fiction work, and there could be opportunities to. You know, certainly pay it forward to the community and things like that, but I'm not getting any intrinsic payback for each person who subscribes to my email. It's only paving the way to something else. Am I just looking at it in too limited a way?
 
[00:32:51] Matt: Yeah, yeah. In short, yes. So let's go with the podcasting thing as an example, so that you said there's a podcasting course that you offer?
 
[00:33:07] Matty: I have a book on podcasting for authors, and I offer consulting services.
 
[00:33:11] Matt: Okay, yeah, so this whole podcasting thing is a sub-story within the whole wider narrative, right? There's going to be a point where you start talking about podcasting, and you're going to receive a certain level of engagement from that. What you can then do is if you've already built a product around it and you know that it's a need and something that's a problem that your audience faces, then you can justify saying, "Okay, I'm going to build this whole subsequence for people who engage with those emails that I'm kind of seeding throughout the broader narrative." And when they engage with those emails, it'll trigger this subsequence that's dedicated to just talking about podcasting stuff. And then you could really focus on that part of the journey.
 
So the next, say you send me an email about podcasting adjacent stuff, and I interact with it. And then two weeks later, you send me another one. I interact with that. You can use that to flag something in your email automation system that says, "Okay, send Matt the podcast sequence." And then I'll be in that for the next, let's say two to three weeks, and then you're going to really start taking me on that journey from talking about the problem that I might be facing regarding podcasting, introducing various solutions to that problem, and then finally talking about your product as one of those solutions among many. That's going to be a way to introduce that series of ideas in a way that's not spammy and creates value the whole time.
 
How constructing an email sequence is like writing a business plan
 
[00:34:30] Matty: So, if people are putting together an email sequence that is following kind of a story arc, it seems to me that thinking through that would be quite a deep dive into making sure you understand your business to the extent that you're almost writing like a business plan for yourself.
 
Like, I would think that if somebody can successfully walk a potential client through that kind of story about the solution they have to offer, they need to have a very sophisticated understanding of their own business. Do you find that you have to advise clients to understand their business better before trying to write that description of it for other people?
 
[00:35:10] Matt: Understand their business in the sense of understanding what they're offering. Yeah, I mean, you have to know what your core value proposition is and what problem you're really solving and think about that quite deeply. I mean, taking it back to the fiction author's thing, yeah, why are you writing? Why are people reading what you write? How are you being valuable to other people? I mean, that's how I look at business, right? Yeah, you have to be aware of those things.
 
The psychology of marketing
 
[00:35:34] Matt: I mean, marketing is numbers and psychology. With email, you get the numbers, right? You see how people are reacting to each set of emails. Like, I'll run experiments where there are three different variations of positioning running against one another. And you can start to see trends in which one is being responded to the best just in terms of engagement, right? And unsubscribes and all those other things we were talking about before. So there's a numbers side of it. The psychology side of it is coming up with those ideas in the first place for the positioning.
 
[00:36:07] Matty: Yeah, this episode title is going to be like the gestalt of email marketing or something like that. Because whenever I talk about email marketing with anyone, I always get kind of stuck on the "why am I doing this" thing. I think it's because I don't have a clear enough understanding in my mind between "I'm communicating with this person because I want to help them start up a podcast" or "I want to help them think through whether they should even think about starting up a podcast." I think thinking through the exact scenario where that is going to be exactly the book somebody needs and then creating the story that leads up to that, I think, quite a sophisticated business exercise. It feels kind of tricky to me to understand what you're trying to achieve at that level.
 
[00:37:00] Matt: It can be a lot of fun.
 
The pros and cons of bucking cover genre conventions
 
[00:37:03] Matty: It could be a lot of fun! It could just make me pull my hair out, but that's so interesting, such interesting food for thought. I'm going to have to noodle on all that. But before I let you go, I had another topic I wanted to hit pretty quickly, and that is the cover of your book, "Natural Orders." So I have to say, I never thought I would say this about a book about email marketing, but it is a gorgeous cover. It's just beautiful to look at. I might just have to order the print copy so that I can just look at the cover.
 
But if I saw that in a bookstore, I would not say, "Oh, look, a book on email marketing," because it has beautiful botanical drawings. And I think there's like a peacock there or something. I'm seeing it quite small, so I'm not exactly sure. But I'm very curious about the thought that went into the design of the book, and I mean, you're making a sale because I just want to have a print copy of this book to look at the cover in more detail. But I'm sure you're acknowledging that you're probably losing people, too, because they kind of breeze through it. They don't even realize what the topic is. Can you talk a little bit about the thought that went into choosing that cover for "Natural Orders"?
 
[00:38:12] Matt: Yeah. First of all, thank you very much. I did put some thought into it. Here it is for the YouTube people watching. I definitely didn't follow the advice for "Here's how to create a book cover that sells really well on Amazon." I mean, it goes basically against all of those rules, and yeah, it doesn't look like a business book, let alone an email marketing book, but I thought, yeah, the people who love it, love it. And you want to attract those people. I've found that in the reviews as well; some people really resonate with the whole perspective I've taken with it. Yeah, that's what it's all about. I think there's a huge branding premium in writing a book that sometimes... undirected knowledge. And I think you should lean into that as much as possible. I've probably really gone down the natural orders route and everything that entails. And yeah, it might get passed over. My click-through rate from Amazon ads might suffer a little bit, but whatever. It's alright. The people who want to read it and find it and resonate with it, they still find it. So I think it's absolutely fine.
 
Also, with a business book, you're not trying to sell a million copies. You're trying to sell a certain amount and get those people who really have that burning problem. And, you know, talking about what you were just. That is the reason I wrote the book, so this whole idea of why I bother with email marketing. That's where people really seem to trip up. I mean, I've gone so deep into this over the years, and I still find people are really at that point. They're like, "Well, I'm doing email. Like basic stuff, but why am I doing it? And what does advanced email look like? And what comes next, right? What does real proper email marketing look like? And it's meant to answer that question. It's meant to be like, here's exactly what it looks like. Here's why you're doing it. Here's what you're trying to achieve with it. Here's where it fits in with your broader marketing mix. And here's how to do it without falling into all these traps that people tend to fall into.
 
[00:40:03] Matty: Well, I think that's a great insight to offer to people because I realized that I, and I'm sure a lot of other authors fall into this as well, but we hear the very valid and understandable advice that says you need to have a list of people that you want to connect with, that you own, and they are not beholden to Facebook or whatever to stay in touch with those people. It totally makes sense to me, and I'm willing to spend a certain amount of time in order to do that. But then I think that's all a lot of writers are looking for. They're looking for that group of people that they own so that if their Facebook account gets shut down, they can still tell people about their latest book.
 
But as we're talking, I'm realizing that's kind of like the nursery school version of email marketing, and that a better understanding of all the other ways that email can serve us would be a good tool to add to the toolkit.
 
[00:40:52] Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I think so. I think there's a lot of people out there that are kind of clued into it. They think, "Okay, there's more to this email thing." There's not a lot of information out there, especially not packaged together in an easy way where it's like, I can just sit down and read this book in a day, and I'll have a whole new view of this channel and what it can do for me. So that's the value proposition.
 
[00:41:14] Matty: So if people are reading "Natural Orders," is it the kind of thing that you feel that they would read through at once and they would have a better sense of it, or is it the kind of book that you have to sort of work your way through gradually? Is the approach something that you need to work your way through gradually rather than trying to absorb it all in one big chunk?
 
[00:41:31] Matt: That's interesting, you say that, actually, because I hate these business books that are a hundred pages just to say one thing. Some of the feedback I've gotten, which is great, I guess, is that it's a very dense book. So a lot of people will buy the physical copy, write notes in it, highlight things, and keep going back to it over and over again, which is. It's great. That's fantastic. I did put a lot of work into this book, even though it's only 200 pages. I think it is quite dense. Yeah, so you'll probably come back to it again and again and get ideas out of it, and there are things that you'll probably realize that you skimmed over the first time that you'll go back to and get something out of when you read it again. Which is great. That's the type of book I wanted to read. When I think of all the best business books, my favorite business books, they're all like that. They're relatively short, but they're just packed with stuff. It's like every line you get something out of. I don't know if mine's achieved that same goal, but I've tried. I've aimed towards.
 
[00:42:24] Matty: That's great. Well, I appreciate you being so generous with following my meandering set of questions. But it is true that this was, you know, less about the tactics of email marketing and more about the value of thinking of it in a bit more holistic way than I think a lot of authors naturally do. But, Matt, it's been so nice talking to you. Please let listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
 
[00:42:51] Matt: So the best place to find out more about me is naturalordersbook.com. So that's naturalordersbook.com.
 
[00:43:01] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
 
[00:43:03] Matt: Thank you.

Episode 208 - Mistakes Writers Make about Bladed Weapons with Teel James Glenn

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Teel James Glenn discusses how he got his start as a stuntman and how "the will to push through" physical challenges enabled him to follow his dream; the different varieties of swords; the fact that your first service is to the story; how opponents will never be exactly equal; the fact that tough people don't pose; how to achieve a realistic portrayal of bladed weapon wounds and guidelines for realistic recovery times; and examples of  well-done current-day knife and sword fight movie scenes.

Teel James Glenn has killed or been killed hundreds of times—on stage and screen—as he has traveled the world for forty-plus years as a stuntman, swordmaster, storyteller, bodyguard, actor, and haunted house barker. He is proud to have studied sword under Errol Flynn’s last stunt double, and has made hundreds of appearances in Renaissance festivals, soap operas, and feature films, including having been beaten up by Hawk on the Spenser for Hire TV show. He has also published dozens of novels, and his poetry and stories have been printed in over two hundred magazines including Weird Tales, Mystery, Pulp Adventures, and more. His novel A COWBOY IN CARPATHIA: A BOB HOWARD ADVENTURE won best novel 2021 in the Pulp Factory Award. He is also the winner of the 2012 Pulp Ark Award for Best Author.

Episode Links

Author website: TheUrbanSwashbuckler.com
Facebook profile: Teel James Glenn
Instagram profile: @teeljamesglenn
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teel-james-glenn-6a334b1/
Blsky.: @Teelglenn

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Teel James Glenn, or TJ. Hey, TJ, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:07] Teel: I'm doing fine. Very nice to meet you and everyone viewing.
 
[00:00:10] Matty: Oh, we are happy to have you here. And to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Teel James Glenn has killed or been killed hundreds of times on stage and screen as he has traveled the world for 40 plus years as a stuntman, swordmaster, storyteller, bodyguard, actor, and haunted house barker. He's proud to have studied sword under Errol Flynn's Last Stunt Double, and he has made hundreds of appearances in Renaissance festivals, soap operas, and feature films, including having been beaten up by Hawk on the Spencer for Hire TV show.
 
He has also published dozens of novels, and his poetry and stories have been printed in over 200 magazines, including Weird Tales, Mystery, Pulp Adventure, and more. His novel, "A Cowboy in Carpathia," a Bob Howard adventure, won Best Novel in 2021 in the Pulp Factory Award, and he is also the winner of the 2012 Pulp Arc Award for Best Author.
 
I invited TJ on the podcast to talk about what's going to become one of a series of "Mistakes Writers Make" episodes.
 
[00:01:06] Matty: And we're going to be talking about mistakes writers make about fight scenes and how to avoid them. This is going to join other entries in this series, which are: Police Roles with Frank Zaffiro, Forensic Psychiatry with Susan Hatters Friedman, P. I. s with Patrick Hoffman, The F. B. I. with Jerry Williams. First Responders with Ken Fritz, Coroners with Jennifer Grazer Dornbusch, Police Procedure with Bruce Coffin, and Firearms with Chris Grahl of TacticQuill. That set of podcast episodes became so popular that I finally created a little listening list on theindyauthor.com/podcast. So if you're writing crime fiction or a topic that includes any of those topics, you'll be able to find all those "Mistakes Writers Make" and how to avoid them all in one place.
 
[00:02:00] Matty: And so we're going to be adding to that list, "Mistakes Writers Make About Fight Scenes," and I'd like to start out asking TJ, what got you started as a stuntman?
 
[00:02:13] Teel: I was thinking about that actually last night very specifically. I was a very sickly kid. I couldn't take gym. I couldn't do any sports. Asthma. Sickly. I looked like a potato with pipe cleaners stuck in me. And when I was 15, I went to a Phil Suling comic convention. I was a reader of comic books, of course, and I saw chapter two of the "Adventures of Captain Marvel" movie serial, made in 1941, and the stunt work in it by a guy named Dave Sharpe. The editing and shooting were so amazing; you really did believe a man could fly. You really did see guys flipping around. And I went, "I want to do that." I started making Super 8 movies in high school. I read every single thing I could on stunts and movie serials and how they did it. I taught myself how to do stair falls at my high school with washcloths wrapped with ace bandages around my elbows and knees on the marble stairs, still wearing my glasses because I couldn't see otherwise. I learned to do high falls off of garage roofs and how to build box rigs and all of it from reading it, seeing any behind-the-scenes footage I could. And then, of course, I went to art school. But the last night in art school before I was supposed to graduate, I had a party who was auditioning people for a film, and on a lark, because I knew about film and I'd been making my own little stupid Super 8 movies, Captain Marvel, Rocketman.
 
I went, I got a part in it, and then he needed somebody to choreograph and storyboard it and to choreograph a fight. I knew how they did it in the movies, so that got me started. Once I did that, I ended up getting a lead in the movie, although he lost the equipment halfway through, and the film never got finished. But that led me to other movies, and then I thought, I got to get some training. So I was researching a book I was writing that had a sword fight, and I took a friend of mine who had studied with Ralph Faulkner in California, who was the swordmaster in a lot of the Errol Flynn movies. He said, "Hey, there's this guy teaching stage combat in the city. Do you want to come with me to the class?" I went, "Heck yeah!" So I took Swashbuckling 101, and the minute I held a sword in my hand, I knew that's what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was like a heavenly choir with lights shining on me. From that point, I started to train to be able to hold the sword, move, and breathe, and I never looked back. I studied with my first instructor for three to four years. When he started a Renaissance Fair, I was one of the instructors. Then I auditioned for other Renaissance Fairs and ultimately ended up doing 60 Renaissance Fairs, either as the fight choreographer, the assistant choreographer, the jouster, or, for the last bunch of years, I participated in a story show. What was cool about that was I did storytelling with all the voices and characters, and my daughter joined me when she was eight.
 
[00:05:17] Matty: Oh, cool.
 
[00:05:18] Teel: Every year we did at least one Renaissance Fair together for a weekend. Where she would beat me up with a quarterstaff at the beginning of the show because everyone likes to see the big guy beaten up. The last time we did it was just before she went off to college, and she was six foot three.
 
[00:05:38] Matty: Wow.
 
[00:05:39] Teel: It wasn't funny anymore. It was just an old guy fighting a young woman. It wasn't the giant fighting a little girl. So she did the last quarterstaff fight on her knees, so it looked funny. And she still beat me, of course. So, I mean, that's it. From learning stage combat, I ended up getting parts in low-budget movies, soap operas, where they needed a big guy who could be the tough guy and throw a punch. So I would often get hired as an actor, and then they would add stunts, or they would hire me as a stuntman and realize I could act, so they would start beefing up my part. But many of my roles were like, "You can't come in here," and then there'd be a fight. That was the main part of my career.
 
[00:06:24] Matty: I have to ask what happened between the asthmatic child that looked like a potato with pipe cleaners. Did something happen that enabled you to take part in those activities, or did taking part in those activities help address it?
 
[00:06:38] Teel: That's it. I had the will to push through it now because there was something I believed in. I don't care about sports; I still don't. So the idea of training to run around a field and throw a pigskin, why would you do that? But training to be able to sustain a sword fight and do a Shakespearean monologue all in a show? Yes, I would train for that. I used to live at the top of a hill, and you'd have to climb up stone stairs in a park for my stage combat class, which was on Saturday mornings. I would literally have to crawl up the stairs. At the end of the class, I could not function.
 
I still carry an inhaler with me to this day. I'm still asthmatic, not as bad as I was as a child, fortunately. One of the first fight choreographers, Jim Manley, who hired me as his assistant, was severely asthmatic; he always had his inhaler with him. And I mean, I can't run a block, but I can do a fight. I can jump off a building, and my martial arts, by the end of a martial arts class, I would be almost like a non-functional lump. But I'd made it through alive, and that was always an achievement for me. So it never went away. My reason for fighting it was stronger than the actual disease.
 
[00:07:58] Matty: That's a great story. We had sort of come up with a couple of categories about which we wanted to discuss the idea of mistakes writers make about fight scenes. We've talked about bladed weapons already a couple of times. So I'd like to start with that one. What are some mistakes writers make? And if you have any good or bad examples from movies people might be familiar with, that's always a fun way to illustrate it.
 
[00:08:23] Teel: Yeah, I almost always end up using movie references because most people haven't read obscure Raphael Sabatini books or whatever. First thing is when people say "sword," there are hundreds of types of swords, different weights, and each sword has a different purpose. When people are thinking, for instance, of the Conan movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, I will always and forever say that it was junk because Milius got his samurai instructor to teach Arnold how to use a sword, which makes no sense because samurai swords and broadswords don't work anywhere like each other. It would be the equivalent of having a bicyclist teach someone how to do motocross racing because they're completely separate. So everything he does with the broadsword is essentially wrong, and he moves like such a truck that anyone should have been able to kill him immediately.
 
On the other hand, you see a movie like Ladyhawke with Rutger Hauer, William Hobbs, who choreographed it, was the swordmaster in the 70s, 60s, 70s, and into the 80s. He did the Three and Four Musketeers with Michael York, the Mel Gibson Hamlet, and the Cyrano with Gepard. So he would study the specific weapon and teach you how to use that weapon. The broadsword techniques in Ladyhawke are real broadsword techniques, and you can see he moves completely differently. And, you know, and it really wouldn't have been a bad thing if they said, "We got a samurai guy, okay, we'll give him a curved sword." That's why Sandahl Bergman actually looks like she knows what she's doing, aside from being a dancer. She had a curved sword, so she was actually doing curved sword techniques. Samurai swords cut on the draw; they don't cut on the extension, so it's a completely different way of cutting. So, again, it's a stupid little nuance, but it's the kind of thing that drives me sane.
 
[00:10:34] Matty: The scene that this reminds me of is, and I'm not coming up with the name of the movie, but there was a movie with Liam Neeson.
 
[00:10:40] Teel: Rob Roy.
 
[00:10:43] Matty: Rob Roy, and there's that scene where he has what I guess is a broadsword. You can correct my terminology.
 
[00:10:48] Teel: A Scottish broadsword, Basket Hill broadsword, and he's fighting the guy.
 
[00:10:51] Matty: He's fighting a guy.
 
[00:10:54] Teel: With a small sword.
 
[00:10:55] Matty: Yeah, like a fencing thing almost.
 
[00:10:58] Teel: They were contemporary, same time. The Basket Hill broadsword was basically a war weapon, and the walking sword or court sword that ... He's always playing horrible, horrible human beings, and he's also really tiny. But he was using a contemporary sword of what the noblemen would have worn on their hip while walking around. They call it a walking sword. In that fight, he would have killed Liam Neeson in about 20 seconds because he had the lunge. The lunge gives you extension. Also, those basket-hilted swords, Rob Roy, whom Liam Neeson was playing, fought 60 duels in his life and never lost a duel. His last duel was when he was 63 years old, which, at that point, was old. We've pushed the extension of things. They wanted to make Liam Neeson the underdog, but in fact, if Liam Neeson's sword had ever actually contacted the court sword, it would have snapped it in half like a toothpick. So they had to work really hard to make you think the other guy was going to win, whereas if he'd gotten a lunge in that fight, the way it was choreographed, Liam Neeson was dead. In reality, the guy with the big hacking sword with longer arms would have won and gotten him on the first cut. If you miss while you're down there, the guy just lunges, and you're done. There's historical evidence of samurai swords against rapiers in Portuguese against bandits in the China Seas, and the Portuguese always won because a cutting sword requires an arc. A lunging sword does not. So while you're doing this, he's going like a sewing needle, and you're done.
 
[00:12:41] Matty: A That's an interesting, I mean, I imagine that in Rob Roy, they fussed with the reality because they needed that scene to extend longer.
 
[00:12:59] Teel: Yes, absolutely. And, yeah.
 
[00:13:00] Matty: Are there tips you can share that say, even like, how can someone do a realistic sword scene but extend it to extend the drama of the situation?
 
[00:13:10] Teel: If you ever see any of these commentaries on YouTube where they'll have, you know, a Swordmaster looks at a real thing and tells you, you know, the one thing all of them will say is that most fights, even if they last a long time, it's because nobody's doing anything. As soon as the blades start touching, the fight's over real quick because it is a case of who makes the first mistake. One of the things I write, I have a sword and sorcery series, and in any of my stuff, if I talk about people fighting with swords, I talk about the type of sword. Because certain swords have an innate advantage over other swords. And because of that, you then have to say, I want my hero to have a disadvantage so the other guy will have an arm that's three inches longer or my hero will have a stiff shoulder because he fell off his horse, to give them a disadvantage with that.
 
But in terms of, it's a case of just looking at the weapons and going, how is it used? And always, it's not the weapon, it's the individual using it. If somebody is skilled, the biggest problem I always see is people pick up a sword in some movie or in some book against someone who's actually trained in that weapon and somehow win. It doesn't work that way. You, even when they were training for combat, you trained with a weapon which was as close to the real weapon you were using as possible, even to the point where in Hamlet's time when they talk about foiled swords, they would take the real swords and wrap it in metal foil and stick a golf ball on the end of it. Because you wanted the actual weight of your weapon in your hand. If it's lighter, you're not going to learn how to use your weapon correctly. The familiarity with it often is the answer.
 
Now, a good swordsman is supposed to be able to use multiple weapons, but you always have your favorite; everybody. It's like everyone even has their favorite chair. You know, you get used to certain things. With any weapon, that weapon, even when I'm teaching stage combat or choreographing shows, I assign specific stage swords to specific actors and say, "That's yours," because every sword's balance is a little different. The weight of it is a little different. For instance, if you hand me a sword that I've never used before, and I'm immediately in battle, I really am not going to be familiar with how it moves. And that would be a disadvantage, which you can turn, as the protagonist gets used to it, perhaps. It gives you a nice disadvantage, even with a skilled fighter.
 
The other thing that drives me nuts, this is just the thing about cover artists and comic book artists. You don't switch your sword from one hand to the other unless you're Cornel Wilde, because you always have a strong side. Cornel Wilde in the old movies, the big trick at the end of every movie, he'd get stabbed in the right arm, and he'd have to do the final fight with his left hand. He was really a left-handed guy. He had to learn to do right-handed when he was competing for the Olympics. And so this was actually his strong side, but he learned to use the right. And 99 percent of people, or 98%, are right-handed. So a left-handed fencer always has an advantage because people are not used to going up against it.
 
[00:16:51] Matty: It makes me think of the scene in The Princess Bride, of course.
 
[00:16:55] Teel: Yes, yes. Believe it or not, that's the other thing. In the text, they go, "Ah, I see you've learned your Capo Ferro, ah, but I will use my Marozzo against you on Uneven Ground." They quote all these specific techniques, and they don't use a single one of them in the movie. The writer took the time to research them so they actually used real techniques. If you choreograph the fight that's in the book, it's a real fight.
 
[00:17:19] Matty: Oh, interesting.
 
[00:17:20] Teel: Using real techniques. Goldman did his research. But for the movie, they said, "Now we just want it to look like an Errol Flynn fight." So they had the dialogue, but they weren't doing Marozzo or Capo Ferro.
 
[00:17:30] Matty: That's very disappointing.
 
Your first service is to the story
 
[00:17:32] Teel: You know what? I still, it's still one of my favorite movies of all time. Because when you're choreographing fights, the first service is to the story. The second, but when you're doing it with real people, the story. And then if you're lucky, you can educate a little. You know, but when you're just writing it, it's always got to serve the story first. You know, and you can always fudge it if you don't know what to do with it. You could make it impressionistic. The feelings of the fight, without actually describing.
 
[00:18:04] Matty: Well, one of the things that I was thinking that's kind of related to that is that when you were describing, and people who are just listening maybe can pop over to YouTube and watch, but you were sort of illustrating why someone who is swinging a sword is at a disadvantage over someone who's thrusting a sword. We're using different terminology, but that's very apparent. Like, if you were watching a movie scene, I think even someone who knew nothing about swordplay would understand that, but when you're describing it, that would be hard to convey in writing. Do you have any tips for that?
 
[00:18:37] Teel: Honestly, I don't think it is because you can literally say, "I looked at him, and he had a curved war sword. That meant he had to swing it. I was lucky. Mine was straight. If I could avoid that first swing, I could stab him." I've actually had a scene in one of my books where two friends are fighting different bad guys. One guy has a two-handed sword and he's against a bunch of straight-handed people, and the other one, she's fighting a guy with a curved sword, she has a straight sword. So, literally, in the middle of the fight, they switch so that it goes straight to straight, curve to curve, to even it out a little. Because she had an advantage with the guy with the curved sword, but her buddy had none. She's also the better swordsman than him, so it makes sense she could take on the two guys with straight swords, and he would take on the one guy with the curve. You can build it in as part of the jeopardy for your hero, you know?
 
Size matters
 
[00:19:39] Teel: Also, the length of the sword matters. I'm sorry, size matters. If your hero is a petite woman, and even if she's an expert swordswoman, as my character Irina is, she has a sword that's scaled for her body, and so she will have less length than some goon she goes up against who's six inches, eight inches taller than her, who therefore has longer arms, and therefore, even if he had the same length sword, had an advantage. She has to make up for it by being more fleet and trying to get inside his range so that her blade is effective. So you really, there are a lot of factors you can use to even the fights up or uneven them against your hero.
 
The other thing is there's an old saying that the greatest swordsman in France is not afraid of the second greatest; they're afraid of the worst. And... So literally, someone who has no idea what they're doing can be on their side. They can just swing wildly, hit the right spot. I mean, how many times have you accidentally hit somebody's funny bone when you were reaching for something? You know, that could happen with a sword, to hit that one spot. There's a very funny story about when... if you've ever seen the movie The Court Jester with Danny Kaye, there's a scene in it where he's going up against Basil Rathbone, who was an excellent real fencer and a great stage combat fencer. But Danny's character is hypnotized to be the greatest with a blade. Unless you do this, then he's unhypnotized and he's a complete bumbling oaf. In the sequences where he's the greatest with the blade, Danny Kaye learned it so quickly and so well that the fight choreographer had to double Basil Rathbone because he couldn't keep up with the speed of Danny Kaye. On the other hand, there's a sequence where he's out in a courtyard, and he goes to Rathbone, "Your life's not worth that." Huh? Huh? Huh? And he's suddenly confused, and there's a scene where he's running around screaming, throwing the sword in the air, and you can see Basil Rathbone doing this. Rathbone said, "Neither one of us knew what he was going to do," and it was the only time I've ever been terrified with a sword in my hand because he could have literally stabbed him. He could have killed him. He was just running around being wild and crazy. So that can work too.
 
Opponents will never be exactly equal.
 
[00:21:57] Teel: You can work to have the guy you're up against. If you do something insane, they'll be like, "What are you doing?" Because also people who train in a style, and this is what Bruce Lee was against, when you train in one style, you're used to certain answers to certain movements. I do this, he always does this. Well, if you go up and complete a different style you've never seen before, you have no idea what they're going to do. If you, you do this and you expect them to do that, but they do this, suddenly, it throws your whole world out of kilter, which is why, In a lot of cultures, you would go around training in different schools, because everybody had their secret, vota secreta, their secret move, and each school would teach it, and you'd try to stay there long enough to learn their secret, and then you'd go on to the next school to learn their secret, because in a fight, you, you, you're not going to face a peer, you're going to face a peer, maybe. But you're not going to face an equal. No fight is ever equal, even if you both have the same training, the same body, the same skill level. one of you is going to be more motivated, or one of you is going to be tired from not getting enough sleep. So it's always, you might be equivalent, but it's never going to be exactly equal.
 
[00:23:43] Teel: That also works to give tension. When I have characters who are heroes and have had real training, I have to make sure they don't just Mary Sue their way through a story. You know, they can't walk into a room and kill everybody in the room like John Wick. Otherwise, there's no tension. Nobody really worries that John Wick is going to die; it's just about how he's going to kill them. It becomes like the Columbo of action films. You know he's going to win; you just want to see how.
 
[00:24:05] Matty: That makes me think of another interesting dramatic twist, which is the calm, cool, and collected combatant against the frantic, desperate combatant. And you can play that either way. You could say, you know, because he was frantic and panicked, he lost the fight. Or because he was frantic and panicked and had nothing to lose and was perhaps not trained. What you were saying before about it.
 
[00:24:30] Teel: That's a real thing. They train you in martial arts. The reason they want you to fight calmly and not fight angrily or excitedly is because when you have adrenaline in your system, you have the fight or flight response. Because of that, your body thinks, "Okay, I'm going to need energy to run away." It starts shutting down finer motor nerves, cuts off power to certain things. So you're, the old trope about somebody not being able to get their key in the door when the bad guy's coming after them, that's true because when you're in a frightened state, you lose fine motor nerves. So one of the reasons for martial arts repetition, and swords are martial arts, as are guns really, is you want to build a sense of, "This is the way you do it, and you're calm about it." You don't fight angrily, and you don't fight scared. You put that away, and you get angry or afraid after the fight is over.
 
One of the nice things, if anybody's ever read Modesty Blaise, or maybe I'm giving my age away, they were great books. One of the first true female heroes, who actually Emma Peel was somewhat modeled on, and one of her character traits is she will be phenomenal through a fight, very level-headed. Afterwards, she falls apart hysterically, but only in her friend Willie's arms. That's her complete release. She literally bottles all the emotion, and at the end, she explodes. It's her own way to deal with her own PTS. And he wrote this in the early '60s, before there was a real understanding of PTS. So I give much kudos to him, Peter O'Donnell, the writer. But you can really use the craziness because you will do things and take chances that no sane fighter would do.I had a friend, the first time he was in France, they still have rapier dagger fighting as a competition. And now it's been revived with HEMA, but back in the '70s, HEMA wasn't doing that stuff yet.
 
[00:26:08] Matty: And what is HEMA?
 
[00:26:22] Teel: Oh, Historical European Martial Arts. It was an answer to the huge explosion of martial arts, which everyone thinks is everything. They really are mostly referring to... Asian, but there's, I mean, the European martial arts are absolutely sophisticated, but we got guns earlier, and so they sort of became less a part of the world curriculum, but the more isolated communities in the east kept The older techniques alive much longer, but anyway, he was in a competition, and one of the things they allowed there, he didn't realize, he's busy, you know, parrying, blocking with rapier and dagger, he parries something, and the guy goes, whoop, and throws the dagger at him, and he said, I was standing there, and I watched this thing through my mask, coming at me in slow motion, going, this can't possibly be, and the guy won the point because they're allowed to throw the weapons.
 
[00:27:16] Matty: Interesting.
 
[00:27:17] Teel: Now, no one in a sane fight would throw away their only weapon, but in this case, he had parried the sword with both of his, so the guy had a free shot, but he wasn't in range to stab him, so he just threw it, and it's an insane move in a real fight, but on the other hand, he hit him. Now, in a real fight, maybe the guy would have dodged his head, but at the same time, that would have thrown his timing off, and you might have been able to kill him with the sword. You know, crazy stuff. It's perfectly justifiable, you know, the best knife fight I ever saw in any movie, the most realistic, was years ago, they used to have little video boxes outside movie theaters, and they would run a clip of a movie, and some Spanish film, I'll never, I don't know what it was, Mexican or Spanish film, because I don't speak Spanish, on 48th Street in Manhattan, and these two guys are in a pool hall, and they both got knives, and they're kind of doing this mirror thing, back and forth, one moves in, the other moves back, the other moves left, that guy moves right, and then, the first time one of them commits, he starts to lunge with it. The other guy reaches back, grabs a pool cue, and breaks it over his head. Most realistic sword-knife fight I've ever seen. Not the fight in Under Siege where they go, and they add in the sound effects of knife blades. You don't really parry with knives. Yeah, they're too small. Even Bowie knives are just too small, and the chances of actually catching it on your blade are minuscule. Again, an insane person or an unskilled person might do it, and that would be the one in a thousand times it worked.
 
[00:29:26] Matty: Well, I think that pool hall scene suggests an interesting scenario, which is the person who is carrying a knife because they intend to get in a fight and win, and the person who's carrying a knife because they're striking a pose, you know that they're threatening, but they're not positioning themselves in a way that they're imminently about to have an attack. Can you talk about that a little bit? Like if someone's using it mainly as a prop to threaten.
 
[00:29:51] Teel: Yes. Well, I mean, it's the whole bully scenario. People who bluster very seldom have the courage to carry through. I always tell actors when I'm working with them, don't play tough. Tough people don't pose. Tough people just are. They don't have to go, "Hey, oh," you know, they just look at you and go, "If you do that again, I'll kill you." It's just there. The mindset, and the samurai will talk about this a lot, is that every fight is won or lost before the first blow is struck. It is the mindset and the commitment, because you can't stop someone who's interested in hurting you and doesn't care about whether they get hurt or not. You cannot stop a determined assassin who does not care about their own safety. Which goes back to the crazy person. If a mother is protecting her child, she will leap onto a sword to throw the guy off a cliff with her. She won't parry it. She will do whatever it takes to make sure the child is safe. And if someone feels that the reason for defeating you is greater than their own personal safety, they will win the fight or have to be hacked down to the point where they can't function.
 
I always say that I fight like Brian Boru until five minutes after I'm dead. He was just that crazy. He would just charge large masses of people. There's actually an incident in Mexico when every year the Foreign Legion salutes a wooden hand. It was because it had been a lieutenant in a detachment when Maximilian was occupying Mexico. The lieutenant had a wooden hand from a previous engagement. There was a bunch of legionnaires that were trapped in a hacienda surrounded by hundreds of juaristas. The lieutenant was killed, but the sergeant made them all swear on his wooden hand they would never surrender. And it got to the point where there were like five of them left. Two of them were wounded. They had no bullets and they fixed bayonets and charged the Mexicans. The Mexicans were like, "You see this?" And they didn't fire because they were like, "These guys are crazy." And they didn't fire and didn't fire. The guys kept getting closer. And finally, somebody went, "Hey, we've got to do something about this." They all got up and surrounded them with bayonets to their throats and said, "Surrender." And the corporal, who was the only leader at that point, said, "The Legion does not surrender, you surrender." They all got bayonets at their throats. The Mexican commander said, "I'll tell you what, let's call it a truce." And he said, "We leave with our colors and our wounded comrades." The Mexicans were like, "You got it." And they saluted them as they marched out. Their determination was like the Alamo, but they won. Their determination. Their spirit was stronger than the people they were fighting because it really wasn't their battle anyway. They were occupying a foreign country, but it was for the honor of the Legion. That's one of the things is we've instilled a lot of artificial values in humans. One of them is the whole honor, flag, country, family. Family is the only one of those that's kind of a natural thing. You would protect your flag, and you would protect your offspring. The others have sort of been manufactured to give a reason for people to do things. Like I said, my reason to become fit, or at least appear to be fit, which is hilarious, people always used to say I was a physical guy, and I'm still not, never was. My reason to be fit was to be able to hold a sword. So that overcame my physical tiredness, my sickness, the exhaustion and stupidity. I mean, sometimes I think back at what I did when I was, you know, a 20, 30-year-old, and I'm like, how come I'm still alive? I mean, I went on to have people set me on fire for money.
 
Achieving a realistic portrayal of bladed weapon wounds
 
[00:34:01] Matty: That could be a whole other podcast episode, but I wanted to use that as a takeoff. I want to stick with the bladed weapons conversation because I think we're delving into a great topic, and that is one of the other things we wanted to talk about was the wounds and the reaction to wounds and realistic portrayal. And we talked a couple of times about what adrenaline does for you, and you were just mentioning people fighting for things like family and honor and so on. So what do you see in movies, if you're the recipient of the bladed weapon attack, what do you see that is good or bad? What should people try for or avoid?
 
[00:34:37] Teel: I do a lecture on guns and violence with weapons that way. And one of the things is, Matt Dillon in 20 years of Gunsmoke was shot 50 times and knocked unconscious 20 times, and in 8 years on air, Mannix was shot 20 times and knocked unconscious 37 times. Now, if you're knocked unconscious, that's a concussion. You have enough concussions. You don't talk right. You don't walk right. You're neurologically dumb. If you're shot, there's trauma shock. If you're stabbed, one of the things in duels, realistically, most duels post-1600 in Europe, personally, if it was a duel of honor, you fought stripped to the waist, male or female. And the reason for that was they figured out that if you drive fabric into the wound, which you would if you're stabbing somebody wearing a cotton shirt, there's always going to be some cotton fibers in there. They will fester, and you will die of the infection. More people died of infections after sword fights than the actual cuts or thrusts. Now I've been stabbed. I was stabbed in the stomach when I was doing a movie, and one of the guys I was working with, we're doing a sequence, and he missed the mark and he just stabbed me in the stomach, and I looked down and said, "Damn it, Scott, you frickin stabbed me." And he looked at me and went, "Yeah, sorry about that."
 
[00:36:03] Matty: So, fortunately or unfortunately, I had enough blub, and he stopped it as soon as he made contact with my body. But I still have a stab mark. He went in maybe about an inch, and any penetration anywhere on the torso and in most of the limbs even, any penetration more than two inches, you will hit a vital organ. Which is why there used to be a rule in New York that you couldn't have a knife first. You can't have a knife that's two-edged, ever, because the only purpose for a two-edged knife is to kill. That's a weapon, and you couldn't have it longer than two fingers' width when you hold two fingers up and you're measuring from one side to the other, because that's a little bit less than two inches. It's supposedly to reduce the chance of fatal injuries if someone has a knife and uses it in a fight.
 
So, swords, you can survive an 8-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch slash with a much greater chance of recovering almost completely than you could a 3-inch stab. Anywhere on your torso, because that three-inch stab will go into the liver, kidney, heart, lungs, and at a point in history, there was no way to stop sucking chest wounds. There was no way to stop a punctured lung. You either recovered or you didn't. Jim Bowie was stabbed and shot and clubbed and spent, I think it was seven months recovering because he had a thrust through the lung, and after that, everybody considered him a superman, that he was unkillable in the famous sandbar fight.
 
So, infection was a very big risk. One of the things that's odd about history is the Mongols wore very light armor. They wore silk shirts. And one of the reasons they wore silk shirts is because when they were hit with an arrow, it would not penetrate the silk; it would push the silk into the wound, and you could literally grab the edges of the shirt and work it to pop the arrow back out. It reduced the chances of infection since silk didn't promote infection, and it also reduced the chances of penetration because silk was a stronger fabric. It's funny that now we have spiders weaving spider silk Kevlar fibers to be used in bulletproof or bullet-resistant vests. So, we've taken modern technology and gone backward. If you look at modern riot armor, it looks like 15th-century fighting armor because what worked then still works now. If someone's going to hit you with something, you're protected in those areas.
 
However, there were some wounds they could not heal. There was something called the Coupé de Jeannac, a very famous duel between the Comte de Jeannac and a favorite of one of the Louis. Dueling was forbidden except this was affair of honor. They got all dressed up in their armor, and the Comte de Jeannac asked his sword master, "Look, we're in armor. I'm not that good with a sword. Can you teach me something? Something that I might be able to use, you know, a secret move." His secret move was to parry, slide in on the blade, and then cut the back of the knee—the tendons in the back of the knee—because in armor, you have to leave that area open. Even if you're wearing chainmail, it's much less armored or protected. In this case, most of the time they were not wearing chainmail pants, or they were fighting on foot. It was just too heavy.
 
They fought for a while. He sliced the back of the guy's leg, and he went down. They moved into the pavilion to try and stitch it up, but they didn't have the capability to really fix it, and he would have been crippled for life. He was so upset he ripped off the bandages and bled to death. The other side of that was that he was the favorite of the king, and the king was so sure that his guy was going to win that he had a big pavilion full of food for the big party afterward. But when the guy died, the king was so disgusted he left, and the populace went in, looted the pavilion, and had a great feast. The Comte de Jeannac had to flee to another country. But it's called the Coupé de Jeannac, the Cut of Jeannac. There are a lot of wounds like that, unhealable. If you were a swordfighter who'd been in any kind of battles for any length of time, you limped, or you were missing a finger, or you had scars on you. You woke up in the morning and you ached like crazy. There was a reason Athos drank a lot of wine. He ached a lot from a lot of fights. The other thing people don't realize is Athos was probably in the ancient age of about 30. He was the old guy. You know, D'Artagnan was 16, and Aramis and Athos and Porthos were probably around 20 because you just didn't live that long then, certainly not in a profession where you were either under fire or being stabbed on a regular basis.
 
Guidelines for realistic portrayals of recovery time
 
[00:41:29] Matty: If someone's writing a current-day story and they have someone who's stabbed or otherwise injured with a bladed weapon, can you give some guidelines about what would be an actual realistic recovery time? And maybe you can assume one scenario where the person actually has access to medical care and one where they don't. Can you give some guidelines about that?
 
[00:41:49] Teel: Yeah, if you're stabbed, it depends on where you're stabbed. They're really big on getting shot in the arm or shot in the leg in Mannix and in a lot of Westerns, and they usually just put a handkerchief on it and wander off. By the end of the hour, they're wandering around. If you're shot in the leg, you're done. It's the largest artery in the body, the largest muscle group. You're going to walk like Chester if you recover. If you're stabbed, it depends on if it's in a muscle group, how much tissue damage is to it. So realistically, let's say it's a four-inch knife. You get cut badly on the forearm and then stabbed in the leg before you break a bottle over the guy's head, and he's out. The forearm, if it's a cut, chances are it'll be stitched up. Unless he cut tendons, you know, a couple of weeks from then, it'll be sore for quite a while, and you may always feel the weather, but you'll be fine.
 
If he stabs you in the thigh, that could be months of recovery time because it went deeper, and they would actually have to do surgery internally to sew up the layers. We are basically onions, and that's why we cry so much. If your hero has a deep cut like that on the leg, it could be months before they can walk normally, if ever, really. And I said if you're cut on the back, that's what I say if you're in a knife fight, you want to control where you're cut. If you're cut here, there's less damage than if you're cut here. If you're cut here, it's all the tendons that work your hand.
 
On the outside of the arm, if you're going to get cut or slashed, even in the bicep or tricep area, is the least of two evils. If you're cut on the inside, you have all of the tendons that operate your fingers, and you have a major vein that runs on the inside. The brachial vein runs on the inside of the bicep, so you want to protect that. There's a reason we were built like a cage. We are basically a layer of suet on top to help protect the bones so they're not brittle. That's fine for slashes or contact wounds. A stab can go through and between those bones. So that's why it's always more dangerous.
 
There's a very famous moment in the historical battle of Agincourt where the French were so jammed together because the English stopped the front line with their longbows. The French were so anxious to get going, they kept moving. So the back lines kept piling up on top of the front lines. They had their distance, so the English just kept shooting bows at them. They got to the point where they couldn't swing their swords. The big cry was, "Estoc! Estoc! Stab! Stab!" Because it was the only way they could fight. Also, when you're wearing armor, stabbing is actually more effective if you can get to the joints. Most knights, when we think of knightly combat, their main weapon was a hammer because you were wearing a tin can, you can't cut that, so they would basically use blunt force weapons, or they would have a pick. One side would be a flat hammer, and the other side would be like what we think of as a railroad pick. You would try to use the pick to get through the armor and pry the guy out. So, you know, it's, and while knights could move very fluidly, you know, up until recently, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, the myth persists because historians never put on armor. Historians sit in places and read books.
 
You have got guys who actually put the armor on when it's fitted for them. It actually is lighter than modern combat gear and is suspended from more points. A full suit of armor might have 80 points of suspension. You wore an arming coat underneath it. Each section was connected, and it might weigh 60 to 80 pounds. Modern combat gear that a Marine might wear, like going into Afghanistan, weighs 120 pounds. It's basically just over the shoulders and the waist. So it's only got three points of suspension. I liken it to modern-day firefighters with all of their gear. Knights could move faster and more nimbly. They could swim. They could climb. They could swing on ropes. Otherwise, no castle would have ever been invaded. You know, so the illusion that knights were big and clumsy and could move very well was not true. They also were the best-fed of the people. They had the most meat, and that's why the Royal Guards are called the Beefeaters. They got the highest percentage of actual meat and vegetables. They didn't have to live off millet and leeks. They also had a more nutritious diet, which gave them more energy and a higher calorie count.
 
A well-done current-day knife fight movie scene
 
[00:46:58] Matty: Well, I wanted to wrap up with one more question. This is to bring it back to writers who are writing more current-day knife fights or bladed weapons fights. Is there a movie scene that you think does an especially good job?
 
[00:47:14] Teel: The best knife fight I can think of is in a William Friedkin movie, "The Hunted." It stars Benicio Del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones, and they have a brilliant knife fight in it. They have a little bit of a Wolverine thing going on. They play the wounds, but not as seriously as it would really be. They wouldn't have had that much adrenaline to keep going after being stabbed a couple of times. But, yeah, it's very realistic in the sense that they are two experts who know each other, so they can really engage in a fight, checkmate, fight, checkmate kind of thing realistically. It's not terribly drawn out, but it gives you a real sense of a visceral sword fight or knife fight.
 
The other one, believe it or not, is a Japanese film with Christopher Lambert called "The Hunted." The premise of it is that Christopher Lambert's a murder happens and he sees the face of one of the ninjas. They think they killed him, but he's not dead. This martial arts sect, though contemporary, has been fighting this ninja sect forever. They find out he's alive and they have to protect him.
 
It has some of the most realistic sword fights, and it's contemporary, from around 1990. There's a fight on a train that's phenomenal, where they're literally fighting guys in the middle of the smoking car, basically on a train. It very much kind of has Highlander vibes in that sense. Brilliantly shot, but both movies are called "The Hunted," so you have a nice, realistic and well-done knife fight, and another slightly less realistic but really well-done sword fights in the Lambert movie.
 
Matty: Well, DJ, thank you so much. This has been so interesting. I appreciate you sharing your insights and expertise with us. And please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
 
Teel: I have a website called theurbanswashbuckler.com. My books are on Amazon. I have "Dragon Throat," which is a novel of Alteva, a sword and fantasy, and "Journey to Stormrest," from the same series. I also have a book about a modern-day ninja, which I call "Martial Arts Noir." It's a murder mystery story, but his mother was an assassin for the Japanese during World War II, and he was raised by her. She taught him how to kill people. It's called "Killing Shadows," and they're both out from Airship 27. I'm around, I'm on Facebook with Teel James Glenn, T E E L, James Glenn. It's very hard for me to hide. I'm too big.
 
[00:49:55] Matty: Perfect. Thank you so much.
 
[00:49:57] Teel: Thank you.

Episode 207 - Six Ways to Collaborate with Your Fellow Writers with Michael Bradley

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Michael Bradley discusses SIX WAYS TO COLLABORATE WITH YOUR FELLOW WRITERS, including sharing your expertise, inviting other writers to writers' groups that match their needs, sharing information about opportunities, organizing a group sales table at a book fair, inviting other authors to participate in your events, and sharing and promoting other authors on social media. We talk about how this is not only a matter of being a supportive member of the author community, but also a vital part of a successful author business. We also discuss the importance of weighing the ways in which you collaborate against your creative and business goals to make sure they're aligned.

Michael Bradley is a Delaware-based mystery and suspense author. He started life as a radio DJ, spending eight years "on-the-air" before realizing that he needed to get a real job. His broadcasting experience came in handy for his award-winning third book, DEAD AIR. His latest novel, NONE WITHOUT SIN has been called "an intriguing, fast-paced mystery" and "his best novel yet."

Episode Links

Author website: www.mbradleyonline.com
Facebook profile: http://www.facebook.com/mjbradley88
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/mjbradley88/

Episode 206 - Embracing Your Own Kind of Online Peculiar with Sue Ellson

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Sue Ellson discusses EMBRACING YOUR OWN KIND OF ONLINE PECULIAR, including navigating the gig economy; the vital importance of a website as an online home base and how to make it appealing and meaningful to the search engines as well as the visitors; managing your online activity as a standardized sequence; the power of WordPress + add-ons; what it means to go from SERPs to CHERPs; and the power of letting your own kind of peculiar shine through on your website.

Sue Ellson is the author of five non-fiction books on the topics of LinkedIn, careers, business, hyper-local marketing, and gigsters. She is also the Founder of NewcomersNetwork.com.

Episode 205 - The Pros and Cons of Writing Contests with Becky Tuch

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Becky Tuch discusses THE PROS AND CONS OF WRITING CONTESTS, including finding and assessing opportunities, and red flags to watch out for; why contests charge entrance fees; considering what you get for that fee; what should you expect if you win, beyond creative validation; and the vital importance of understanding what you gain and sacrifice in terms of ownership of your IP if your work wins a contest, especially if you’re submitting a book-length 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.

Becky Tuch is a fiction and nonfiction writer, creative writing instructor, consultant, and editor. Her writing has appeared in over a dozen literary magazines and several anthologies, and has been honored with a number of magazine awards as well as fellowships from The Somerville Massachusetts Arts Council and The MacDowell Colony. She is the founder of The Review Review, a website dedicated to reviews of literary magazines and interviews with journal editors, and The Lit Mag News Roundup, a bi-weekly newsletter that aims to demystify the world of lit mag publishing. Becky lives in Philadelphia, PA.

Episode Links

www.beckytuch.com
https://litmagnews.substack.com/

Episode 204 - Rebranding: Is It Worth the Investment? with Michael La Ronn

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Michael La Ronn talks about REBRANDING: IS IT WORTH THE INVESTMENT? We talk about Michael's rebranding of his non-fiction book series, the importance of accommodating evolving tropes, how rebranding is like "a fresh coat of paint" for your books, how Michael determined what the new color scheme for his non-fiction series INDIE AUTHOR CONFIDENTIAL would be, the importance of reassessing pricing across markets, and, maybe most importantly, deciding when to reallocate time from writing to rebranding. You can also hear Michael talk about how his adventurous tendencies played out in a Wisconsin Chinese Cajun restaurant specializing in seafood gumbo.

Michael La Ronn is the author of over forty science fiction & fantasy novels and self-help books for writers. He runs the popular YouTube channel Author Level Up and serves on the staff of the Alliance of Independent Authors as a US Ambassador, and he also co-hosts the AskALLi Member Q&A Podcast.

Episode Links

Michael’s links:
https://www.youtube.com/authorlevelup​
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaellaronn/
​https://twitter.com/michaellaronn
https://www.facebook.com/michael.laronn

Michael's previous episodes:Episode 176 - Two Perspectives on Choosing the Tools for Your Author Career with Michael La Ronn
​Episode 163 - Year End: The Writing Craft And The Publishing Voyage with Jennifer Hilt & Michael La Ronn
Episode 148 - Making the Most of In-person Events
Episode 126 - Estate Planning for Authors
Episode 096 - Emerging Tech for the Writing Craft
Episode 090 - Bringing a Creative Endeavor to an End
Episode 074 - Perspectives on Personal Branding
Episode 055 - The Costs of Self-publishing a Book

Episode 203 - The Author Marketing Audit with Joe Solari

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Joe Solari talks about THE AUTHOR MARKETING AUDIT, including what Joe saw in the creative world that led him to develop the audit, the power of using the natural forces of popularity marketing, positioning your product to meet an unmet desire, the value of segmentation and the role of direct sales, setting up a process that allows customers to self-nurture, and considering how you would want to be treated as your customer.

Joe Solari helps authors build great businesses through books, courses, and podcasting, as well as strategy and operations consulting. He is the author of ADVANTAGE: HARNESSING CUMULATIVE ADVANTAGE IN THE WINNER TAKES ALL PUBLISHING MARKET and MAY I HAVE A MOMENT OF YOUR ATTENTION: HOW TO GET YOUR MESSAGE HEARD IN A NOISY MARKET.

Episode Links

joesolari.com/ama
https://twitter.com/Joseph_Solari​
https://www.youtube.com/@JoeSolari​

Episode 202 - Acting on Inspiration Anywhere with Kevin Tumlinson

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Kevin Tumlinson talks about ACTING ON INSPIRATION ANYWHERE, including how he wrote a short story, designed its cover, and published it while waiting in line at Disney World; the benefits of the small screen; how the option to write on your phone should be considered an opportunity but not a requirement to produce; the vital consideration of what fills you back up creatively; the madness of rapid release (exacerbated by AI); the question of whether an author can maintain a career by slowing down; and the possibilities of multi-media (but don't forget the words).

Kevin Tumlinson is a bestselling and award-winning novelist, a prolific podcaster, and a popular public speaker. He's known as "The Voice of Indie Publishing" for his work helping thousands of authors to start, build, and grow their writing careers.

Episode Links

https://kevintumlinson.com
https://twitter.com/kevintumlinson
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevintumlinson/

Episode 201 - Crafting Great Scene Descriptions with Alessandra Torre

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Alessandra Torre talks about CRAFTING GREAT SCENE DESCRIPTIONS, including if and how scene descriptions vary by genre, the challenge of repeating descriptions across a series, the importance of engaging all the senses, tapping into the familiar and the unfamiliar, and the value of both potato chip scenes and casserole scenes.

And if you want to dive deeper into this topic, some of Alessandra’s recommendations, especially related to the power of assessing well-reviewed and successful books in your genre, are a great companion piece to Episode 195 - The Anatomy of a Bestseller with Sacha Black.
 
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.
 
Alessandra / AR Torre is an award-winning New York Times bestselling author of thirty novels. She is self-published, as well as traditionally published by Hachett, Harlequin, and Thomas & Mercer. In addition to writing, Alessandra is the CEO of Authors AI and the cofounder of Inkers Con.

Episode Links

https://www.inkerscon.com/inkers-con-articles/2023/3/8/heres-a-fun-exercise-to-make-your-scene-descriptions-better
www.alessandratorre.com
www.facebook.com/alessandratorre0
www.instagram.com/alessandratorre4
https://www.youtube.com/@Alessandratorre00
https://www.tiktok.com/@alessandra_torre

Episode 200 - How Times Have Changed (or Stayed the Same) with Mark Leslie Lefebvre

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Mark Leslie Lefebvre talks about HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED (OR STAYED THE SAME) in the writing and publishing worlds since 2016. Why 2016? Because that’s when the first episode of The Indy Author Podcast aired, and I’m looking back with Mark to celebrate landMARK episode 200. We discuss what has and hasn’t changed in interior and book cover design, editing, production, distribution, marketing, and promotion, and how we as indie authors can prepare for what the coming years will bring.
 
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.
 
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.

Episode Links

www.markleslie.ca
www.starkreflections.ca

Episode 107 - The Seventh Process of Publishing: Selective Rights Licensing with Orna Ross

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Orna Ross of the Alliance of Independent Authors joins me to discuss the seventh of the Seven Processes of Publishing: SELECTIVE RIGHTS LICENSING, or how you can make your hard-earned content work for you year after year across multiple markets and in multiple mediums. We discuss contract clauses that rights seekers might include in their boilerplate but which you should negotiate, and what clauses should be there that are sometimes left out … what it means to have someone option your work for TV or movies … why it’s important to fight for how you are represented in derived products (for example, the difference between “inspired by” and “based on”) … and when you need to let it go once you’ve licensed specific rights to a specific work.

Orna Ross is the founder and head of The Alliance of Independent Authors, a non-profit professional business membership organization for self-publishing authors. ALLi provides trusted advice, supportive guidance, and a range of resources, within a welcoming community of authors and advisors.

Episode Links

Episode 070 - Copyright for Authors with Orna Ross

https://www.ornaross.com/

https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/

https://selfpublishingadvice.org/

Your First 50 Book Reviews: ALLi’s Guide to Getting More Reader Reviews (affiliate link)
​
150 Self-Publishing Questions Answered: ALLi’s Writing, Publishing, & Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets (Publishing Guides for Indie Authors 5) (affiliate link)

Episode 099 - Connecting with Fans through Merchandising with AL Jackson

Episode 023 - Reaching New Readers through Translations with Emma Prince

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Welcome back, Orna.

[00:00:03] Orna: Hi, Matty, thank you very much. Delighted to be back for our last one.

[00:00:07] Matty: Yes, we are here for the seventh in our series of the Seven Processes of Publishing, and today we're going to be talking about SELECTIVE RIGHTS. And I think that a great companion piece to this discussion is going to be Episode 70, which you appeared on, which was on copyright. I think that'll provide great background. But I think in this conversation we're going to be talking about something a little bit different. So when you talk about selective rights, Orna, just share with us what you have in mind there.

[00:00:34] Orna: Yes, selective rights licensing. So to set the context and the reason why it's called selective rights licensing, if you get a publisher, which is the way authors talk about it, so we know now because we've been through the Seven Processes of Publishing, we know that being published is not getting somebody to actually agree to put your book out. That is a different thing. And when people do it that way, when an author actually signs a publishing contract for a manuscript, a raw manuscript, then generally speaking, that contract takes most of the rights and licenses them for a period. Sometimes they take them for a long period. There's this new clause that's sneaking in that's also trying to take rights that haven't been invented yet. So a publisher's contract by definition tries to take as many rights as possible for that one publisher on an exclusive basis.

[00:01:34] As indy authors, we're doing things very differently. We're self-publishing our own books, and we bring them out as we've already discussed at length now across this series in three different formats, ebook, print, and audio. Audio traditionally was what was known as a subsidiary right. So a publisher who licenses all rights would then go on and sub-right out the audio rights to an audiobook publisher.

[00:02:02] In the old days, they were originally just buying the hardback version and putting that out themselves and selling the paperback rights to another publisher. And still there are very few publishing houses that do it that way. Most cover now print and hardback and other print editions in-house. But the point I'm making and the point that we made when we talked about copyright on your podcast before, that your book is not just an ebook, a print book, and an audiobook, which you now will harvest the rights to yourself as a self-publisher, there are lots of other rights embedded in there too. And they usually appear on the subsidiary rights section of a publishing contract. And they are things like translation rights, TV rights, radio rights, and so on, merchandising rights. There are lots of them, there's a long list and it’s not so important to talk about what they are as how do you handle them and understanding that your book is like a shopping mall, and different parts of the property are rented out to different people. That's what selective rights licensing is. You don't just think about self-publishing, you think also about the other publishing rights that are embedded in your book.

[00:03:28] I will say this is not for beginners. So the time to start thinking about licensing your rights is when you've already had some success in selling your book in ebook, print and/or audio, because most rights buyers won't be interested until that point anyway. So it's not something to be thinking about at the beginning, except to think about it in these terms, to understand that's what you've got. You are the rights holder, that's a huge privilege and there are lots and lots of ways in which you can take advantage of that.

[00:04:02] Matty: I know one thing that is sort of the first thing that people leap to if they're talking with you about your book and they'll always say, when is the TV series going to come out? That seems like the first step that people's minds go to. So is that an example of one of these selective rights categories that you would include in this topic?

[00:04:24] Orna: Yes, exactly. So TV rights are becoming more and more popular. I mean, we're living in a great time as writers. In one sense, there's a lot more content out there, there are a lot more books being produced, but also, there are a lot more outlets out there. So the new digital streaming services like Netflix and Amazon and so on, they're content hungry. And one of the first things they do, rather than make a new story is they turn to the world of books, and we can see this with classics. They make them over and over and over again. But they're always looking for new stuff. So the world of book scouting and searching out good content for TV and other outlets is on the increase.

[00:05:09] I mean, that's not to say it's easy. And it's not to say it's straightforward either, because the first thing that happens, if you are approached by the TV or film or radio, those broadcasting rights, the first thing that happens is they will ask to put an option on your book. So every single week we get members of ALLi, and they write to us, and they say, I've just been asked for an option on my book by a TV company or a TV producer, a film producer or a radio producer. And they're super excited, naturally, and we have to say, calm down, dear, because options don't get made, far more options are actually sought. “Being greenlit" is the term that's used in the industry. And the gap or the amount of time it can take between an option being signed and the green light on a project is a very long time.

[00:06:08] But just to talk a little bit about the option, because we get a lot of questions about that. An option is essentially a producer or somebody else, an investor, somebody who hopes to make money out of a broadcasting rights project, they ask you for an option on your book, which means that you won't discuss, you won't allow anybody else the right to explore making a TV program or making a film or making a radio program or whatever it might be during the option period. So an option is all about them getting the time to go to funders and actors and directors and all of the millions of people who need to get involved in making a decision as to whether the project will go ahead or not. It gives them the time, you have exclusively optioned the work to them, so if they get all their ducks in a row, the book will go to them.

[00:07:06] For you though, as the author, while it's optioned by person A, it can't be optioned by person B, and person B might be a better option. So always with your rights, when you're licensing your rights, you want to keep the term as short as possible, and the rights buyer or the option seeker would want to make the term as long as possible, so that is the negotiation that you're going to be in.

[00:07:32] If it's a company that is hoping to produce this work at a profit, not just, say, another indy artist, producer, director that you might team up with, but if it's somebody who's actually intending to make some money from your book, then they should pay for that option. And you need to set a fee, because essentially your rights are held up for that period of time. It has a value, and if they are serious, they will have a budget for the option. A lot of authors get asked for the option and never ask how much. So asking how much is definitely part of selective rights licensing.

[00:08:12] Matty: And I always like to put a plug in for ALLi in these kinds of conversations because, can you describe a little bit what sort of support ALLi provides to members in that kind of scenario?

[00:08:22] Orna: Yes, so you just would need to write to us and tell us what's going on and we will advise you accordingly. It depends, as we've talked before about how "it depends" is the answer to so many publishing questions, but it's very particular, depending on who is the person who has approached you, what are the plans, all of that kind of thing, the size of the option will vary around that.

[00:08:45] But yeah. It's actually something we do get lots of questions about, because I think all of us instantly begin to feel out of their depth in this. And the other thing I would say is, we certainly can't advise somebody on a TV contract in the way that we can advise on a publishing contract. And TV, film, radio, any kind of broadcasting rights, merchandising rights, and lots of other subsidiary rights are completely outside our arena. You do need an attorney. They're very complex, and if you get beyond the option phase and you get into the contract phase, you definitely will need support of somebody who understands the business, because it's a different business to the publishing business. So while we can give very broad guidelines, it's not our area of expertise in that sense. It never will be. It wouldn't be possible for us to be able to do that.

[00:09:37] Matty: It seems as if the earlier in the process a contract would come up, the more standardized it probably is because if they're offering options to many authors, they're probably not modifying them author by author. And so, the earlier it is, probably the easier it would be for a novice to at least understand at a high level what's going on. So that idea, I think you and I have talked about the idea of using text-to-speech to help you work through a manuscript to make sure you're catching all the errors. I would use text-to-speech to have it read you contracts so that you're not skipping over anything. And I would think early on, anybody could understand like 90% of it, and then you'd still maybe want to check in with somebody to understand the 10% or to make sure you really did accurately understand the 90% that you thought, and then the further along the process that goes, the more specialized advice you would need in order to understand all the nuances. Does that seem sensible?

[00:10:33] Orna: Yes, very much. So I mean, the option is fairly straightforward. The option is literally just an agreement letter with a term and an amount of money granted, and that's fine, you're fine with that. It's when it gets to the contract, to the actual purchase of the content, because again, even when you get to that point and they bought and they paid, there is no guarantee that it will be made. It's notoriously difficult to get these projects through the gates. And even if they are made, it can take a very long time. But also, they can be really quite ruthless around rights. They can slip in little bits and pieces that make all the difference.

[00:11:14] It's the same as with publishing. Some contracts are fine, they're very straightforward, and some are not, and yeah, it's tricky. So it's definitely advisable at that point to get some help. But I mean, once you're at that point of actually looking at a contract, there will be a fee in there for the work and the fee should be reasonable. And so there should be room in there for you to hire some help to actually get it looked over.

[00:11:42] Matty: I think the importance of getting expert advice, even on those simpler ones. My two concerns with contracts are always, that I think I understand something, and I don't. There's a nuance to a word that has a legal meaning that I'm not thinking of as someone who's not familiar with the legal terminology. And then the other one is just, what is reasonable? What is average? If they're offering me a contract that has an option for, I don't know, five years, is that normal or is that outside of normal parameters? And so, yeah, it's great to have a resource like ALLi that you can run those kinds of very basic questions by.

[00:12:15] Orna: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And the third thing is, is there something that should be there that isn't? Very often one like that catches people out. So for example, if you're selling your publishing rights as opposed to broadcasting rights or merchandising rights, with your publishing rights, translation, or supposing you get a publisher, which some of our members have done, who is just going to do your print for you. You carry on with your ebook and audio, but they will look after print. Make sure there's a right to reversion clause so that when the book goes out of print, that the rights revert to you. That's missing on lots of contracts on the publisher side, surprise, surprise, and should be there. But if you're not aware that that ought to be there and you're not going to notice that it's not. So yeah, these are the kinds of things that can catch you out.

[00:13:06] Matty: We've been talking, I think, I've been thinking in terms of TV, but movies, any differences between TV and movies in terms of what authors should keep in mind?

[00:13:15] Orna: Yeah, film and TV are similar and different. So I think of it in terms, very often with the TV, it's going to be a series of books that you're dealing with out there for the amount of content that people are getting. And TV tends to be built around pilots, and then if the pilot takes off then the rest happen. Or they might have invested in one, the first series, which might be your first book say, but if that doesn't go well, then books two to eight will no longer be required. What happens in those instances is something you need to think about. So TV is, generally speaking, unless it's a one-off TV special, it's generally long form and therefore needs even more attention.

[00:14:05] But the distinction is not so much between TV, as it is between different production companies and what they put into their contracts. So, the contracts can be quite different. Overall it's generally governed by the same principles because they're turning your text into video, which is what it comes down to. The new streaming services have slightly different approaches as well. And then the traditional Hollywood machine, which has its own particular way of behaving, and then there are all, I mean there are so many of them, independent production companies, some of whom are making both film and TV. So it really is quite difficult to generalize. But I think the big distinction between film and TV is the length of time, the amount of content you're actually licensing. And obviously, it should be obvious, the more content that's being licensed, the more money you should be getting.

[00:15:09] Matty: So I think another interesting consideration for TV and movie is that oftentimes even when they get made, they look really different than they originally did in your book. So the example I was thinking of is in Episode 89, THE BOTHNESS OF COMPELLING CHARACTERS, I talked with Ben Winters, who is the author of one of my favorite series, which is THE LAST POLICEMAN, and that just got made into, or it's going to be made into a movie or a series called THE LAST POLICE, because they decided that they were going to replace the male protagonist with a woman. And similarly, John Dixon is an author I met through our local writers' group, the Brandywine Valley Writers' Group, and he had a book called, PHOENIX ISLAND that got picked up and turned into INTELLIGENCE. John's book was about a teenager. By the time it reached the film, it was an adult, it was a totally different thing, but you know, John was still getting some remuneration for his contribution, his inspiration. So totally aside from the legal considerations, do you have any advice about how authors should approach the releasing of that sense of ownership about their material, if it gets pursued in that way?

[00:16:22] Orna: Yeah. So there is a kind of a practical thing to say, and then there's a more general thing to say. At the practical level, and this will come up in the contract negotiation, there's a difference, you used the word inspiration there. There's a difference between a broadcasting work that uses the term "inspired by" your book title and your author name, hopefully in the credits, and one that is "based on" is different again. And then there are a few other terms that are sometimes used, but those are the two big ones. So, you want to be negotiating that in the contract. You want it to be "based on," because that's better in every way, in terms of the flat fee that you get or the royalties that you get. But also, and this is a really important thing when it comes to broadcasting, is it's a fantastic marketing vehicle. And so if the name of the book gets changed too radically and it becomes not recognizable, or if it's not put on the cover, it's shoved down in the acknowledgement somewhere, things are really important for the value that would accrue to you for those rights. And so you need to be cognizant of them. That's at that level.

[00:17:34] So you fight like crazy during the negotiation and they'll know what they're prepared to do or what they're not prepared to do, and they'll have their break point, and so will you. And you can walk away, you don't have to take it. If somebody is interested, chances are somebody else will be interested and you may get a better deal somewhere else.

[00:17:52] So it's all that tricky kind of area and all the challenges that go with negotiation. One of the sections we have in our selective rights licensing guidebook is just about negotiation. So pitching and negotiation are two skills that come into properly licensing your rights and getting the best return you can for them.

[00:18:14] But back to your question, so that's the practical side of it. You fight like crazy during the contract, but then you let it go. Then just forget about it because it's going to be so different. I mean, let's take anything fictional and you've got your picture of your characters in your mind, just like a reader does, and you hear loads of readers say, oh, it wasn't half as good as the book. In fact, people nearly always say it wasn't half as good as the book, because it's very exceptional for a firm to exceed what a book can do. And particularly somebody who's read it before they see the film, because they've got the picture of the characters in their mind. But how much more so do you, as the author, who's been carrying it around for such a long time?

[00:18:57] And of course you feel like you own them because they first popped up in your imagination, but in the film, you don't own them. You've licensed them, they're gone. Licensing means that somebody has actually got the license now to do as they will. And the less involved you get, the better. I think the more you think about it, I mean, go along and do whatever they allow you to do. That would be written in the contract as well, whether you can turn up on set, you can get involved in things. Different production companies take very different kinds of approaches to that, but aside from enjoying that experience, and certainly not turning up to say no, you can't make him do that, he would never do that. You can't do that. You have to let it go completely, so only go on set if you can watch them mutilate and still be happy that it's happening.

[00:19:47] And secondly, think of it as a marketing tool, rather than anything else. And it's a completely different art form. Their constraints are much, much greater than yours. You've got the full swathe of your imagination; they've got to price that. My son works in film, so I'm really familiar with the challenges of casting and scenes, having to change the settings because they're too expensive or impossible to reproduce. There are just so many constraints in the making of a film that it's a wonder any of them are any good at all, ever. It's a really challenging art form, and it's different, so yeah, just let it go.

[00:20:27] Matty: Yeah. I think that what could be an obvious comparison would be having the author do the screenplay, which I just can imagine would almost always be a bad idea, and it's so unusual that when it does happen, it ends up making the news because people say, oh, in the circumstance so-and-so did the screenplay.

[00:20:45] Orna: Yeah. It's such a different, I have done screenplays of one or two of my novels, but I actually ended up in the end just using it as a vehicle to organize my mind. It helped me with a particularly complex novel to actually think of it as film and to write it in dialogue first. But yeah, I can attest to it being super challenging and just a very different way of writing and very different way of thinking about things.

[00:21:10] So yeah, best stick to what you're good at. It's hard enough to be a novelist or a book writer of any kind. Writing for the broadcasting media is a different skill, and there's no reason to knock yourself out getting both those skills unless you really want to.

[00:21:28] Matty: The other thing I liked about what you said is the idea of favoring or pursuing "based on" rather than "inspired by," or having your name more prominently displayed in whatever that production's public facing offering is. And I like that because I think a lot of times, if an author was considering whether or not they should pursue having their name included in the movie poster, let's say, just as an example, they might see it as like an ego thing and something that they would be willing to back off of because it was just an ego thing. But I like that approach of thinking of it as a marketing tool that you should fight to keep, not something you're using to feed your ego. You might be using it to feed your ego, but there are legitimate reasons you would want that too, legitimate business reasons you would want that.

[00:22:17] Orna: Absolutely, and you will be really letting yourself down as a publisher, you know? So again, it's about that thing we've discussed before in this series, about which hat are you wearing? As a writer, it's an ego thing, but as a publisher, it's your job.

[00:22:34] Matty: So we've spoken so far about TV and movies. The other thing I wanted to make sure we hit was translations, but are there any other subsidiary rights that you want to talk about before we go there?

[00:22:44] Orna: Merchandising is worth a little chat, because we've just seen a horrible thing happen with merchandising rights. And this really shows the importance of selective rights licensing. And this happened to an ALLi member, I won't name the person, but a children's book author who signed a contract for their books exclusively with the publisher, as you do sometimes if you're not thinking from a selective rights licensing perspective, and they have gone on to sell on the broadcasting rights, extremely lucrative attached merch. The character that this author created is now a household name in the UK. Everybody knows this wee character, and the merchandising rights have also been really successful, so they're popping up in bookshops and toy shops all over the country. The author hasn't gotten one penny, not one penny.

[00:23:44] So simply because she didn't think about it from a selective rights perspective. So if she had, she would have retained her merchandising rights and she would have retained her TV rights and not just sign them over to the publisher, which is what she did. And it was a very bad deal, some of the way in which the sub-rights was handled was a really, really bad. I mean, most reputable publishers will have a standard sort of contract for sub-rights that will give the author 50% minimum. This was one where possibly there was an awareness of the deal in advance of signing the work, I'm not sure exactly how she got to where she got to, but it's been awful for her. So yeah, I think if you're a children's book writer or if you're in computer games kind of territory or fantasy, or any of these things where a merchandising might become a thing and be aware of your merchandising rights. You might want to hold them rather than signing them over. And somebody, if you are signing a deal for say, the print rights or for the publishing rights, just be aware that merchandising can be lucrative too.

[00:24:55] Matty: If you wanted to pursue merchandising rights separate from the print or visual arts or whatever, are there places you can go that specialize in negotiating merchandising rights?

[00:25:05] Orna: Yes, there are places that specialize in licensing. So you're moving outside copyright and you're moving into trademarking and different kinds of agreements around your intellectual property. So it's all intellectual property rights, but they're handled quite differently. So copyright is one that we're very familiar with as writers, but when we get into the area of other kinds of subsidiary rights, then the types of agreements change. So yeah, there are lots of licensing companies that will actually take you on. There are kind of agencies for brand licensing, they'll take you on if they feel you've got potential. And again, successfully selling already in book form is what interests them. They won't be interested, no matter how brilliant your idea is, they're not going to be interested in that. They need proof of concept, and then you just, it's just a matter of pitching them.

[00:26:35] Matty: I did want to mention another recent episode, as long as we're talking about merch. So in Episode 99, I just talked about CONNECTING WITH FANS THROUGH MERCHANDISING with A. L. Jackson. And that was very interesting because she is not only making good money for merchandising related to her romance novels, but she's gotten to the point where she has a little production operation going on there, a production and distribution operation because it's so successful. So, if you decide to keep your merchandising rights and exploit them yourself, then that would be a good resource for people to check out for doing that.

[00:27:11] Orna: Fantastic. And I just love this, I love that as authors, we are thinking, well, I might license this right, but not going to expose this for myself. And it's a really good, it's a really good way to think about it. As an aside and not particularly an advice thing. I really wish there were more independent publishers who are already supplying bookstores who would team up with independent authors around print. I would license my print if I got somebody who was really cracking good already putting similar books into bookstores because they've got all infrastructure, they're set up for returns and they know how to deal with it all. And I would love to see that becoming more of a thing. I think it's a bit short-sighted of independent publishers not to recognize some indy authors who are doing extremely well in ebook and/or audio book could really be lucrative options for them as print publishers. But they're very loathe to split the rights. They want all rights. So that's where we are.

[00:28:16] Matty: Yeah. As a former project manager, I imagined an Excel spreadsheet. I imagine everything is an Excel spreadsheet, but I can imagine an Excel spreadsheet that would be all the territories, that you could sell into. And then all the media, those would be the two axes, and then in each of those cells, you would have what your desired or what your actual timeframe was for that. So it's print rights in Japan and, whatever the duration of that right is. And I think that's, when you think of it as those multiple chunks, I think the "selective" of selective rights becomes very clear.

[00:28:54] Orna: Yes, absolutely. That's a really good and interesting way to approach us. I should also put a mention in here for Ethan Ellenberg is an agent in New York that I worked pretty closely with him. A lot of our advisory for people who have queries around, rights that you would take to a literary agent. And he and his son Ezra actually has put together royalty reminder, which for people who are up and running and doing this successfully, as you've just suggested there with the print rights in Japan, on your something else rights on another line and something else on there coming up at different times, it can, when you start to successfully license your rights, it can actually become quite confusing, especially if you've got a loss of books. if you're in a genre where you produce lots and lots of books that can easily get confusing. So they produce a reminder for authors and some small publishers and as a way to keep track of your commission payments, your royalty payments, and when everything is due.

[00:29:58] Matty: It's an interesting thought, you mentioned about the number of books, because I would imagine that most people who would be pursuing rights, if you had a successful series, they're probably not going to want to try to contract with that on a book-by-book basis. Or a character-by-character basis, if it's merch or whatever, that they're probably looking to contract for a series or a set of characters, for example. So I don't know if there's an answer to that other than just that they should be commensurately paying a series worth of money to you.

[00:30:30] Orna: Absolutely. That's right. And this is where the negotiation comes in, and this is where it can be tricky to make sure that you're getting what you want out of it. But you're absolutely right. They're not going to say, okay, we will pay you for one and book four, while you licensed book two and book three to somebody else that just doesn't work that way.

[00:30:47] Matty: Some of the stories that I've heard that were among the things that made me decide to go indy were these scenarios where an author was with a traditional publisher of some size. And then the publisher went under or whatever circumstance arose, and they realized that it was tricky for them to continue publishing in a series if the series had been started by the publisher. So there was the whole question of trying to get back their rights on those early books in the series from the publisher who is maybe not in business anymore, but then also having the rights to continue the use of those characters, which I think is where reversion rights or reversion clause is very important.

[00:31:22] Orna: Really important to, honestly, we have one of these a week, at least, crosses our desk. This is just more and more common as publishers are acquired and merge, imprints go out and are taken over by somebody else. The rights position become very complex. And this is another thing that you always need to look out for when you're signing your original contract, but the term is kept to a minimum. So at least if you do end up in a very kind of complex scenario, you have your original contract with the original publisher that carries some weight because you can find that publisher A sells to publisher B. so you can have all the rights, indefinitely forever, but actually they didn't have the right to sell that, they just did to do between them. So yeah, it can all get pretty tricky.

[00:32:14] But I will say that in most cases, and we see a lot of them, we are successful in getting those rights back for the author. Sometimes it takes some time, there’s sometimes kinks to straighten out, but generally speaking, particularly if they're not selling well, if they are selling well, they also should be doing well. If they aren't, then that's a different question entirely. Something's going wrong somewhere. But if they're not selling that well, you will usually get your rights back. Just ask. Sometimes the authors assume, oh, I signed something that I didn't put a term in. And I, that's it forever. Those books are gone.

[00:32:49] You know, a contract is not set in stone, and it's not written in blood. You can, post-contract, still have a conversation. And things can still happen. Always ask for what you want. Don't answer for them. Don't assume if you change your mind or things changed for you over time, which is really common, then ask. And sometimes the answer will be yes, because maybe they want to simplify and it's not worth their one and I'm making enough and they're decent people and they feel okay, now you can self-publish. I'm not going to hold you back. Here you go. We've seen a lot of that. And publishers, lots of publisher, are really decent people, and they're not interested in holding up your rights just for the sake of it.

[00:33:34] The other thing on that is, you will get in negotiation. Other publishers are very good negotiators and not very nice people also happens. And you will hear a sentence that will be fired to at some point in your negotiation. a rights buyer often is, oh, that's our standard contract. So just bear in mind, there is no such thing as a standard contract. There is a boiler plate that is meant to be adapted.

[00:34:02] Another thing that authors do is they get the contract may just sign. And the publishers do not expect that. And authors can feel sometimes, oh, if I ask them, they're not going to like me and they're maybe won't go through with it and I will get this nice rights deal that I'm looking for.

[00:34:20] And it doesn't work like that. It's business. They expect you to negotiate. If they have more respect for you, if you negotiate. And if you don't know what you're doing, get an agent to do the work for you. It's pretty easy to get an agent once you have a reasonable offer on the table, because it's easy work for an agent and it can be a way to get somebody to work on your behalf, not just for that particular negotiation, but also then maybe to begin to work on your rights licensing for you.

[00:34:52] Matty: Great, great advice. I'm going to clip that out and I'm going to put it on my social media once a month because it's an important reminder to people.

[00:34:59] Let's switch now to translations. The whole question of movies and TV is one that I can imagine that the author themselves has to almost by definition be actively involved in, that may or may not be true, but translations is one of those ones that I would love it if there was some kind of passive way that I could potentially take advantage of translations, find someone to just say, here, if you can find someone who wants to publish this, then I'll split the proceeds with you in some way. So, how far off am I with that as a possibility?

[00:35:33] Orna: Yeah. I mean, an agent will work on getting translation rights for you, if you have a good agent who understands the principle of selective rights licensing, who isn't expecting you to sell all your rights, who is indy friendly. And it can be hard to get agents who are indy friendly because they see indy authors as essentially part of the change in the publishing worlds that is not agent favorable and that's fair enough. But there are lots of agents now who are more far seeing than that and who understand that authors will work with agents on some projects and not on others, or who will give agents certain rights to negotiate, but want to retain others.

[00:36:16] And so any agent you work with needs to have that understanding of the indy author and how that publishing works for indy authors. So the old agent contract that's exclusive, again it's part of that ALLi we're always saying, shun exclusivity. Non-exclusive is what you want. That's your advantage. You can't do selective rights licensing if you sell your rights exclusively, or if you self-published exclusively on self-publishing platform, you're also shooting yourself in the foot. So, non-exclusive is always the way to go. So yeah, there are services as well, who will actually pitch translation rights agencies.

[00:37:01] And the other thing to be aware of is that it's generally sub agents, that your home agent will work with anyway. So say Korea, taking your country off the top of my head, and you have an agent who will essentially do the work that you'd been talking about there and go and see if they can license your Korean rights for you. So we say, "sell rights," but what we really mean is "license," and I think it's important to keep that distinction, so I tend to say license. And off they go to try and do that. They don't go to Korea. They don't write Korean publishers. They actually have already probably got the Korean sub-agents that they use.

[00:37:45] So these agencies are now becoming more widely available. People that are accessible through Writer's Market and here in the UK, the equivalent does the Writers and Artists Yearbook. You can actually research them on the internet. You can see who else has published. Authors are also sharing with each other, yes, I sold my rights to them. They were great on gosh, X months that they did well. I recommend them, or no, they were a disaster. They didn't pay me what they said they would.

[00:38:13] Because translation right, copyrights itself is well embedded in certain territories. It's not very well embedded in others and it's contested in others. So in Europe, for example, there could be quite a bit of contesting between the UK edition of the work, the US edition of the work, the self-published edition of the work. And there's a lot of plagiarism. There's a lot of just taking a book and ripping it off in certain places and just selling the book in a cheap and nasty cover, but it works for that territory and somebody's making money out of that. And we often never even knowing, or the publisher or anybody agent, nobody knows it just happened. And there's not lot we can do about that. But it is worth knowing which territories are good to sell into and which are best to just not even bother because copyright is such a loose concept there that the money you get wouldn't be worthwhile.

[00:39:10] The other thing, speaking about money, is you don't get a lot of money for translation rights deal, generally speaking, unless you're a very desirable property. It's going to be somewhere in the region of about, five or 6,000 dollars, maybe a bit more, but that will be a good average benchmark. And your agent will take their percentage of that, and they will usually be 20 to 25% because there'll be their cost and they'll be the sub-agent cost. So it's not a lot of money. But once you've sold into one territory, it becomes much easier for yourself, for your agent, to go to another territory and say, I sold the Korean rights and I just thought I'd mention the Japanese rights, and they're available and you can set your price even if you want to and top it up.

[00:40:00] And when you add them up, then it gets easier. Every time you sell one, it gets easier to sell the next one. And then, over time it can just make a nice difference to your bottom line. So, yeah, that's, I think it's a whole area that needs its own set of administration. It's a wing, in publishing houses, there is the rights department and that's all they do. They just do the rights and it's kind of like the dark arts of publishing. Nobody else knows what goes on over there. It's a whole different way. So one is selling books to readers and the other is selling rights to rights buyers. It's a completely different thing.

[00:40:43] Matty: Yeah. When I think about my own books and I think about the amount of study I would have to do to feel even passively competent to make those kinds of assessments, it's just way down on my list. And another episode I can point people to is Episode 23, which is REACHING NEW READERS THROUGH TRANSLATIONS, that was with Emma Prince, who was doing very well with Scottish medieval romance in Germany. Who knew?

[00:41:06] And so I'm sure that the people who work in those areas could look at a book and say, oh yeah, that's going to do great in Germany. It's not going to do so great in Korea or vice versa. And I do think that there are plenty of authors who would say, here are my books. And if you give me a reasonable contract, I'll split it with you. Even if the split is wildly favorable to the person who's helping you do it because you figure everything you're getting is just an extra. And I'd be willing to split whatever I'm getting pretty generously with someone else if I was getting a percentage of it.

[00:41:40] Orna: Yeah. And I mean, another way to do it is this is expertise that's built up over time, and it is possible to get people who have been doing this for publishers and for others and hire them and pay them a fee to do it. And then whatever money they make is yours. So there are various ways that you can go about it. But as you said, as you rightly said, where is it on your list of priorities? For a lot of authors, it's not. That's why I say it's not something to be thinking about at the beginning because rights buyers won't be interested anyway, but also because it is time consuming. You will, you need to have your equivalent of the rights department, be that an agent working on your behalf or a rights assistant, who does the pitching and stuff like that, who builds up their expertise over time. However you decide to do this, you have to allocate time, you have like everything else, time and budget to it in order for it to work.

[00:42:39] Matty: Yeah, this is one where I just want to exchange time for money. And I want it to be a percentage because I don't want to commit the money. I would rather find out that I was wildly popular in Germany, and I’ve made a million dollars and give half of the million dollars to somebody else to have found that opportunity for me than to either not pursue that opportunity or to take the chance that I'm going to pay someone whatever it would be to potentially realize there was no opportunity. It's just very, it's very tricky

[00:43:06] Orna: Absolutely. I've been trying for 10 years to find an enterprising individual who sees the opportunity here with indy authors. Because there's a major opportunity as you just said, you'd give away a lot of rights capital there in order to make that happen because you'll never get to it otherwise. And so anything is better than then that. So yeah, there is an opportunity there definitely for an enterprising individual, but it is a complex area. And even those who have been working in the rights arena for a very long time, it never gets easy. It never gets easy to sell rights. Unless you get something like the Harry Potter phenomenon, when everything gets easy. Unless you've got that going on, it's always a challenging arena. But a very interesting one, culturally and in lots of other ways. So if there's any enterprising person listening, if they want to contact ALLi, I've got a lot of ideas about how you could make money doing this.

[00:44:05] Matty: And I'll volunteer to be the beta author for trying your new service out.

[00:44:11] Another thing I think is interesting about translations is honestly, because translations is way down on my list, I'm waiting for AI translation to get good enough that it's feasible. So, in a year, three years, five years, 10 years, whatever it is, if I could just plug my book in and I could have a native speaker tell me, that's like a pretty decent thing. Maybe I would sell it for a discount because over time I'm guessing that AI generated content is going to be expected to be discounted from the human generated content, at least for a bit. Do you have any sense of like where that's going, at what point that might be realistic?

[00:44:47] Orna: I don't. It would be a brave person who would actually put a date on this one, particularly if your translation is complex. But I mean, it's coming. It's definitely coming. It will be here and, I expect it to be here when my business is still here. So, that sort of timeframe. Years rather than decades, let's put it that way. Already, I think, you get a fair translation. And that's the other option is that you retain your rights and that you work with a translator who now gets a fair copy from an auto translate, though sometimes they say, no, they'd rather work from scratch, that actually inking up the one that the AI translator gave you is harder than just translating from scratch. I don't know, I'm a bit dubious about that. But it is an option. And we have a number of big indies who are selling their own German rights particularly, but we're also seeing them sell into all the territories as well.

[00:45:47] So I think it's not a bad idea at all to wait. And if that's something that appeals to you, selling it in that way, then you can. I wouldn't be discounting too much because books in other territories outside of the Anglo-American world are more expensive, considerably more expensive. So, if you've got a translated work and if it's decent and if, you do need to do and get it checked by a native speaker or a native reader, somebody who reads in your genre and in that language, some of these things are challenging, but if they've told you that you've got a good book on your hands, there's no reason just because it was generated by a AI. And because there will have been some human input as well. It's never going to be a matter of just press a button and a perfect translation pops out.

[00:46:39] Matty: That's what I'm waiting for. I'm willing to wait a long time, but that's what I want.

[00:46:45] Orna: Okay, I'm changing my date. It's just gone into decades or maybe hundreds of years. Perfection is hard.

[00:46:52] Matty: I'm seeing another business opportunity too. If people who were willing to act as, not as the expert subsidiary rights managers or agents, but as like virtual assistants in different countries. So that somebody who’s, let’s say they're an avid romance reader in Germany who could read the book for that, to ensure the translation was good. And one of the things that Emma talk about was, even if you have a human translator, it's good to have a native QA reader as well to make sure that it's coming through, but also to deal with things like social media and stuff like that. So we're just starting out all sorts of great business opportunities for people who want to forge new paths in the indy world.

[00:47:30] Orna: Absolutely. And the other one that I would add to that, and I think this is important if we're thinking about not licensing our rights, but actually exploiting them ourselves in the translation arena is just getting the book up there. As we all know, it doesn't change if it's in another territory, that's only the start, how you go to marketing. And so you need a native speaker and somebody in that territory to do your social media or whatever other ways you've decided you're going to market your books. So you've always got to think about.

[00:48:01] Matty: And I guess it's worth mentioning too, that, for people who may be just starting out, but got to the end of this, even though we gave them a warning that this was more advanced material, that all this is not to say that if you want your book in German, you can't get it out there in Germany. It's just trying to be in English. And so, if you're publishing through KDP or Draft2Digital or other platforms, I'm sure, you can make your own language book available in other countries for people who speak that language.

[00:48:28] Orna: Absolutely. So you're talking about English language books selling in Germany and Spain and so on. Is that what you mean? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just by using the services that we use, they're automatically going into those territories where those platforms have a presence. On this is where, when you start looking at the international arena, this is where you see that Amazon is not as dominant as it is in the Anglo-American world. So Amazon is in, I think, 13 territories of moment, whereas Apple is in 52 and I'm not sure how many territory Kobo is in but I'm going to shout out here for the Kobo map, which I just love, which tells you where your books have sold, and I'm heading up for a hundred now. I'm dying to get to a hundred territories. But Kobo has access where Amazon doesn't. So does Apple and then PublishDrive or StreetLib are people who can take you into countries and territories where you're just there just by using other services. So your book is selling in those countries in the English language.

[00:49:36] Matty: I think Google Play is another one based just based on the number of different currencies you can enter as a price, they're in many countries.

[00:49:43] Orna: They're all over the place. Absolutely. And I'm glad you mentioned them.

[00:49:48] Matty: So my last question is that a lot of the examples we've been using have been fiction, Harry Potter or cartoon characters that were turned into merch, things like that. Any final thoughts about if someone is a non-fiction writer, any different advice for how they can be exploiting these subsidiary rights?

[00:50:07] Orna: The only thing is it is general advice that I didn't actually say. And that applies across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, is you must approach rights buyers who have an interest in that type of material. And you need to get to know the territory and you need to get to know who are the good publishers in that area and what do they publish? And don't send them stuff that they just don't do. So if you're selling specialist nonfiction, you're probably going to be more aware of publishers in that arena. It's probably easier to pick them out. But yeah, definitely make sure that you're sending the right material. Otherwise it all happens pretty similarly. It's the same process in terms of getting the contract and negotiating the contract and all of that. Nothing changes very much if it's non-fiction or poetry.

[00:50:59] Matty: That's great. Well, if people have enjoyed this episode, I would definitely point them to your earlier episode on copyright, Episode 70 COPYRIGHT FOR AUTHORS. And I also just want to give a recommendation for the ALLi book 150 SELF-PUBLISHING QUESTIONS ANSWERED, ALLi's Writing, Publishing. and Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets by Orna Ross and ML Ronn, a.k.a. Michael La Ronn, who has also been a multiple appearance guest on the podcast.

[00:51:27] So, Orna, thank you so much for going through the Seven Processes of Publishing for us. Please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and ALLi online.

[00:51:36] Orna: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity. Yeah, I'm Orna Ross at OrnaRoss.com for my author website. And the Alliance of Independent Authors is the professional association for self-publishing authors, and you'll find it at AllianceIndependentAuthors.org.

[00:51:57] Matty: Great. Thank you, Orna.

[00:51:58] Orna: Thank you. Matty. Bye.

Episode 106 - The Sixth Process of Publishing: Promotion with Orna Ross

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Orna Ross of the Alliance of Independent Authors joins me to discuss the sixth of the Seven Processes of Publishing: PROMOTION. ALLi defines promotion as specific activities designed to sell a particular book during a particular time period, as distinct from marketing, which we discussed in episode 105 and which comprises ongoing positioning of your work in the world. In our discussion of promotion, Orna addresses whether it's worthwhile for a career author’s first book; the importance of having a goal in mind so you can assess a promotion’s performance; the importance for an indy author of having profit, not just exposure, as a goal; the value of endorsements versus reader reviews; and whether investing in a publicist is a good use of your promotion budget.​

Orna Ross is the founder and head of The Alliance of Independent Authors, a non-profit professional business membership organization for self-publishing authors. ALLi provides trusted advice, supportive guidance, and a range of resources, within a welcoming community of authors and advisors.​

Episode Links

https://www.ornaross.com/

https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/

https://selfpublishingadvice.org/

Your First 50 Book Reviews: ALLi’s Guide to Getting More Reader Reviews (affiliate link)

150 Self-Publishing Questions Answered: ALLi’s Writing, Publishing, & Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets (Publishing Guides for Indie Authors 5) (affiliate link)

Episode 097 - Taking the Long View for Publishing Success with JK Ellem

Episode 076 - BookFunnel with Damon Courtney

Episode 059 - Author Newsletter Swaps and StoryOrigin with Evan Gow

Episode 058 - Author Newsletters with Lee Savino

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, Orna. How are you doing?

[00:00:02] Orna: Hi, Matty, how are you? I'm very well thanks.

[00:00:06] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. So Orna Ross is back for the sixth of our series of the seven processes of publishing, and in this episode, we're going to be looking at promotion. So Orna, in the previous episode, which was about marketing, I asked you to talk a little bit about what the difference was between marketing and promotion, and just in case anybody missed that, can you just give kind of the Reader's Digest condensed version of how you're making the distinction between those two activities?

[00:00:32] Orna: Sure. So, marketing is essentially your promise to the reader. It's your positioning within the book world, it tells the reader what to expect from your books, through your covers, through your book descriptions, through your author website and your general presentation of yourself as the author. It positions you in the marketplace. So marketing's long-term and ongoing and constantly being kind of tweaked and put out there, and each new book adds to the whole mix, your marketing mix and your author platform.

[00:01:05] Promotion contributes to your marketing, but book promotion is a specific activity designed to sell a particular book across a particular time period. So promotion is like a campaign which has a start date and an end date, and you can say, I want this promotion to sell X number of books and you can actually look at it and see, did it achieve that goal?

[00:01:27] With marketing, it's all a little bit more nebulous. You have to do these things, your website, your book covers, your book descriptions, you cannot get away without them, but you can tweak them and change them as time goes on if something is not working. You've never really failed, and you've never really succeeded at marketing. You could always do something else that would kind of tweak it and sharpen up your message. But promotion, you can very easily say, well, that did not work, and we're not doing that again, let's try a different promotional tactic this time.

[00:01:57] Matty: I definitely want to loop back to that idea of setting the goal, but I want to ask a couple of questions before we do that so people have a little bit of context. And I'm just going to throw out the very general question, how does a first-time author get into the promotional world most successfully? What approaches should they be using to promote a first book?

[00:02:17] Orna: So this question is so frustrating. So many questions that we ask about the different processes of publishing, the answer is, it depends, and this is one of those. So it's going to depend on your genre, it's going to depend on what else you've set up and so many other things, but one of the easiest ways, there are promotional sites that have email addresses of readers who like to read particular kinds of books, and for a small fee you can organize the promotion with those sites and they will send news about your book out to the readers, and the readers would choose to buy or to not buy.

[00:02:59] And I'm thinking of services like Freebooksy or Bargain Booksy and there are many, many others. And rather than kind of listing off a whole load of things, we do have some information about this on our self-publishing advice site, SelfPublishingAdvice.org, you can just search for the promotional posts, and they will give you some very specific information. But that's one way, so you get on one of those lists and see how you get on.

[00:03:29] For some authors they work really well, for others, they don't, and I think this is something important to say to the first-time author, have a bit of a budget for this. Promotion requires you to spend either time or money, and the money can be the easier thing, if you have some, never easy if you don't. But if you have some money, it can be the easier way because of what we spent so much time talking about in the last episode, Matty, that need to balance your time between letting the reader know the book exists and writing the next one. So, you can put some money towards the issue, and I'm not saying throw money at it mindlessly at all, I really think it's very important to research the type of promotion that you do.

[00:04:16] There are free things you can do, and one of the things that can work really, really well is, a swap with another author who's in your genre, so they can tell their readers about you in some way, and you can tell you a redress about them in some way. This works best, obviously, when you pick somebody who has roughly the same number of readers as you, and when I say readers here, I'm talking about on your signup list. But if it is your first book, you may not have a lot of people, and so you're not a hugely attractive prospect in that regard, so that's not going to work for you unless you have already been marketing and amassing sign ups while you were writing the book.

[00:04:57] Do remember that each of the platforms has its own promotional tools that you may want to explore. Kobo, Apple, Amazon, all have really good promo tools, and again, they work to varying degrees for different books and for different authors. So, I've had authors who've said it really worked well, my Kobo promotions, for example, worked really well on my last book but they're not working on this book. And to some degree, book marketing and promotion is more art than science. It's not always predictable.

[00:05:32] And I think that's probably the most important thing I'd like to say at this point. You approach your book promotion, especially when you're starting out, very much in the spirit of experiment and exploration. You don't have huge high hopes. Don't have high expectations. Have the lowest possible expectations and base your budget and your time allocation on that. And then, some fine day you'll be surprised, but most authors go about it the other way around. They think, okay, if I'm going to spend some money, and I've got to pay, I expect to really shift books.

[00:06:05] If it's your first book and you've only got one book, you may not even want to spend any money or time on promotion just yet. Focus on getting your marketing right, getting your messages right, getting your infrastructure right, and then when you have three books begin to spend some money on promotion, because at that point you're likely to see some sort of return from that, whereas with one book, it can be done, it has been done, I've seen it done brilliantly. I've been actually in awe sometimes of what I've seen to be possible, but I would say nine times out of ten or ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it's very, very, very tough. And the sooner you can get beyond one book anyway, the better for you as an author, and I think probably your time is best spent in writing rather than promoting. ...

[00:06:53] Matty: There were two episodes I wanted to point people to with regard to the newsletter swap. Episode 59 was AUTHOR NEWLETTER SWAPS AND STORY ORIGIN with Evan Gow and then Episode 76 was BOOKFUNNEL with Damon Courtney and part of our conversation was about newsletter swaps, so those are our two good resources.

[00:07:13] Orna: And two great services or two that will facilitate you to do so, you can just reach out yourself, individually, just to an author and set it up with somebody you like and admire, but the danger is you don't know how many, how their signup is, and you could be putting yourself in an awkward situation. And Story Origin and BookFunnel have two fantastic services for that, and for many other things, too.

[00:07:38] Matty: I wanted to use the conversation about the promotions as an opportunity to loop back on what you were saying earlier about having a goal in mind. So, if we look at promo sites like Bargain Booksy or Freebooksy or BookBub being the big one, I've often heard the advice that if you get a BookBub, which is difficult to do, but if you get a BookBub, then there's this whole strategy about stacking promos, and then see if you can get placement on all these other similar kinds of sites that you were mentioning.

[00:08:10] But I think the problem with that is that it's then very difficult to distinguish what you're getting from each platform. And so, if you have a BookBub on the first of the month, and then you have something else on the third, then it's hard to know where it's coming from. Do you have any advice about that, or even more generally, how can you then look back at something like an email promo, BookBub or similar, and decide if it was worth it or not?

[00:08:39] Orna: Yeah, great question. So just first, on BookBub just to say, when we're talking about "getting a BookBub" here and that's the way all of us describe it to each other, did you get a BookBub? Oh, you got a BookBub, yay! And what we mean is a BookBub Featured Deal. So BookBub also runs an advertising platform, which is a different opportunity. This is specifically the Featured Deal. And yes, it's also important I think, contextually to just say that the people who are doing this and who are recommending this as a strategy, it's algorithm marketing, really.

[00:09:13] So what you're trying to do here with your BookBub deal, if you're doing this stacking of buying other services around it, what you're trying to do is create, and it's usually Amazon that people are looking at, Amazon doesn't particularly reward spikes, it rewards consistency. The algorithms reward consistency, sales building over time is kind of what their algorithms really like and will pick up and amplify. So what you're trying to do is knowing that with a BookBub Featured Deal, you will get a big spike in sales. You're trying to build up to that and also not have this huge fall away straight afterwards, in order for the Amazon algorithm to pick you up and start giving you some organic sales, that's what it's all about.

[00:10:03] So it's important to recognize it's within that context, so you wouldn't do all this unless you actually have an algorithm marketing plan, promotional plan around this. You're doing it in order to achieve that goal. That's your outcome, otherwise, there's not really a lot of point in doing that. You don't need to do that at all, just be happy that you got your Featured Deal and bring them to wherever you want to sell it and away you go.

[00:10:28] So, in terms of knowing then, you're absolutely right, it's going to mush up a bit, you're not going to know exactly, but I will say this, the research shows that on such deals, the sales are pretty immediate. So if I have my BookBub on the first and I have something else I would sell on the first and the second, then by the third, I be picking up a few, definitely, but they won't be half, much, much less than half. We'll be down at about one 10th of the sales that we've been getting when it was at its peak two days ago.

[00:11:04] So if you're bringing something else in, you won't know exactly how many of those sales can be attributed, you're absolutely right. And that is the way it is, there's no way to know more, to be sure about that, you just have to kind of take that one on the chin and you can get a general sense and a general idea, but you can't know for sure.

[00:11:24] Matty: To use an example, if you get a listing or purchase listing, and let's say it costs a hundred dollars and it's the only one you're running, so you're avoiding this problem we're talking about, identifying where the sales came from, and let's say you make $80 in royalties in the days following that promotion. Is there a way that you can weigh whether that was worthwhile in terms of either quantifiable things like follow on sales to other books or in less quantifiable things like well, my name got out there, my name was seen by a bunch of people that might not otherwise have seen it?

[00:11:59] Orna: Yeah. So first of all, I think it's important to say better to have done it and to have fallen short a little bit probably than not to have done it at all. Better still to have done something that would've made a profit. So that's what you're trying So I hear a lot of authors saying oh well, at least my book got out there, or, oh well, hopefully it generated some organic sales as well, if they're talking about Amazon ads or something.

[00:12:27] I don't think that's a healthy way to look at it, it's not a very business-like way to look at it. I think the goal should be profit. And then you can fail, you can fall short of that and that's fine and you can fail better next time. But, you know, those kinds of consolations to ourselves can very easily lead us into vanity metrics and vanity spend. If we're not keeping ourselves, if I'm speaking now to people who are obviously in this to run a business and to make a living as an author, if money is not that important to you and you just want to sell books and get your name out there and so on, that's a different situation.

[00:13:03] But speaking to the main bulk of your listeners, which I know are the same as the main bulk of ALLi members, they want to actually make a successful business out of this, then profit has to be your motive. And as I said, you can fall short of that and you can console yourself a little bit, but it's important that you see you didn't make a profit. And so profit should be your aim, and you should judge your success or failure on profit and not on, oh, well, it was better than nothing kind of thing.

[00:13:34] Matty: That brings up the interesting question of the scenario where someone has written one book and doesn't intend to write another one. They have one book, they finished it, they worked on it for 20 years, whatever, and let's say they have a day job, so they're not relying on the sales of the books to pay their mortgage. But they're very interested in getting that book into the hands of as many people as possible. And for the purposes of this example, let's say it's a novel, not a how to, nonfiction book. Does ALLi even bother to give advice about promotion in that scenario, or is that so specialized and so different than what most of your members and followers are looking for that there's not the same pool of advice to offer?

[00:14:14] Orna: Again, it's a very good question. So it comes back to that idea of your goal and your definition of success, doesn't it? So what is your goal when you're setting out and why and knowing yourself and all that kind of stuff. What they will actually do won't be that different. It's the same thing to push one book as it is push all of your books. The only thing is that when you've got lots of books, it gets easier. So each book that you promote will have probably you get some people who really like your books and buy another one of your books. It's getting your name out there, it's building your author platform, it's got all sorts of ancillary benefits. If you've only got one book, everything is harder because everything is folded into that one book.

[00:14:58] It doesn't mean it can't be done, it absolutely can be done, and you'll use the very same techniques as the author who wants to make a living from their writing. But the thing is that it will be, A, it will be harder for you to be focused in just on that one book and success or failure will be quite stark. It'll just, you'll see it, you will see it very clearly, but on the plus side, you're not actually there to try and make a profit. So in a way you can kind of see it maybe as a paying hobby. And it might take a while, if this is what you like doing, marketing your one book that you wrote and getting it into the hands of as many readers as possible, and you're not exercised by profit, you just want to get the book out there, then in that way, it's a lot easier.

[00:15:47] Matty: I always thought that a distinction that would need to be made between that kind of scenario and a scenario where an author has a whole set of books that they're trying to lead people to is, for me, so I'm of that second type and I'm focusing on Facebook and my email newsletters, let's say, and so that's great, because I'm going to have, one hopes, a whole series of books to point those followers to, but if you have just one book, it's always going to be new to somebody, but you'd have to keep changing your approach because you're quickly going to exhaust your Facebook followers.

[00:16:21] So then you're going to have to either switch to a different platform, or maybe you decide you want to pitch yourself for articles and newspapers, so you would have pitch yourself to every newspaper in every geographic area that you're interested in. It's good that you only have one because then the effort needed to get it in front of people who haven't heard about it before is more intensive because you have to keep thinking of new ways to do that and new places to do it.

[00:16:47] Orna: But the great thing, and the reason why people can do well now with one book, whereas they never could before, is that we have this wonderful thing called digital publishing on the internet. So, there are lots and lots of territories that are open to us once we're selling. And presumably, this mythical person has their book in three or at least two formats, so ebook and print, maybe audio as well. So, between the three different formats and all the different territories that you can get your book out into and all the people in each of those territories that can be approached through different social media, all the different ways to get at people, you can actually keep going with one book for years.

[00:17:31] There are lots and lots of ways in which you can constantly keep growing that following. And of course, for those of us with more than one book, you want a bit of that, we were talking about this in the last episode, you want a bit of that going on, where you're reaching out to new people and new people, as well as selling more, which is easier, selling more stuff to your already warm people.

[00:17:57] Matty: Another topic under promotions is endorsements. It's always a little bit of a depressing topic. Not depressing, but intimidating, I think. So, can you talk about what an endorsement is and what your advice is, especially for first time authors for getting that?

[00:18:15] Orna: So I'm assuming by endorsements, you mean somebody well-known and kind of giving them a bit of a blurb that they can use to say that this is a good book, yeah. So I have a bit of a personal sort of observation on this, which not everybody will agree with. I think endorsements are much more useful for nonfiction than for fiction and poetry. I think we're in endorsement and blurb fatigue now, as readers of fiction and poetry, because every book appears with hyperbolic sort of praise, and I'm not sure that has value. However, having this discussion publicly with somebody recently, they were saying, that hyperbole is becoming the base. If you don't have those hyperbolic endorsements, then people think there's something wrong. So yeah, you can't win.

[00:19:10] So, let's just assume that people who are listening want to get endorsements. So this is something that takes a lot of time. You've got to do a lot of work upfront to get good endorsements from good people. And you've got to put yourself in the position of writing to people and asking them to read your book, which is a huge thing to ask somebody to do, please read my book. You're basically saying to somebody, please give over maybe 10, maybe more hours of your life and then give me a blurb.

[00:19:37] So, A, a lot of people are not very successful. They just can't get the people that they want to do the endorsements because they never heard of them and their inbox is full and they're really busy and they're probably looking for endorsements from somebody else, and it's that kind of thing. You can be lucky, but it can be quite challenging. And it's like pitching yourself in any respect, and pitching is part of being in a creative business, but not all of us are good at it. And a lot of people become indie authors because they don't want to be sending pitch letters to agents and publishers, and now they don't want to be sending pitch letters to somebody to endorse.

[00:20:18] However, if you have somebody in your arena and you know them, or you have one or two degrees of separation where you can actually draw on some kind of personal or networky kind of connection, it can help. If there's a very close, and I mean, really close kind of synergy between your work and theirs, particularly if you drew on their work or you've quoted them in the book, something like that can be really helpful.

[00:20:46] But you might want to forget about endorsements and wait for reviews. That is also a valid thing to do. So, our to-do lists, we have to look at them and see what are the things that we want to keep and what are the things that are going to have most effect. Will these endorsements actually sell your book or are they kind of nice to haves? A lot depends on your genre. So there are some genres where you won't get away with not having them. If you're writing anything that's vaguely educational or textbooky or something like that, it really, really does help if you can get those endorsements. But as I said for fiction, poetry, I'm not so sure.

[00:21:26] Matty: I have found it much easier to both ask for and get endorsements for my non-fiction books, and I think your example about if you've drawn on the work of another person is a good one because in TAKING THE SHORT TACK, which is the book I wrote with Mark Lefebvre, we didn't even get into the whole legal rights thing in a ton of depth because Douglas Smith has the book PLAYING THE SHORT GAME, which covers that very nicely. And so, right in the book, we said, in this part where we would otherwise put a bunch of stuff in about legal rights, just go buy Douglas Smith's PLAYING THE SHORT GAME and then we'd let Douglas Smith know, and we have mutually benefited from promoting each other's books. So whenever Mark or I are doing a podcast guest spot, for example, about TAKING THE SHORT TACK, we mention Doug's book and vice versa, so that's been very nice.

[00:22:22] On the fiction front, I'll share two things I've done, one of which has worked really well and one of which I'm still experimenting with. But one is that for the first two Ann Kinnear books and the first Lizzy Ballard book, I requested a Kirkus review. And Kirkus is one where you pay for the review, but you are not guaranteed a good review, which is great, because people know that, and they don't assume you've just paid for a positive review. And so I was fortunate that I got very positive reviews from Kirkus for the first of both my books.

[00:22:51] But it's pricey, so I didn't want to keep doing it for every book, so what I do is, I rely heavily on those Kirkus reviews for the first in series. And if I'm ever in a scenario where I'm promoting something else, I don't know that I've ever done this, but I could conceivably say, “here’s Book 4 in the series. Kirkus Reviews said of Book 1 in the series ..." So I could use it to promote even after the first one. But 99% of the time I'm promoting the first in series anyway, so it's a nice tie-in. So that's worked very well for me.

[00:23:19] And then the other thing that I'm still experimenting with is the idea of finding a big name in your genre and sending them a short story that you feel is representative of your style and saying, here's like a 4,000-word short story, which I feel is representative of my writing style, would you be willing to read it and then comment on the style, not the plot or the particular topic, but just the style. And be explicit with them that then what you plan to do is say, Stephen King said of one of Matty Dalrymple's short stories, "the best thing I've ever read." So being explicit with them about how you're planning on using it.

[00:23:56] And I actually did this with a very big name in my genre, and this person was so gracious, but she commented on the whole story. Actually, she didn't comment at all on the style other than to say, oh, the style seems nice, but here are some comments about the plot. And I realized in that case, I had picked the wrong story to send to her because it was a story that would make more sense for somebody who had read the novels and was now reading the short story, versus vice versa. So I still think it's a good idea, but you have to be careful what you're sending them to make sure it's going to leave the impression that you want to.

[00:24:29] Orna: I really like this idea. It's not one I've heard before, so I think that's a really interesting tip. And also, feeding into that, there was some research, it's quite old now. but there was some research that said depending again on the genre, but if you're on the quasi literary end of the fiction world, by which I mean, just that language, counts a bit and style and so on counts a bit with your readers, they're not just about give me the path of the story next, the quotes, that praise, the author style, actually get more clickthrough than something that's very specific about, this was good in this book. So, you might be onto something, let's keep talking about that one. That's interesting.

[00:25:15] Matty: I'll let you know how my continued research goes because I did burn out. Requesting testimonials or endorsements or blurbs is just as an exhausting as writing a pitch letter. And I finally just decided, you know what, I'm just not going to spend my time on that anymore.

[00:25:31] So another thing, a question that comes up about promotion is the value of hiring a publicist. So I'm curious as to your thoughts about the value of hiring a publicist.

[00:25:42] Orna: It very, very, very, very rarely pays for itself. It has to be a very particular kind of book. Again, fiction, forgot about it. Even big-name fiction authors can be disappointed with their trade media outings now. It's getting harder and harder to get attention and the big names are getting most of the attention.

[00:26:05] So we just recently had somebody, really experienced author, really great author, who sold loads of books and also runs a publishing house and publishes other authors to great success and she hired a publicist in London for her latest novel. And she said everything was great. They were fantastic. They did everything. She knows they did. Can't praise them highly enough. But was super disappointed, got one interview on a local BBC radio. That was the extent of it. And she'd spent thousands.

[00:26:41] So I think it's one of the least effective way of selling books. And I know that it's something that people at the beginning assume is part of the deal, if you like, because we're so used to reading author interviews and the review sections of the newspapers or whatever. And when we think of being a success as an author, that's kind of how we envisage it. Yeah. You've got your full-page feature on your latest book and, you're interviewed on the chat show and you're doing the rounds and that means I've made it, I'm a success. They're not the signifiers of success for most indie authors. I can't think of anybody actually. And I know a few people, including myself back in the day, I've done these, had fantastic exposure. But it hasn't shifted the needle on the books at all.

[00:27:27] Because, again, somebody is watching something and they say, well, that sounds really interesting. You know, sometime if I find myself in a bookstore, next time I'm online, I might go and read it. It's a much less direct route than online marketing. And then click this link, now I'm there, and within five minutes, I've heard about this book, decided that I'd like to buy it, gone over and bought it, and I'm sitting reading it. That's just a much more effective and efficient methodology.

[00:28:29] Matty: I wanted to loop back on a reference you had made earlier when we were talking about endorsements and that's the idea that getting reviews is much more important than getting endorsements. So talk about that a little bit. How can especially first-time authors go about getting reviews for their books.

[00:28:43] Orna: Yeah. I'd like to give a plug to our guide YOUR FIRST 50 REVIEWS, because that's goes into this in detail. But the thing is, first of all, you've got to realize how important reviews are these days. And when we're talking about reviews here, we're talking not about the editorial kinds of reviews that Matty was talking about with Kirkus, or you're being reviewed by a blogger or a book review page in the newspaper or whatever. Their editorial reviews, they go up top and Amazon and they can be used on your website and so on. They're kind of testimonials after the event. That's fine, but we're talking here about customer reviews and doing your best to get some visibility on Goodreads with reviews and or Amazon, Apple, Kobo, wherever your books are sold.

[00:29:31] And first of all, it's really important to realize that reviews are important and that you need to have a review strategy. to begin to put that in place while you are doing the other aspects of producing your book. So the early stages in the process. You begin trying to get some reviews.

[00:29:50] So as soon as you have a copy of your book that is very tidy and readable but maybe might have some final proofreading to do or you might be adding an index and there might be a few little bits and pieces left to finish, but you have what's called an advance review copy, an ARC, you begin to get that ARC out to as many people as possible. And so if you've been building up your own reader list, you can tell your email list that your book is ready, and if anybody would like to review it, that you'll provide an ebook copy and a digital copy in return for an honest review.

[00:30:29] And that's really important. So you're not asking them to give a positive review. You have to leave it up to them to review whatever way they want to publicly on Amazon or Goodreads. I know most of you listening know that, but often when people come into this business, they just assume that they go around trying to find positive reviews and trying to kill negative ones. It doesn't work like that. Once the book leaves you, people are free to review it honestly. And that's a really important part of the whole transaction for readers, because it's all about the readers in the end.

[00:31:03] So, yeah, your own list may provide a way. There are services like NetGalley and others who will actually organize reviews for you. You can do blog tours where book bloggers will sign up to take your book and review it. There are lots of ways to get reviews. But the most important thing is that you have a reviews policy and that you keep on doing it. You know, to keep on trying to get those reviews. They're becoming essential.

[00:31:31] Matty: One of the questions I've had in assessing my own pool of reviews is that it appears to me that Amazon lets at least customer rate a product without necessarily leaving a review because I have hundreds of ratings for my first book, but definitely not hundreds and hundreds of reviews. But when I see people asking their followers on social media, for example, to support them in this way, they're usually saying "ratings and reviews." Whereas I would think that if it's possible on the different platforms for readers to just rate something, there's definitely value, I mean, I know when I'm looking at products and it says, 400 people gave this a 4.5, then I'm attaching some importance to that. Even if I don't ever go in and look and read what those 400, some subset of those 400, people said. So do you know the mechanics? Is it possible for people to rate without reviewing?

[00:32:32] Orna: Yes. Absolutely. You can. You used to be able to, a long time ago though. Now you absolutely can just give your rating. And you're absolutely right. I would say there are lots of people who don't read the reviews at all, but they look at the star rating and then decide if it's four plus or whatever they'll go or three plus maybe on Goodreads because it's harder obviously to get a decent star showing on Goodreads. But, yeah, the mechanics is definitely there to just leave your star rating now and let that be that.

[00:33:07] Matty: The other thing I was doing, you can weigh in on what you think about this is that a lot of times I would be happy to leave a review, but I might've read the book months ago and I don't really remember it that clearly. So what I started doing is creating images that I would pull quotes from favorable reviews, "a great page turner" or "never saw the ending coming" or whatever it is, and then I would sprinkle those through an image that I would put up so that if someone wanted to support me by leaving a review, but maybe they read the book a while ago, or maybe they just didn't feel comfortable about writing a review and they could say, oh, "page turner," that sounds good. I thought it was a page turner. I'm going to go put that.

[00:33:43] And so I was prompting people. I was trying to give them some fodder to at least trigger an idea for their own review. And I have to say that on social media, I would say, "if you enjoyed the book, please leave a rating or review," not, "regardless of what you thought about the book, leaving a rating or review." Any comments about that approach?

[00:34:02] Orna: All good. You're good. And I think the prompting is a really good idea. It's like when people write for endorsements and they give a suggested sort of, you know, "other people have said, this book is blah, blah, blah." So you're kind of trying to steer them towards, you're not forcing anything and you're not insisting or anything, but you're kind of trying to steer them towards the outcomes that you want. All very good marketing, I will say, yes, top of class for your marketeer.

[00:34:31] Matty: Thank you. So I'm going to ask about another aspect of promotion that stumps me and the listeners will groan because I've been obsessing about this for the last several episodes, but that's pricing. So I have what I've got to believe is a pretty common set up for an indy author. My first in series are 2 99 for the ebooks and subsequent ones are 4 99. And I interviewed a JK Ellem fairly recently. TAKING THE LONG VIEW FOR PUBLISHING SUCCESS, that was Episode 97. And he had said that he had moved his post first in series books from 4 99 to 5 99. And he was encouraging me to do that too. And I have, for whatever reason, this huge mental block about it, because my fear is that I'm going to piss off the people who have gotten used to 4 99 and they'll never come back. And his very reasonable position was well try it, and if it doesn't work, put it back. Any thoughts on that approach? Or just more generally what indy authors should be considering when they're pricing?

[00:35:30] Orna: Well, try it. Yeah, I think, there aren't clear answers on these things, and I've personally had experience of putting my prices up and selling far more. I would also say that be aware that some platforms are less price sensitive than others. So Apple readers would pay more for books. So you don't have to price everything in the same way as straight across the board. Do keep in mind that Amazon will always want to be the cheapest. So don't make it cheaper on your own website because they were price match down and their algorithms will pick it up sooner or later. So it must be cheapest on Amazon and Amazon prides itself on being good value, so that's fine. But be aware that readers are less price sensitive elsewhere. And also that for some readers, if a book is below a certain price, they assume it's not good. And that is a recognized phenomenon.

[00:36:27] Now where you fit, I don't mean you, Matty, but all your listeners, where you fit on this spectrum is going to be influenced by all sorts of things. Again, the genre you're in will make a difference. Buyers of literary fiction are more tolerant of higher prices.

[00:36:44] I would say that my overall just general comment is indy authors are pricing too low. We're pricing too low to make a living. We're not allowing for the expenses of marketing. We're pricing based on just the cost of the production of the book. And not even that sometimes. So again, making profit your central motive, valuing your own time, how much should this book cost is a question that's well worth asking.

[00:37:12] Matty: A long time ago, at least probably a couple of years ago at this point, I was doing an author event at a bookstore, and she asked what the price was, so she could put it into the system. And this was for my paperbacks, and I said 12 99. And she was like, oh, you should be getting more than that. So, it's a good tip. I think both the observation that a pricing lower does not necessarily attract people and might in some cases deter them.

[00:37:37] And I feel like what I'm seeing is pricewise, indies, especially as the approach becomes more and more professional are feeling comfortable pricing a little higher. And I kind of feel like in some cases, the traditional publishers are pricing a little lower. So I feel like eventually sort of meet in the middle and that people won't be able to distinguish whether it's traditionally or indy published just based on price anymore. And that will be a good thing.

[00:38:04] Orna: I think it will be a good thing because indies played the price advantage, but the problem with price advantage is it's a downward spiral. And the core around which we should build our business is not price, but value. And being very aware of the value that we're giving. Then we will need to hire professionals to help us to do that. We also need to spend some money on marketing. So indy authors go into business without thinking, hey, I'm going into business. I need to budget for my marketing. I need to put for my this, and so on. They just go and do it and then go, oh, I'm in business. Am I in business? Oh yeah. Okay. Right then. So you know, there is no business that you would start without setting aside money for two years to keep it going, what you built up and so on and so forth. And so we bootstrap to a ludicrous degree and some people never get beyond that barrier.

[00:38:56] You can only charge the kinds of prices that are charged in the indy sphere, in parts of the indy sphere, if you are either suffering a loss or you're giving over a huge amount of your own time for no return. So, yeah, pricing concentrates the mind, pricing for profit is how we need to be thinking about it. And that means paying ourselves, not just making enough money, taking in enough money for the business to keep turning over. But if we want to actually price in a way that we make enough profit to pay ourselves a salary, then these prices are not sustainable.

[00:39:38] Matty: Do you have any tips for people pricing their print books and now on a platform like Findaway their audio books other than finding similar authors in your genre who are kind of like a similar level of success and considering that those are the people that your readers or listeners are going to be comparing your prices against?

[00:39:59] Orna: Yeah, I think that's the best. When you're thinking about prices, that is definitely the best benchmark to take. Pricing print has become very tricky because paper is becoming a more and more and more expensive and POD, it's becoming quite difficult to make the economics work in some cases, depending on the size of the books and so on. So pricing for print is becoming quite tricky. But yeah, I think your best benchmark is what is going on around you.

[00:40:26] But again, not being afraid to stand out a little if that's what's right for you and your business model. So as well as looking at what's happening out there, you have to look at what's happening in here. What's happening in your business model. How do you want to grow? How do you want to develop next year? What sorts of resources do you need for that? Don't just be guided by trying to be the best value. Be more aware of the value you're bringing and the price that you put on that and the price that you expect others to put on that.

[00:40:56] And having that sort of confidence reflects itself in the book. If a reader really wants a book, they will buy it. And there is no doubt about that. If they're taking a punt, it's something slightly different. But I often think that free or so low in price that they don't have to think about something, that's your giveaway, that's your product for prospects as what they would call it in the business world.

[00:41:17] You're just putting something out there in order to attract people. That should be very low in price, or first in series strategically priced lower to get people in and then you put them up, also fine. But as you said, there's almost a formula in the indy world that everybody kind of adopts without exploring enough. Is this actually my optimal sweet spot of number of sales versus amount of revenue generated?

[00:41:48] Matty: One of the reasons that I've liked putting my first and series at 2 99, but now I'm going to rethink that as well, is that it gives you a point to discount to. So if you're selling your first in series for $0.99 and you want to apply for a BookBub or similar, then there's nowhere you can go other than free. And free is always such a fraught conversation. What are your further thoughts on offering something for free?

[00:42:11] Orna: I think free needs a strategy. So just putting out free books and assuming that's going to attract the right readers is not a good plan. There are free junkies who will never buy a book. Don't worry too much about them because they never wouldn't buy a book anyway, no matter what happens and fine if they get a free book because they weren't going to buy anyway. But, yeah, you need a strategy for free. You're doing free in order to attract. So you need to make sure that your strategy works, and they need to be clear about what is the next step. So if you're giving something for free, you certainly should be expecting something in return if you're doing it as a business proposition.

[00:42:49] So just, mindlessly, as it were, just I'm going to make this book free and then everybody's going to read it free and then they're going to come and read my book, that's not necessarily so at all. And there was a time where free was a very effective strategy, but that bus has left the station. It can work. It depends on the genre. It depends on, we're always saying this, everything does, I can work. it can attract people in but be aware.

[00:43:16] And don't give away too much for free. This is something that people vary on, but I'm not a fan of this, here's your free library of books, because lots of people, once they get that free library, they've had enough of you. You know, they want to move on and buy another and read another writer now. And so you want that free offer to be tantalizing. You want it to be an attractor. You want to put some thought into what you're giving out.

[00:43:43] Matty: I think it wasn't a conversation I had with Lee Savino about newsletters, and I'll put a link to this in the show notes, and we were talking about reader magnets for collecting email addresses, and she was saying that she had the experience of signing up for someone's newsletter, and they sent her an entire series. It was one of these authors who has like 500 books. So Lee had received a whole set of books for free as a result of signing up. And she said it was kind of a detractor. And I think the same applies to offering your books online for free. That once you've had all that, it's kind of like when you eat too much at Thanksgiving and then you don't want to see turkey ever again for a little while. They don't want to repel people with free content.

[00:44:26] Orna: And the thing is that there's a very well know indy authority at the moment who's saying just giving away a free book doesn't cut it any anymore. You have to get away a library of books. And a lot of people are listening to that and doing that. And I personally think it's a very bad strategy.

[00:44:44] Matty: Yeah. I just have never been able to get past that feeling that I want to give away anything. The things that I give away, I'm moving more toward deleted scenes and things like that. And again, this is on the email side, but I'm kind of using that as an analogy that I don't want somebody to think that my book is worth nothing. I want them to recognize that it's worth something. And I think based on the conversation with you and the conversation with JK Ellem, I'll experiment with that and then report back on how things are working out at a higher price.

[00:45:16] And I think also the key is you have to make it worth the higher price. You can't just decide that now I'm going to charge the same that the big guys are charging unless your work is really indistinguishable in quality from those or better. There should be a standard of excellence, not different ones for indy in traditional.

[00:45:36] Orna: Absolutely. You're singing my song, Matty.

[00:45:40] Matty: Any other promotional considerations that we should be hitting, especially for early authors?

[00:45:45] Orna: Yeah, I think we've definitely ticked the major boxes. I think the only other thing I would say is I think it's useful to plan your promotions around a quarterly calendar. And so each quarter of the year, you've got something going on promotionally. So you might be experimenting with your prices this quarter, and you might be experimenting with email newsletters next quarter, and you might try some digital advertising the following quarter. And sooner or later, you'll settle into, oh yeah, this is the kind of promotion I like, and it doesn't take up too much of my time. And then you can use your quarters to refine that strategy. But I think thinking quarterly about it is important because if it means that you keep on promoting in some way.

[00:46:32] And almost no promotional campaign will result in no sales. Everything is going to generate something. So you're not losing completely. But back to the original point of having a goal of how many books you do want this promotion to sell, having some sort of metric whereby you can measure did it achieve that? How much did it exceed that? How much did it fall short of that? And then taking that learning and taking that into the next quarter. I think is a good way to approach it. Because otherwise it's the kind of thing, it can fall off the desk in terms of importance because there's so many other things going on.

[00:47:09] Matty: Well, Orna, once again, this has been so helpful and interesting. Please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and all your work online.

[00:47:17] Orna: Great. So, SelfPublishingAdvice.org and that comes from the Alliance of Independent Authors and that's AllianceIndependentAuthors.org, and I am Orna Ross, and I am at OrnaRoss.com.

[00:47:32] Matty: And Orna will be back for the seventh in our series of seven processes of publishing, and we are going to be talking about a topic I know is near and dear to Orna's heart, which is selective rights. So people will definitely want to tune in for that. And thank you again, Orna.

[00:47:47] Orna: My pleasure. Thanks Matty. Bye-bye.

Episode 105 - The Fifth Process of Publishing: Marketing with Orna Ross

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Orna Ross of the Alliance of Independent Authors joins me for the fifth of a series of seven episodes devoted to the Seven Processes of Publishing. This week the topic is marketing. We talk about the difference between marketing, which is your welcoming handshake to a potential reader, and promotion, which we’ll address in the next episode. We talk about the “post-natal mania” that authors suffer after their first book, and how this “buy my book!” approach is understandable but not effective marketing. We discuss the importance of having marketing be a two-way conversation with readers.

Orna offers a host of ideas for how to achieve these goals, while emphasizing that this is not a checklist to be marched through blindly, but a menu of options from which you can pick to match your strategic goals, with an eye to what will work well for you personally. Orna offers a host of ideas for how to achieve these goals, while emphasizing that this is not a checklist to be marched through blindly, but a menu of options from which you can pick to match your strategic goals, with an eye to what will work well for you personally.

​Orna Ross is the founder and head of The Alliance of Independent Authors, a non-profit professional business membership organization for self-publishing authors. ALLi provides trusted advice, supportive guidance, and a range of resources, within a welcoming community of authors and advisors.

Episode Links

​Your First 50 Book Reviews: ALLi’s Guide to Getting More Reader Reviews (affiliate link)

Episode 100 - Becoming the Relaxed Author with Mark Leslie Lefebvre

Episode 058 - Author Newsletters with Lee Savino

Episode 073 - Author Websites with Pauline Wiles

Episode 027 - Why to Stop Blogging ... and What to Do Instead with Pauline Wiles

THE INDY AUTHOR'S GUIDE TO PODCASTING FOR AUTHORS

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, Orna. How are you doing?

[00:00:02] Orna: I'm very well, Matty. How are you?

[00:00:05] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. And I'm very excited to be back for our fifth of our series on the Seven Processes of Publishing, and today we're going to be talking about Marketing. And so the first thing I wanted to start out with is that ALLi considers marketing and promotion to be two separate activities. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what the differences are and why you felt it was important to make that distinction.

[00:00:28] Orna: I think it's really important for a number of reasons. When it comes to books, there is the sort of stuff that you need to do as what you might call your basic, your core marketing stuff. They're non-negotiable, you have to have them. Things like book covers, book descriptions, website, we would say transactional website for an indy author, and various things like this. Setting these up is quite a bit of work, and at every level you've got to work out so much to do this successfully. And in many ways, they're evolving. Lots of us find that we change these things as we go, but putting them in place is really, as I said, it's non-negotiable, it's got to be done.

[00:01:17] But they don't in and of themselves sell books. What they do is position you in the market. They give you a core place for your author platform, your website, where you can gather everything together. And they establish your promise to the reader. So when you're setting up your marketing, what you're doing is you're actually saying to the casual browser who comes across a book or your website or your book description or whatever it might be, you're saying to them, here's the kind of book this is, and you're either going to be interested or you're not. I don't mind if you're not, be gone with my blessing. But if you like this kind of book, here's a good one.

[00:02:01] And I say that through my marketing. I say it through the quality of my book covers. I say it through the quality and user-friendliness of my website. I say to the reader, this is a good book not by jumping up and down and saying, "my book is great, my book is great!" But by actually through my marketing messages, subliminally giving them confidence, making them feel like they know what kind of book it is, and they know that they would like it or not. And just essentially, it's the hello. It's you putting out your hand for a handshake, then they need to come in and see more to find out what they want to buy.

[00:02:42] Promotion, which we'll be dealing with in the next session, promotion Is quite different. Promotion is for book sales. It has a start date and an end date. Your marketing rolls on and on, it's constant, but promotions are set campaigns, which are designed to shift a particular book at a particular time for a particular time period.

[00:03:05] So they really are quite different. And I think what happens to authors, the reason why it's so important to make the distinction between the two is that authors do all of the set-up stuff, and then they feel that they've done that, why is nobody buying my book? They don't understand that marketing at this level is really important. Nobody will ever buy your book without it but having it in and of itself is only going to sell a few books here and there. You need the promotion to actually shift books in quantities.

[00:03:34] Matty: It's sort of like the infrastructure side of book sales, having all the mechanisms there, as you say, in place. And I like the comment about, it’s not the jumping up and down and waving your book in someone's face. And actually I talked with Mark Lefebvre about this in the episode 100, which was THE RELAXED AUTHOR, and we were talking about it in the context of don't go into social media and just post "buy my book, buy my book, buy my book." But I think it generalizes to any aspect of your interactions with readers and potential readers, and a learning I had attending a conference, it was Thrillerfest that I went to for several years, and it was interesting that the more successful the author, the less likely it was that they were going to mention their own work in a conversation with you. And I guess that makes sense because if you're Charlaine Harris or George R.R. Martin or any of these very successful authors, you kind of don't need to, the people already know. But I think that's such a hard transition to make, and I saw it in my own author career, that it's much easier now for me, now that I have a number of books under my belt, to not do that than it was with the first one. Because I think with the first one, you're just desperate for people to know about it. Now, am I venturing into promotion by talking about this now? Or would you consider this part of marketing?

[00:04:53] Orna: I would consider this part of marketing, because I think this is about settling into your marketing groove, is how I think of this kind of thing. And I think what you're raising is super important. After your first book, you're suffering from what I call post-natal mania. You're not quite right. You have this new baby, and you want everybody to know about it, you're super excited, hormones are flying all over the place and you don't behave like the average human being in those weeks, and that's fine. It's completely understandable. You have done something amazing, which is actually bring a book, not just finish a manuscript, but actually bring a book into publication. You scaled to enormous mountains. It's like if you're a mountaineer, having done Everest and Kilimanjaro. It's really huge and you're entitled to your mania, but that's what it is. It's not actually marketing and it's not effective.

[00:05:52] And I think what you're saying about the established authors, that is so interesting because I think another reason, as well as the fact that they've got more confidence and we all get more confidence the more books we write and publish, but also it doesn't really sell books. Like mentioning your book in passing conversation, people won't remember your title, your beloved title that you spent ages working on. They won't really click and most people at the beginning, when we're talking about our book in that sort of obsessive way, we're talking mostly to people who are never going to buy your book. If they do buy, they buy because they love you, but they don't normally read that kind of book.

[00:06:32] So you've got to get over that hump, if you like, and then settle back down, start writing the second book and create some distance between yourself. And when you get to book three, I think things really come into proper vision for you as both a writer and a publisher. But obviously that takes time. And give yourself the time. It's absolutely fine to make mistakes at the beginning and to jump up and down and say, "buy my book, buy my book, buy my book." Just don't expect it to be very effective.

[00:07:03] Matty: Yeah. And I guess maybe there's a distinction between saying "I've written a book" and "buy my book," because I would definitely find "I've written a book" to be a more palatable message to hear from someone on social media, for example, or if I met them at a cocktail party or whatever, than "buy my book."

[00:07:18] Orna: Absolutely, yeah. Telling somebody to buy anything is never a good way to get them to buy it. And even if you just come across, like one of those really brash ads on the television that you just go whizzing past, you don't pay attention. And particularly when it comes to complex, and that might work if you're selling sofas, but it doesn't work if you're selling a complex product like a book.

[00:07:44] Because actually, what sells a book is emotion, a feeling. It's not even the cognitive messages that are in the book that are as important to the person who hasn't read it as the subliminal sort of messages that are coming through the use of language in your book description, and particularly the subliminal messages that are coming through the book design, your book cover. That's why your cover is so key to your marketing and why often authors find, and we discussed this a bit when we were talking about cover design, often authors find that their first attempt of this doesn't really work, and sometimes you have to go back a second or third time before you realize.

[00:08:26] And then as you add more books into your stock, your whole look as an author, your author platform, it all changes. So it isn't a set thing, it's not like building a physical platform, you just build it and you just leave it there. It's actually an evolving thing, your author platform, and the more books you produce, it will shift and mutate a little bit. But if you know your core passion as a writer and mission, if you have one also, they remain core and then everything else can kind of settle in around those.

[00:09:05] Matty: It was interesting when we were talking about the emotion and the difference between saying "I have a book" and "buy my book" is I was flashing back to my corporate career. Because until 2019 I worked, among other places, at QVC, the shopping network, the online retailer. And one of the approaches they had was that sales should be like talking to your friend over the backyard fence. "Over the backyard fence" was a common phrase that you would hear to distinguish that kind of sales approach, especially when QVC first started up, the very heavy, sort of in your face, screaming promotions of TV ads, it all seemed like an infomercial. I think that's kind of a nice theory to carry forward, that you want to have a conversation like you're talking with a friend over the backyard fence, which could steer you away from the "buy my book approach."

[00:09:57] Orna: I think that's brilliant. Just imagine your right reader, your perfect reader on the other side of that fence. And you’ll not only be chatting to them about your book, you'll be asking them about what they're reading, what they've enjoyed. It's a two-way conversation. Marketing at this level is a two-way conversation. So we're learning as much from our readers as we are giving to them. It's definitely the more dialogue we can get in there in terms of reading our reviews properly and inviting email responses and just getting to know our readers as real people, not this faceless mass, it really feeds back into the writing and the marketing.

[00:10:41] Matty: So one of the things that I think is a common question, especially early in a writer's career, is how early in the process should writers start trying to establish this marketing platform that you're talking about?

[00:10:51] Orna: Yeah. So you are not just a writer, you're also publisher because you're an indy author, you're an author-publisher. And so you've got these two things going on at the same time. And I think the answer to this question depends on what kind of writer you are. And by that I don't mean your genre or anything, but I mean how you are as a person when you're writing. Are you the kind of writer that needs to completely protect what you're doing and not let the outside world in? So are you the kind of writer who doesn't speak to family or friends, doesn't tell them what's going on? They may know you're writing a book, but they have no idea of the content. Or are you the kind of person who bursts out of the study in the evening and says hey, today I wrote this and that.

[00:11:34] If you're the second kind, you can safely start to use social media and other ways to kind of begin to get your message out there. Marketing, the sooner you start, the better from a marketing perspective, what your number one always has to be protecting that creative writing part of yourself. And you will know best as to whether that's able for that. If it isn't, forget about it. Get the book out. And particularly on first books, I think there's not a lot to say if you're not the kind of person who's happy to share the writing, if you're not ready to. If you're writing a complex novel, say, that is multiple timelines and stuff like this, and there's going to just change and change and mutate, you need to get to the end, go back to the beginning to write it again. There isn't a lot of point in sharing that unless you're really super comfortable about being that raw and exposed, and very few of us are. So at that stage, focus on the writing and getting things done and don't worry too much about marketing.

[00:12:37] So yeah, beginning as soon as you possibly can, is the right thing from the marketing perspective, but keep in mind what the writer needs. And then, when you have the book done and safely through, when it begins to go to your editor and to other people, then you can and go from there. You can begin to send it through.

[00:13:00] Matty: I think that people do enjoy seeing that behind-the-scenes aspect of the writer's life. So even if you're not explicitly sharing the content of what you're writing, sharing the process might be of interest to the people that you want to nurture as your followers.

[00:13:17] Orna: Yes, it absolutely can be. But you know, it does depend on how sensitive you are, really. And some of us are very sensitive. So I absolutely agree, if you can, find a way, but if you can't, don't worry too much about it. There will be plenty of time for marketing when you've got something to actually sell.

[00:13:37] There's also the danger for some people, and really, we vary so widely on this that it's very hard to give just one answer, but there's also a danger for people, they separate themselves and start looking at the book with a critical eye instead of deeply immersing themselves in the flow that's needed to finish.

[00:13:56] So, I know for example, I couldn't have shared, even if we'd had those tools back at the beginning, when I was a beginning author. I was already struggling having been a journalist, I was already struggling with having too public a mind, having self-censored myself as a freelance journalist to give editors what they wanted. And switching to fiction, it was really important that I wasn't thinking about what the editor wanted or the reader wanted for that first book, because I had to learn how to become a novelist. And that is quite a job in itself. And so for me, I'm just speaking personally, doing anything at a social level would have derailed the project, I think.

[00:14:44] But then not everybody feels that way at all, so it really is about finding your own way. And if you can find any way to begin to market and integrate that with your writing, then that is the ideal because that's what you're going to have to do always. And so the sooner you can set up that habit of, I'm not just a writer, I'm also a publisher and I'm wearing my writing hat, I'm doing this, I'm wearing my publisher hat, I'm doing that, and getting comfortable with those two. And sooner you can do that, the better. So if you can, do, but if you can't, don't worry. That's what I'm trying to say, I think.

[00:15:19] Matty: One of the tricky parts of marketing activities for me is that I need to distinguish between readers and fans. And so, the best example I can think of this is that a long time ago, and this was back when you could do giveaways on Goodreads for either free or almost nothing. Now, I think it's quite expensive, but early on, I did a giveaway on Goodreads in exchange for email addresses for my mailing list, and I got like a thousand people on my mailing list.

[00:15:47] And so I've seen that over time in the many years since then, every time I send an email out, a couple of people unsubscribe. It shouldn't be surprising, but it's still sort of painful to see. And then at a much slower rate, I'm adding people in. You know, I'll recognize a name that I've seen in my private Facebook group, and now I see them on my email newsletter list, and so I think that's the distinction between readers and fans. That the people I got initially were readers and the people that I'm getting now are fans. Is that something that should impact how an author goes about their marketing activities for their work?

[00:16:25] Orna: This is such a great question, really, it's such a great distinction, and one I think that too few authors are kind of cognizant of. So anytime that you do any sort of giveaway, you're going to gather people who are only there for the giveaway. That's why free books are a useful strategy up to a point.

[00:16:44] So you can set yourself up in such a way whereas I'm only going to really focus on fans. I'm only going to focus on those people who most love what I do, and I'm going to have the most connection with, I'm not going to give them anything. I'm just going to put myself out there. Here's what I do, I probably won't get their email address until they buy a book on my website. That's one way to go about it. I'm going to really focus on using one of the distributors like Amazon or Apple or somebody, I'm really going to focus in there and trying to find fans.

[00:17:14] But I think for most people what happens is there's a bit of a scattered gun kind of approach. So I think of it as concentric circles. And in the middle, Kevin Kelly wrote way back at the beginning of the internet, that a thousand true fans can sustain a creative in their living, because they'll buy everything you do. They'll follow you no matter where you go, no matter what your creative development is, they just love you, they really align with you, and they follow you to anything.

[00:17:43] And that's recently, with Kelly's permission, been modified to a hundred true fans spending a thousand. So it was originally a thousand true fans spending a hundred, and that was a sufficient income for you to keep on doing your thing. And now it's even more in that direction by saying a hundred true fans who would spend a thousand a year is enough for you to keep doing your thing.

[00:18:05] So I think it's very difficult if you're only going to try and find those people. I think you have to have the readers. So if we think about the concentric people here in the middle, they are your fans. The next ring around that will be the more casual reader who kind of likes what you do, but they prefer that author and this author over here, but you're not bad, you're okay. And if you have a new book, yeah, they'd like to know, kind of, yeah, sure, if they have time, they'll put it on their TBR and maybe, fingers crossed. Those people, by the way, are on your mailing list. They're interested enough to be on your mailing list, but they're not wild about you. They're not going to buy everything you do. And if you start to do a new series, they're going to think twice about whether they're going to follow you over there or not.

[00:18:47] The next concentric circle around that are the people who are on your subscriber list, but they're really quite casually connected to you. The next circle outside of that is somebody who's bought a book, but never signed up for your mailing list and hasn't done that yet. And then outside of that, of course, the people on the biggest, widest circle of all, they haven't heard of you at all.

[00:19:07] So, I find that a useful way to think about it because you can then get your promotions, depending on what way you want to handle it, you can get your promotions going into one of those circles, deciding in advance which of those circles you would like to approach.

[00:19:25] So if you give away a lot of free books, for example, to a lot of people who haven't heard of you before, that’s good marketing, but they will fall off. They won't all come all the way into the center of your circle. Some of them will, a few of them will. So at each level of the circle, you're reducing the percentage. And that's not personal. And actually, you want them to unsubscribe if they're in any doubt, because well, for all sorts of reasons related to deliverability and stuff like that, in terms of your emails actually landing in the inboxes of those who do want to receive them. If you've got too many people who are not sure and they're not opening your mail, then that actually affects your deliverability rates, and your emails can wind up going into the spam boxes of people who actually do want to get them.

[00:20:17] You want at all times, and I do think this is the central thing to keep, you're aiming your bullseye there in the middle of these concentric circles. You're aiming at those people and you're trying to get as many of them as possible into that middle. But in order to do that, you'd cast your net wide. And you can think about how you go about that. And again, a lot will depend on the kind of books you're writing, what your own right readers like to do, what they're used to from other authors and all that kind of stuff.

[00:20:52] Matty: I also find that the process of turning potential readers into readers and fans is that the more interactive you can be with them, and this kind of harks back to something you had said earlier, the better it is. So I've had good luck doing author takeovers on Facebook pages. And there you can spend an hour or two hours or a day or however long the takeover is, chatting with people. And then I see a very high percentage of those people then showing up on my email list of people can look for those opportunities, where you're able to interact with them, not to show them your book. Then that's kind of a nice approach.

[00:21:24] Orna: Definitely, and if you enjoy anything like that, then your publishing side loves that. So just as a trade publisher would push you out to every event in town, you as your own publisher have to decide which events, you're going to push yourself to, that won't derail your writing. And that's always the delicate balance that you're trying to achieve. So if you are the kind of person who loves going on to Facebook and doing a Facebook takeover, fantastic, do that.

[00:21:53] If that's your idea of hell, don't do that. Do something that you love. So much about marketing will only work if you like it, and so often we're doing things because we saw some other author do it and we'd go, oh that's a good way to sell books. And it probably is, but is it your good way to sell books? That's the question you have to ask yourself.

[00:22:15] So you absolutely have to go where your readers are. You absolutely have to find a bridge between you and them. That has to be done, that's part of the job. You won't sell books if you don't do that. But what's that bridge going to look like? And there are a thousand ways to build a bridge between a writer and a reader, there's so many ways.

[00:22:35] And the more interesting and yourself, the more authentic, I think this is one of the reasons that people love things like Facebook page takeovers, or live video or audio, because it brings it alive, and they can get a real sense of who is the person behind the book. And readers really like that. Authors deplore it sometimes. They think, I spent three years putting this book together, it says everything. Why do you want to ask me questions? Read the book! And we can be a bit impatient in that way.

[00:23:05] But it is actually wearing our publishing hat, that's what you want to be tapping into. That wish, on behalf of the reader, for something else, something that will be the bridge, something that would kind of hold their hand to bring them across into the world of the book.

[00:23:20] So you've got to remember how much pull there is on everybody's time. Think about yourself, think about your own reading habits. Think about what you want from the writers you love. What sort of bridge would you like them to lay down for you to walk over? Yeah, again, to think in those ways, and you can come up with some good ideas. The more original and personal and authentic you can make it, the better.

[00:23:45] Matty: You've mentioned a couple of times the importance of balancing marketing or any of these other publication processes with the writing. Are there red flags that people should keep an eye out for that would suggest that they are not striking that balance in a healthy way?

[00:24:01] Orna: Yeah, I think it's really useful to time yourself and just see how much time are you actually spending on the writing. It's very easy to get confused and think you're spending a lot of time on your writing when you're actually spending a lot of time on your marketing.

[00:24:18] So you need to clearly label, I think of it as three different aspects, which I think I've mentioned before in this series, the maker who makes the books and also makes the social media ads or the podcast or whatever it may be, that's the maker. There's the manager who does all the stuff related to money, income, and processes, improving your writing process, improving your publishing process, all of that kind of thing. And then there's the marketeer who looks after the promotions and all the marketing work. So it's really helpful to do, and I have a creative business planning program where we all look at the week and the day in terms of maker, manager, and marketeer. So you get very clear about what you're doing when, and I think that's really useful.

[00:25:09] One of the reasons I have this is because, I've found this so challenging myself, between being an also publisher and then also running ALLi, there was a lot of pulls on my time and I used to think I was doing more writing time than I actually was. And these planners helped me to get clear and to really see what was going on in my day and therefore in my weeks and months.

[00:25:31] I ended up actually having to get completely different physical spaces for my maker. My maker has a space all of her own now. And ALLi happens obviously in ALLi world. But the publishing happens outside of the making space and I think that's important.

[00:25:50] Matty: Are there are characteristics of those three spaces that make each of them appropriate for the activity that goes on in that space?

[00:25:57] Orna: Yeah, definitely. I think your creative, maker space needs to be very, speaking for myself, each of us knows what our own maker likes, but for me, it's got to be very soft, and it's got to be very quiet, and it's got to be very removed from the world. So I feel like I'm stepping in here, there's just me and my imagination, it's got all my favorite books in here, it has got a few childish kinds of things. And so your maker, generally speaking, is soft and vulnerable and needs to open up, to be coaxed out play. So it's also a more playful space and there is a nice day bed if you're going to have a little snooze, that kind of thing.

[00:26:35] Whereas the ALLi environment and the publishing environment is much more businesslike. Still fun, I mean, it's a creative business, it's not mechanical or mechanistic in any way, but it is more businesslike and that's appropriate.

[00:26:50] Matty: The big challenge I think I have is that, especially coming from a project management background, the draw of the marketing and the manager aspects is that it's like a list of tasks and you can go through the tasks, and you can check them off, and each time you checked something off, you have the sense of accomplishment. Whereas the making part is usually much more sort of loosey goosey, and you might get to the end of a period of making and you don't really know whether you've accomplished what you wanted to accomplish or not.

[00:27:20] And I found that for me, the equivalent for me to where I'm doing it as when I'm doing it. And I used to spend the time before one o'clock daily sprint that I had with two fellow authors doing the marketing and the managing part. And then we eventually moved the sprint up till 11, because I'm like, if I have until 1, I'm going to fill until 1, but if I only have until 11, I stop at 11. And it was only by mechanically moving that marker that I was able to spend more time making and less time on those other things, which I think was a healthier balance for me.

[00:27:55] Orna: Absolutely. I mean, you're raising something that's really important. The two resources that we're playing with are time and space. I mean, we could introduce money there as well. And so space, yeah, I talked about that, but time is really important for me. The actual deep work of the latest book that I'm writing, the deep writing work has to be done first thing in the morning. And there are a couple of reasons for that. If it isn't done first, probably won't be done because so many calls on the outer sphere and they all sound more important and more urgent, and in a way they're easier.

[00:28:30] There are all sorts of reasons why they're easier. They are deep, kind of psychological and emotional reasons, and we don't need to know what they are, but we do need to know that it will always be challenging to give that inner part of yourself the attention that is needed to sit down and go deep. And so I have to do that first thing in the morning. Speaking to an author during the week, he said he has to do it last thing at night when everything else is done. He can't actually let himself relax until he's ticked all the boxes.

[00:29:02] So I think a lot is, I mean, you come from a project management background, you will have a whole load of habit energy built up around project management that feels good to you. And you've got to feed that part of yourself. A lot of authors that I talked to, nothing fills them with more horror than a to do list or a project management aspect. They don't enjoy the marketeer / manager. They just want to sit in making all day, but just not possible, really, for any author, any creative. So yeah, again, it's about knowing yourself and exploring, experimenting, and seeing what works for you with regard to all of that.

[00:30:16] Matty: We had sort of mentioned before the various aspects of a marketing platform for an author, and I just want it to walk through them and have you comment on each of them as we go in terms of what they can bring to a marketing effort.

[00:30:29] So the first one, I don't know that we want to spend a ton of time on this because it could turn into a whole episode on to itself, but social media. We've talked a little bit about the idea of spending your time where you enjoy being. Any other tips you would want to share about social media?

[00:30:45] Orna: Yeah. Don't stay in your comfort zone if you're using social media as part of your business. Don't stay with your friends. Realize that what you're trying to do is reach readers and think about how you use this medium to reach more readers if that's what you're doing. If you're on to enjoy your friends, be fully on there to enjoy your friends and don't bring business into it. So get very clear.

[00:31:12] A third thing that I found very useful was to separate out my social media. So this is just a personal thing. I haven't seen a lot of people do it, but it worked very well for me. My poetry now is on Instagram only. It doesn't really surface anywhere else. And Twitter is for nonfiction and Facebook is for fiction. It's kind of loosely divided up in that way in my mind. And that really helps me to know what I'm doing where.

[00:31:37] Make a distinction between your Facebook page on your Facebook profile. If you use your Facebook profile for your personal stuff, be cognizant of the fact that you have a Facebook page and how they link.

[00:31:51] The other thing I would say, if you're going to use a social medium to sell, go be a user. Don't go on to something that you haven't got a clue how it works. It doesn't last. You'll see countless author accounts on all the different platforms that are just mordant. They don't work.

[00:32:10] So it's not something to be embarked on lightly. It's something that you really need to think about and engage with. It's another form of writing. It's communication in another way. It should amplify and expand what you're saying in your book. You should be the author when you're out there. If you're using it in order to sell books, you go out there and not as yourself, but as a representation of yourself, the part of you that writes books.

[00:32:37] And again, you're thinking about the reader. So you're thinking that giving good value to them, not going on to sort of complain because your delivery didn't arrive on time or whatever it might be. A bit of humanity is absolutely fine, but within the context of providing value to the reader, always.

[00:32:57] Matty: I don't know if this is actually a new feature of Facebook or I just noticed it, but I've seen recently that you can join groups or do Facebook page takeovers, things like that, as a page rather than as a profile, because before that either existed, or I noticed it, I would join groups as my profile, and then suddenly I would get a bunch of friend requests and I actually only want my profile to be accessible to actual friends.

[00:33:23] I don't think I'll ever be able to just go back to what I used to post on my profile because there are too many people that have gotten in there now that are not my friends and family. But it was a nice way to make that distinction that you're saying that you draw a line between what's personal on social media for you and what is more business oriented for you.

[00:33:41] Orna: Yes, exactly. And Facebook is always changing things and sometimes they do things prematurely and then they catch up when they see how people respond on that.

[00:33:51] So, yeah, they're always making changes, and this is the thing that these platforms, why our marketing, why we must have our website. I know we're talking about it about social media, and we've continued to do that. But just to use the opportunity to say, because these changes are constantly going on and always will be, you need a stable place of your own on the internet. You need your own space, your own website, where everything happens, and then you see your social media as outposts.

[00:34:21] Matty: Well, let's use that as an entree to websites. Talk a little bit about what are the primary considerations for an offer in terms of having a website presence?

[00:34:28] Orna: So, one of the things I've mentioned this already, but I'll say it again, always saying it. As an indy author, you're a publisher, you're not just a writer. And so you should have a transactional website. If a reader finds your website, you want them to be able to buy your book. So that's number one, your website is transactional and therefore you're different to an author who has sold all their rights to one publisher or a couple of publishers, but they have other people who look after that, it's fine for them to just have a brochure site, but as a publisher, you need a transactional site.

[00:35:05] And then you have to decide with your website, what is the one thing that you most want your reader to do? So you would ideally like them to buy books. But there is a problem with that I mentioned earlier, that is that a lot of readers are hesitant to buy a book from an author that they don't know and love. There are millions of fantastic books out there. So you are in competition with all those other books that they could be reading. And so they're not sure when they come onto your website, if they've never heard about you before. They may be bowled over by your fabulous covers, your brilliant reviews, and your general ambience and jump right in and buy a book, and that's great. But most of us will want them to sign up and get to the sign up is the most important thing for most authors.

[00:35:52] But you have to decide, are you going to be pushing the sales, are you going to be pushing signups, or are you going to be pushing something else, something unique and original to you? Whatever it is that you decide your website is there to do, then that should be really crystal clear, and all roads should lead there.

[00:36:10] So your site map on your website should lead your reader through, in a very logical sort of way, to what you want them to do. So if you want to sign up, then make that your homepage, make the sign up page your homepage. And make it attractive and give them a reason why they should sign up. Generally speaking, that's free books, with all the attendant dangers that we've discussed already. But whatever it might be, really try to attract them into the signup. If it's about the book sale, then think about accordingly. And think about how you shape and structure your website around that one thing that you want them to do.

[00:36:48] Secondly, remember that your fonts, your colors, and the shapes of your site, how you do your dropdown menu, everything on that site is sending obvious or subliminal messages and you don't want the message to be, this person is not professional. And it may well be sending that message if you've put it together yourself. So I would really highly recommend that to hire somebody who's good at design to do your website.

[00:37:22] Thirdly, it's worth putting a bit of time and attention into SEO, search engine optimization. So in the same way that you will have to choose categories and keywords when you're uploading your books to Amazon, Apple, and so on, use those same categories and keywords. It's surprising how many times you see a disjunction here. Use those same categories on keywords all around your site. That should happen naturally, but often on our websites, because it is our own part of the internet, we can get a little bit distracted and find ourselves writing and all sorts of different things.

[00:37:59] Fourthly, if you do lots and lots of very distinctively different things, don't be afraid to get them off your author website. Your author website should be about your books. It can give a sense of everything that you do. But again, thinking about the reader, the main focus of your website isn't really to tell them what you do. Again, that's a brochure type site that kind of includes everything and you know, interest them in that. You are thinking more strategically in a more business-like fashion.

[00:38:32] And also because people's time for browsing websites in that sort of way is far less available than it used to be. You want to keep the site as simple as possible. A lot of author websites are absolutely coming down with junk. There's way too much stuff and people don't know where to go. They don't know what to do. They might even want to buy a book and not be able to find their way. They don't need every award you've won, every nice thing that anybody has said about you. They don't need all that upfront, really. You need to think about them and what makes a really enjoyable experience.

[00:39:09] And then you need to think about how you're going to get some back again. And this is where blogs or podcasts or Facebook Lives or author interviews or something comes in. You need a site not to be static. People want, if they come back next month, but they're not just going to the same site they saw last month and the month before and the month before. They need to get a sense of this author is working, they're producing, and that there's things going on that they're going to be looking forward to. So all in all is a lot to think about.

[00:39:43] Matty: There is a great episode. I'd like to point people to Episode 73 was AUTHOR WEBSITES with Pauline Wiles. And she was totally on the same page as what you're describing with simplicity is key. And also the level of simplicity that she recommends for first-time authors I think it gets a lot of people over the hump of being frightened about the idea of setting up a website, because she has some great suggestions for, there are just three or four or five components that you need when you start out and get those lined up and then expand as you want it to over time. But I think that would be a nice companion piece for people to take a look at.

[00:40:16] And you had mentioned blogging, so that's another of the components let's use that as an entree. Is blogging still a thing?

[00:40:21] Orna: Yeah, blogging's still a thing. It definitely is. Podcast have become popular. Video has become popular. You know, we are writers. We work with the written word. So if you can't make a blog interesting and compelling, then who can? Blogs still are a thing. But again, going back to what I said earlier, if you don't like blogging, they're not a thing for you and find another way to do it. You might prefer audio. You might prefer to do podcast. You might prefer to do live videos, which you then embed on your website. There are loads and loads of things that you can do. You just need to work out what they are.

[00:41:00] What's great about blogging is in the same way as a transcript on a podcast and other these things, this distinction is kind of wearing down because there was a time where Google wasn't indexing video, and it wasn't to indexing audio in the same way that it is indexed text. And so blogs have the advantage. And this is why a lot of podcasts did transcripts as well as being something that readers wanted, and some people wanted to read it rather than listen to it. It was also because you needed that to get the Google juice kind of thing. And that is not as significant as it used to be.

[00:41:37] But blogging is still an excellent way to reach a reader, but it must be targeted. You must know what you're doing. It's not about just blogging whatever comes into your head. Again, it's about those all-important keywords and categories and writing something that's interesting enough that it is kind of the best thing on the internet about that particular topic so that it will come up and turn up in searches.

[00:42:05] And this is much easier for nonfiction writers than it is for poets or novelists. So blogging works very well for non-fiction. Maybe not so well for fiction unless you've got a very clear kind of idea of a very distinct niche, and you can write around it in a way that it's going to surface up on searches. And very often fiction is just more nebulous and so it's difficult for it to top SEO searches. And it's the same with keywords and categories on the platforms. That's just a nature of fiction. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you, but it does mean that you need to stop and think it's blogging best use of my time.

[00:42:47] This is another reason why people don't blog because they're all written out by the time they've written their book. The last thing they feel like doing for marketing is turning around and do more writing. They'd rather do almost anything else.

[00:42:59] So yeah, so much of this, and I'm just realizing as we're talking, so much of this marketing stuff comes back to know yourself. Know yourself and trust the process of what you love and connect with is what your reader is going to love and connect with. Just trust that flow, that natural flow, rather than thinking I have to do blogging and I have to do social media and I have to do these things because that author did them and somebody else that you have to. You don't have to do anything, but you do have to do something.

[00:43:31] Matty: There is another Pauline Wiles episode. I want to point people to, this was Episode 27, WHY TO STOP BLOGGING AND WHAT TO DO INSTEAD. And her message actually was that blogging can still be valuable, but if your goal is to reach new readers and followers, then guest blogging is a better option than blogging yourself. So if you're blogging yourself, in a way you're preaching to the choir, you're connecting with the people who are already following you, probably, and you're gradually getting some people in. But if new reader outreach is what you're looking for, guest blogging is what she recommended.

[00:44:04] And I know that for myself and this ties back to what you were saying about consider what is comfortable and desirable for you is that I very rarely blog, like every once in a while there's some message I want to get out and it's just convenient for me to put it in my blog and connect people from social media to it, because it's like too long to put as a social media post, but that's very rare. And I'm just doing it sort of for my own entertainment, not for any marketing purposes.

[00:44:33] But I do accept invitations to appear as content on other people's sites, but usually only if it's audio or video, something I can record, because as you're saying, I'm definitely of the camp that if I have writing energy, I don't want to be spending it on a blog, especially somebody else's blog. I want to be spending it on my books or possibly my social media. And that ties in with something that Mark and I talked about in Episode 100 BEING THE RELAXED AUTHOR about if he's going to be contributing content to somebody else, he wants to do it in the most efficient way possible. And for him, audio or video is what that is.

[00:45:12] So let's use that as an entree to video content. How can author teach video content was productively as a marketing tool?

[00:45:19] Orna: Yeah, I think video is very underused by authors and they tend to think of the author interview. And just to add to everything you said there, which I 100% endorse, it's the same for podcasting and video appearances as it is for blogging. You will reach a lot more people. I hear a lot of authors saying I really should start a podcast. Probably not. Unless you're absolutely dying to start a podcast, unless you're absolutely itching to do it, what you should probably do is go and appear on podcasts. And same for YouTube lives or whatever it might be.

[00:45:54] So, yeah, video though is far more than just the author interview. Book trailers are very effective at selling books. Now you still have the issue of you have to get attention for your video or your podcast or whatever it is that you're doing. And that in itself needs to be marketed, but it is much easier to get somebody to watch it a book trailer than it is to get them to buy a book. So again, it's about that bridge. Video can be a fantastic bridge between your reader and your book, and there are all sorts of ways that you can do that. And you could also be in a lot more creative, myself included, around how they use video and how they create that bridge through video.

[00:46:38] There's a fantastic tool that I use now called StreamYard, where you can do your Facebook live or whatever you are doing, you both through StreamYard and you can be simultaneously broadcasting to Facebook, your Facebook page, Twitter, everywhere essentially, all at the same time.

[00:46:59] Those kinds of tools and things with video with audio really make a lot of sense to find out the way, again, in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, you might have time that you're spending getting the most return that you can makes a lot of sense. So a lot of it is about getting out there or else producing something really attractive, remarkable, and interesting that is going to give people a sense of what your book is about and create something in video that makes them go, oh my, I really have to read this.

[00:47:31] So I think there's a lot of scope there and a lot of scope to get creative. But again, it's time, it's energy, and you need to probably work with a good video editor who can kind of bring your vision into reality.

[00:47:46] Matty: I enjoy making book trailers, but I totally do it as just an entertaining activity for me. I never expect that I'm going to actually get any readers from it. Like if I can't justify the evening that I'm going to spend doing it, just because I think it's fun. You know, it's like, am I going to read a book or am I going to make a trailer? I'm going to make a trailer. I sort of weigh it in a different way because I don't know that it's bringing me that much.

[00:48:11] Orna: Yeah, cause again, you have to market it. So if you're enjoying the making part there, but maybe not engaging with the marketing part around the trailer. And if you enjoy making them, you definitely should make them because why not? They really do help a reader to know what the book is about. So they really are very effective. I mean, anyone who gets a bit of a budget in a publishing house, if they've got a contract, will get a trailer. A trailer is seen as kind of basic, you know, so if you can, do it. What tool do you use just as a matter of interest?

[00:48:45] Matty: Well, until recently, believe it or not, I used PowerPoint. This is showing my corporate background that I basically did a series of slides with transitions and text and things like that. But if I were doing it now, I would use probably Canva or BookBrush. So the tools that are available to do it now are much nicer.

[00:49:05] Orna: They're great. And could I do a call out for a lovely tool called Animoto. And they put it together with music and stuff and you just drop in your whatevers, from your slides and they produce this very nice video with lots of kind of special effects things up to you. Though they're all coming up, aren't they? They're all improving. Every time somebody does something, all the others come up to the same level. So these may well beyond Canva now and BookBrush and I'm not aware of that, but certainly I have found Animoto to be a great tool.

[00:49:39] Matty: Yeah. Well, we've given people a couple of options to look at.

[00:49:43] And I wanted to look last at podcasting. So of course I have a personal interest in this. I totally agree with what you're saying about the idea of being a guest on a podcast is a good test for if you want to be a host of a podcast. And I'm just going to put a blatant plug in for my book, THE INDY AUTHOR'S GUIDE TO PODCASTING FOR AUTHORS. And if you go to TheIndyAuthor.Com, and it's Indy with a Y, and click on Podcasting for Authors, in the book, I have a few questions at the end of each chapter, the early ones are aimed at trying to decide if podcasting is right for you. Like put together a list of topics you'd like to address, and if you can't come up with, you know, two dozen of them, you probably don't want to start a podcast. But there's a document out there called the Captain's Log because I love the nautical metaphor and it includes all the questions that appear at the end of the chapters and the early ones are focused on deciding of podcasting is right for you.

[00:50:38] And then if you get past that stage and you decided is, one of the distinctions I make is whether you want to use it as, are you connecting with followers or are you connecting with fellow creators? And so I still find that I'm probably benefiting more from The Indy Author Podcast as an opportunity for me to connect with people like you, that I might not otherwise get a chance to talk to one-on-one and it's totally makes it worth it to me to make the financial and time and effort investment to continue to do it. Whereas for some people it is definitely a more marketing rather than a networking kind of effort.

[00:51:16] And I have found that based on my own experience and that I've seen other people have with using a podcast for fiction, it's tougher for exactly the same kinds of reasons that we're talking about fiction blogging is a little harder than non-fiction blogging. Because my belief is that when people listened to a podcast about fiction books, they're following the author, they're not following the host. And so if I go on somebody else's podcast to talk about my fiction books, I'm probably still speaking to the choir, preaching to the people who already know me because I'm going to post about it on social media and they're going to listen to it and hopefully be entertained. But I don't know that I'm picking up a lot of new people. Do you have an opinion on whether you're picking up new people, if you're a guest or if you're a host for a fictional podcast?

[00:52:10] Orna: Yeah, I think this is great because I think we need to expand our idea of what a fiction podcast can do. So I think we're very used to the interview format in terms of podcasting and that's what you're talking about there. And I completely agree with everything you said. And a lot of authors don't understand this. So think it's really useful to be raising it. It's the complexity of fiction marketing. It's not a simple and it's not as straightforward as how-to nonfiction, let's call it that, guidebook nonfiction, which is very much around the information. Give me the information. So you can do keywords and things, it's very easy to do your SEO properly and to reach out and pick up new people.

[00:52:57] When we're doing fiction podcasting and poetry podcasting ... so let's just talk about poetry for us for a second. Poetry, the most effective form of podcast is samples of the poem and say, if your poetry is doing its job, because it's short form, it's ideally suited to audio. And so can serve as a taster for your book. So somebody listens to a poem, they're moved by the poem, they're so moved they buy the book. Simple. So poetry and podcasting really worked very well together. Just a simple audio reading. And there are loads of ways in which poets get together and do their readings on each other's websites and on podcasts and Instagram lives and all that kind of stuff. And all that is straightforward.

[00:53:40] And then in the middle you've got the poor novelists who are wondering how on earth do I use podcast to effect? So you’ve pointed out the difficulty. So you can go out there and put yourself around and be interviewed by trip book and you may enjoy that the first few times anyway. But how much are you actually picking up readers of that kind of book? Because you would have to have a laser sharp choice of podcasts. And then it may not even exist, the right podcast for you to reach your readers. People who are following somebody else whose podcast is so on-brand, to use a corporate term, for you. And so there might be a book blogger maybe who specializes in your type of book, but it's not going to be a whole lot going on out there in the wider world.

[00:54:31] So then the choice is kind of back to the book trailer thing. You make another piece of art, another piece of work, which draws in readers, and it is very closely connected to what you do yourself. Now I considered doing this. I was going to do a podcast called "Histories and Mysteries" because I write historical fiction and inspirational poetry and I felt that would kind of that umbrella would go across the two, and I was going to make it as close in experience as possible to the experience of actually being engaged with the books. In the end, I decided not to do it because I just thought it was too much hard work and that I'd rather write in all the book. So that's the problem.

[00:55:16] So I do realize that we're raising the challenge here rather than providing the answer, but I think it's very important to understand this before you open off and do all the work that's involved in doing podcasts is to think very closely and carefully. Again, put yourself in the reader's shoes. If they were to listen to this podcast, would they buy that book? And also think about the consistency of it, the amount of work that's needed to do with the amount of time it's going to take the amount of energy, creative energy that it's going to use.

[00:55:48] If it's a fit, it's fantastic. It's absolutely brilliant. There probably isn't a better way I would think. I mean, there's a reason why here in the UK, BBC Radio 4 books programs, those audio programs on the radio, they really shift books better than anything else on television, because the audio intimate connection, it's the closest we can get in a broadcasting environment to the intimacy that is there in the reading of a book. And particularly now is audio books take off, audio podcasting and audio books are a very neat fit, but you've got to create the bridge. It has to make sense. And so think very carefully about it when you're setting it up.

[00:56:32] Matty: I think that the idea that you have to make these decisions, especially about spending time on any of these things we've spoken about or writing, is so key. And again, I'm going to hark back to Mark Lefebvre's Episode 100 on THE RELAXED AUTHOR, which would be great for people to listen to before and after they listened to this series because I think the key of this set of seven that we're going to be doing is that you should have all this information about what's on the menu, and then you make an informed decision about which ones you're going to pick and maybe revisit it periodically to make sure that your appetite hasn't changed and you want to shift your focus a little bit. But that it's not intended as a checklist that here are the hundred things, and you better start at number one and start marching through what, because that way lies insanity.

[00:57:21] Orna: Absolutely. Permanent, not just your post book mania.

[00:57:25] Matty: Exactly. Well, Orna, this was so great. Please let listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your work online.

[00:57:35] Orna: Yeah. So I'm Orna Ross and my author website is on OrnaRoss.com. I am founder and director of the Alliance of Independent Authors, and you can find that at AllianceIndependentAuthors.org. And we have a self-publishing advice website, which you find at SelfPublishingAdvice.org.

[00:57:57] Matty: Great. So this has been the fifth of our series of the seven processes of publishing on marketing. And the next episode is going to be all about promotion. So stay tuned for that. And thank you again, Orna.

[00:58:08] Orna: Thanks, Matty, it's been a pleasure.

Episode 104 - The Fourth Process of Publishing: Distribution with Orna Ross

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Orna Ross of the Alliance of Independent Authors joins me for the fourth of a series of seven episodes devoted to the Seven Processes of Publishing. This week the topic is distribution. As with the previous episodes in this series, we discuss ebook, print, and audio, including how to reach the most outlets in a way that is aligned with your business goals and that takes into account every indy author’s most limited resource: time. 

We discuss the importance of not assuming that your own reading or listening habits are necessarily the habits of the readers and listeners you want to reach. And we discuss how making your print book available on a non-Amazon distributor is necessary but not sufficient for getting your book on the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores.

Orna Ross is the founder and head of the Alliance of Independent Authors, a non-profit professional business membership organization for self-publishing authors. ALLi provides trusted advice, supportive guidance, and a range of resources, within a welcoming community of authors and advisors.

Episode Links

From personal update:

​Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing Podcast Episode 216 – Podcasting for Authors with Matty Dalrymple

For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.

From interview:

Episode 100 - Becoming the Relaxed Author with Mark Leslie Lefebvre

Episode 063 - Wide for the Win with Mark Leslie Lefebvre

Episode 020 - Working with Libraries & Bookstores with Mark Leslie Lefebvr

https://www.ornaross.com/

https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/

150 Self-Publishing Questions Answered: ALLi’s Writing, Publishing, & Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets (Publishing Guides for Indie Authors 5) (affiliate link)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to part four of our series on the Seven Processes of Publishing. And I am here again with Orna Ross. Say, Orna, how are you doing?

[00:00:08] Orna: I'm doing very well. How are you Matty?

[00:00:10] Matty: I'm doing great. Thank you.

[00:00:12] So, this fourth process that we're going to be talking about today is Distribution. And similarly to what we talked about in the last episode with production, we're going to be talking about ebooks, print books and audiobooks, and I'm going to start right out with ebooks.

[00:00:27] So, Orna, I'm just going to open it up to you for your recommendations, ALLi's recommendations for ebook distribution.

[00:00:35] Orna: Sure. So production and distribution are very closely aligned and particularly in digital publishing, a lot of the platforms that have set up to distribute our books have actually provided us with great tools for producing our books. And I did mention in our last show that the guiding rule of thumb is, be everywhere. Just get out there.

[00:01:02] And so with distribution and especially with digital and with ebooks and the audiobooks in particular, it is not that hard to be all over the place and it is worth your while to do that. Because a lot of the countries, territories, platforms and things that have just been starting up in the last while are in massive growth mode. And so if you're not there, if you're just kind of restricting yourself to what you know, you're missing out on stuff.

[00:01:35] So with ebooks in particular, this is our general recommendation, but we recognize that this isn't going to work for everybody, and everybody makes their own choices depending on their particular set of circumstances. But we would recommend that you use Amazon for the Amazon ecosystem as a general rule of thumb. So, when distributing your books on Amazon use the Amazon platforms, which are for your ebooks and print books, it's KDP and KDP Print. You load them both essentially to the same dashboard. For audiobooks, it's ACX, and that is a completely different platform and a completely different dashboard.

[00:02:19] And we recommend that you distribute non-exclusively. Non-exclusivity is a big deal at ALLi. It's one of our core recommendations because the basis of being an independent publisher means that you can respond to different conditions in the market. When things change, if you're a tied in with just one self-publishing platform, one distribution outlet, then you are no more independent than the author who has licensed all their rights to one trade publisher. There is no independence there. You're very dependent, in fact, and we have seen members who have suffered through having their books distributed on just one platform. So yeah, non-exclusively, Amazon for the ecosystem.

[00:03:14] And then when you get outside of Amazon, there are aggregators who will distribute your books for you. I know you use, Matty, very popular in the US is Draft2Digital. Fantastic organization and platform, and really easy to use. But there are lots of outlets that Draft2Digital doesn't reach. There is PublishDrive in Hungary. They have a really very broad reach into lots of different territories. And there is StreetLib in Italy, and they also have an extraordinary reach actually. We're talking literally hundreds of outlets. Some of these acts are very small. But the thing is you just need to upload your book there once. And then they look after the really widespread distribution of the books.

[00:04:06] And you can use these together. It isn't a matter of having to choose between them. So you can use, you can choose to use Draft2Digital, go to the various stores that they distributed to, use PublishDrive for the ones that they don't use StreetLib for the ones that they don't or have one aggregator and just use them for everything. Some people want the simplicity of just uploading their book once until they've used one, I gave her an even use us aggregator to distribute indirectly to Amazon.

[00:04:37] So the choice is yours, but our recommendation is if you want to maximize your revenue from your ebooks is to be out there as widely as possible. And as the outlier, you might call them, territories and platforms begin to rise, you're there. Your books are there.

[00:04:57] Now that just distributing a book isn't enough. Generally speaking, sometimes it is sometimes a book just takes off and I'll be reading those high something has happened, but you've don't know what it is. But generally speaking, you're going to need to do marketing. We'll be talking about that next time. But just distributing your book isn't enough. If you're not there, then you can't be accessed. If you're not in, you can't win as they say.

[00:05:19] So it's very little extra work, a bit like we were talking about having the different formats last time, for very little extra expense and very little extra time, you can really increase the possibility of your distribution. And so why not?

[00:05:37] Matty: You had talked in an earlier episode about the fact that when you're first starting out, sometimes it's better to get started simple and work your way up. And since I think a lot of people in the US and UK, and I'm sure other countries who are indy authors, their first sights are on Amazon, they may go to Amazon KDP, upload their ebook. And if they know that they're not going to have the mental bandwidth to go to other platforms for a period of time, they just want to get it up on Amazon, but they have long-term goals of being wide, are there pros and cons to turning on the exclusive button on KDP for a period of time, let's say for the 90-day period, or should you retain your wide ability right from the start, even if you're not capitalizing on it right away?

[00:06:27] Orna: There is a danger if you go KDP Select and then you pull your books, particularly if you're writing in series. And so if all the books are standalone, it doesn't apply so much, but it does a bit because from the reader's point of view, they're on a subscription model and they've just got to know you. They've just got to like you. They want more of your books and whoopsy-do, they're not available to them on subscription. They have to buy them, and they may not like that. So that's the danger if you kind of go in and pull out.

[00:06:59] It takes time to establish yourself on KDP, on the Amazon platform, or the wide platforms, no matter where you go, it's not as easy anymore if indeed it ever was. If there ever was this mythical golden age where you just put a book up and it sold in its gazillions, I'm not sure that ever really existed for any, for us all, but it certainly does not exist now, when books are just being put out by the new time, day in, day out. So it's going to take you time to build up whatever it is you're going to do.

[00:07:33] So I would say work out your strategy from day one, and then don't waste time building an audience in a place that isn't part of your ongoing strategy. Let each step build on the last step slowly but surely taking you where you want to go. Of course, if it doesn't make sense or something happens and then comes in, changes your mind, learn from your experiences, experiment, explore, all of that. Absolutely. I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but I am saying that I've seen authors who have just about built a good following on KU suddenly decide, oh, I really should be wide. And then they pull out and then they get extremely frustrated because they didn't really recce that they had to start all over again.

[00:08:23] And you do. It's a different platform. It's a different outlet. The regions are different. You can't really transfer your readership across. So it's worth putting some thought into your process at the beginning. And then I would say, just confine yourself to that in the interest of simplicity.

[00:08:42] Matty: Well, one other episode of the podcast, then we're going to point people to is Episode 63, which was Mark Lefebvre, talking about WIDE FOR THE WIN. And Mark is usually such like a calm and friendly person, but he got quite exercised about it. So, that's a good one to watch as a companion to distribution to understand some of the ins and outs from someone who clearly appreciates the value of going wide.

[00:09:05] Other recommendations for ebooks beyond Amazon?

[00:09:09] Orna: Yes, absolutely. So, all of the aggregators that we were talking about there, PublishDrive, Draft2Digital and StreetLib, they're publishing to distributors that are worldwide, in different countries, from Mexico to the Philippines. So there will be all sorts of distributors that you may not have heard of. And particularly for our US friends, we're very Amazon-minded, but if you go somewhere like Germany, Tolino sells far more ebooks than Amazon, as an example. That's just one off the top of my head. So the idea here is, as I said, just getting them out there as widely as you possibly can. So use Amazon for the Amazon ecosystem and then use at least one other aggregator, ideally the three, to reach everybody else. And that will see your books distributed widely.

[00:10:10] There are a couple of other people though, that we feel it's worth going directly to. And each time you upload direct, it's a bit of a drag, you know, do recognize that the platforms work slightly differently, and you have to familiarize yourself with a number of them. Apple is one. Apple Books is a really good outlet for ebooks for all sorts of reasons, not least because people who purchase Apple devices very often stay on the Apple ecosystem. If you go directly to Apple again, you will have advantages that you won't have if you go to them through aggregators.

[00:10:53] Some of the aggregators also have arrangements with Apple, but just generally speaking, that is true. And also, it's a very good platform from the point of view, it's not as price sensitive at all as Amazon. So you could charge more for your ebooks. Its reach is fantastic and they're in far more countries than Amazon is in. And yeah, it really is well worth going direct to Apple if you have the bandwidth.

[00:11:25] Kobo, also another fantastic platform, coming out of Canada, but they have lots of partnerships with various distributors around the world and they've partnered in a really clever way that allowed them to grow and expand and get a real global reach very fast. So and if you can go directly to Kobo again, they run promotions that if you are a direct with them, it really makes a difference in terms all move in your books on the platform.

[00:12:00] Barnes and Noble in the US is still, I mean, this has all sorts of problems. Nook, its ebook distributor, had terrible problems. They've now relaunched as not going all that well, but nonetheless, they have a massive mailing list, people who are very into books. And if you are somebody who has done well on that platform, it can be well-worth file uploading directly.

[00:12:26] If you do upload direct to some of these platforms that I'm talking about, do reach out to them. They would like to hear from you and know what you're doing. And there are humans, there are algorithms as well, of course, but they're less algorithm driven than Amazon. And so lots of the books, for example, on Apple are human curated. And so promoting them and selling them and getting them out there is quite a different sort of setup to trying to do well on Amazon. It's different.

[00:12:56] There are some others I could mention, but I think that's enough for now. The only other one I would definitely mention is your own website. We are big in favor and seeing authors doing really well now with selling direct. So five years ago, even, direct selling from your own website was something that most readers didn't purchase ebooks direct. They wanted to buy from Amazon or wherever they normally bought their books. They didn't want to set up a different account. In short, they weren't as used to buying online as they are now. And the pandemic and lockdown and all of that has accelerated this development very much.

[00:13:36] Now readers love buying directly from authors. They love to feel that you've done better, they love to feel that kind of direct connection, and when you sell a book to a reader online yourself, you get their email address and so they become part of your asset base, which you don't get that information from the other distributors,

[00:13:56] So not by any means saying that you should go direct and not use the other distributors. Again, it isn't either or, it's both. But we're seeing people do better and better with direct. It's growing and growing as a proportion of successful indy authors' income. So really would urge you to think about it.

[00:14:17] Matty: Since a lot of people I think won't have the technical wherewithal to really understand how to set up a mechanism to feed digital data to customers, for example, I use PayHip. So it's not on my website, I have links to it from my website. Is that the approach you're recommending or, is that okay? Or is there a benefit to actually having something on your website and if so, what mechanism do you use to do that?

[00:14:45] Orna: Yeah, so you can use PayHip or Selz. To distribute on your own website, you need two things. You need the transaction engine, if you like, where the reader is going to come and actually pay the money, and then you need somebody to deliver the file. So it's a combination of PayHip, you probably use BookFunnel or somebody to do the actual file delivery. You can download any digital file using PayHip as far as I know. PayHip is a partner member and highly recommend as a really fantastic, an ALLi partner member, and so is BookFunnel.

[00:15:20] So, I think the best way to think about it is just do some research on this and we have an article on selling your books directly on the self-publishing advice site, which is SelfPublishingAdvice.org. If you just, or to Google "direct selling Alliance of Independent Authors," you'll get it.

[00:15:37] But essentially, what you need is, as I said, you need a transaction facility where you can take a credit card number or a PayPal or whatever, and then you need the delivery mechanism. And so you could use somebody like PayHip, which is a third party, and you pay them a percentage of the transaction payment on each file. I use personally and we use on the ALLi site WooCommerce, which is built into WordPress. If you have a WordPress site, you have access to a WooCommerce site. WooCommerce and BookFunnel then does the delivery.

[00:16:08] So essentially, you just have to think about how am I going to take the money? How am I going to handle the file? And it's a setup, it's something that most people can do for one book in a couple of hours. It's just a matter of working out what way you want to do it. Then you can sell that book for years and add to your bookstore on your website as time goes on.

[00:16:32] If you trade published, if you're published by a third party, it makes sense that your website is just kind of like a brochure. It really just tells the reader what you do and what your books are roughly about and gives them a sense of your author platform and you know who you are and what you do. But if you are an indy author, it makes total sense that your website is an actual distribution delivery mechanism. Because they land on your site somehow, read a blog or listen to your podcast, saw you at an event, whatever it might be, they go to your website. They're there, they're keen. They want to buy. And you're bringing them off somewhere else to buy. Why not have that sale yourself? It really does make sense. So, yeah, I would urge people to, if you're just starting out, think of your own website as the core of your activity and all the other distribution outlets as kind of a circle around that core.

[00:17:29] Orna: My book CREATIVE SELF-PUBLISHING talks about these processes and how they link together and how you set up so that you can kind of integrate and follow your readers where you want them to go. Because that's kind of what you're thinking about. I think when we start off, as authors, we do the first bit and then we do the next bit, we do the next bit, and it's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. But if you're thinking, if you were a different sort of business, when you originally sit down with your business developer, they would be very sales-focused and they will be saying, what is your business, what is your website trying to do? How is it getting them over? How are you getting the email that you want, how are you getting... so, it can be very hard to unpick that and pull it all apart.

[00:18:16] The blog is a mechanism by which we try to integrate this. And I will talk about it a little bit more when we come to the marketing one and the whole idea of access marketing and the drawing them in through your own world, if you like, bringing them in to your funnel. But with a lot of people, I think it's trial and error and it all comes together in the end.

[00:18:41] You also can try different, I tried PayHip, and I tried Selz, and I actually ended up with WooCommerce. So I think there's a bit of experimentation here as well. The main thing is that you have your goal in mind. What is it you want them to do? Author sites fall into two. You either want to get the email as your number one, their email address, or you want to get the sale as your number one. And once you decide that, I think then you decide which bits you're putting together and what bits go out front.

[00:19:14] So, when we started off, we weren't clear where, we were all, you know, Dean Wesley Smith talks about writing in the dark. We were all publishing in the dark. We were doing our best. Now the tools tend to be better, so Aweber was designed as business minded tool. Now, there are tools that are just for authors, websites that are just for authors.

[00:19:37] But I do think that the key to it is what is your core goal? Because there can be three or four different things that you want to happen, but what's your number one? When the reader lands on your website or comes into your orbit, your social media or wherever that might be, what is it you want them to do? And setting up the signposting so that it's really clear and in a sense then letting go of all the other things that you kind of like them to do, but you have to forgo.

[00:20:05] Matty: Yep. Great advice.

[00:20:08] I did want to get back to something you had said about using some of the other platforms like PublishDrive and StreetLib. And even though those are based outside the US / UK sphere, I'm assuming you're recommending, even if you do not have translations, these are still worthwhile platforms to go to with English language books.

[00:20:27] Orna: Yes. They're not about translated books at all, they're all about books in English. They do have translation options as a different thing, but these are all just about distributing your English book. So PublishDrive and Streetlib can distribute your books to Amazon as well, as we said, though we recommend that you would go direct. Apple and all the other major distributors, as well as the minor ones. So they are for English books and English book distribution in countries around the world, because every single country has loads of people who read in English, either immigrants or people who know English. We are so lucky to be writing and publishing in the world language that is English, and so it takes advantage of that.

[00:21:11] Matty: Yeah. Anything else on the distribution of ebooks front?

[00:21:19] Orna: The only thing I would say is take it easy. Again, build step by step. So we spoke about not jumping into exclusivity, if we're going to jump back out of it, but you know, you don't have to publish on all these platforms at once, but you can leave that door open so that you can come back to them. And that's the way to proceed, I think, and get to know one platform and understand it. Then it's a bit easier next time out.

[00:21:46] It seems impossible to believe when you're on your first book, but by the time you're on your third book, production and distribution is actually the thing you will think about least. Once you've decided on your processes, then it's very straightforward. And it’s just literally repeat, whereas writing and marketing are constantly challenging and evolving. Production and distribution are actually the most straightforward part of self-publishing, even though when people talk about publishing a book, very often, what they really mean is production and distribution. And it is only one part of publishing, and in fact it is the most straightforward part.

[00:22:28] So, it literally is just learning by doing. So whatever you do, do it, because until you do it, you won't know. You'll hear people telling you, you should do this, and you shouldn't do that, and this is the other way to do it, and blah, blah, blah. This is something really where you can only learn by doing.

[00:22:48] Matty: And I think it's worth repeating something that I believe you said in the last episode, which is make notes about all this stuff, because with production and distribution tasks, depending on what your release schedule is, you might do it every month, but you might only do it every couple of years. And so, your make your way through it, and then you go back two years later and it's like you've never seen it before. So it's worth capturing the links and making the notes and can you use HTML in this platform's book description, but not in this book platform's book description? So, just making it so you don't have to start from scratch every time. So we've got to do these repetitive tasks.

[00:23:22] Orna: Absolutely, in your own words can make a big difference when it comes to facing in second time, third time. And the other thing I would say is, all of the platforms, their customer service is really excellent and very helpful. Don't be shy about using them. They really want to hear from you. They do not want you struggling and having a problem and trying to reinvent the wheel, when you know, a few words of advice from them can make a difference. So don't be afraid to ask your questions. First port of call is always the platforms themselves. If you're not having success then, do feel free to get in touch with us at ALLi and we'll see what we can do for you.

[00:24:03] Matty: Great. Should we move on to a distribution of print books next?

[00:24:08] Orna: Yes.

[00:24:10] Matty: So once again, what are your and ALLi's recommendations on that front?

[00:24:15] Orna: Yeah. So we spoke a little bit about this already when we talked about production in the last program. So yeah, when it comes to print, it's KDP Print for the Amazon ecosystem and it's IngramSpark for the rest of the world. So you very often hear people talking about 8,000 outlets worldwide. That is essentially where the Ingram catalog is picked up by distribution and wholesalers around the world. That enables a library, bookstore, or another book institution or business to access your book. And that's what you want.

[00:24:57] Distribution is all about just being there, just getting them out there. So we recommend that you use both that when you upload your book to Amazon KDP, you do not take expanded distribution. If you do take expanded distribution, that means that Amazon would send your book over to Ingram. And there are all sorts of issues that arise around that. But not least is the fact that if you have any interest in your book being picked up by bookstores, they are not likely to pick up KDP Amazon published books. They are much more likely to pick up a book if it's distributed by somebody else and that's to do with just marketplace realities in terms of how bookstores feel about Amazon's presence in the bookselling arena. So that's one reason, and there are other reasons too, so you don't take expanded or extended distribution in Amazon, and then you upload your book to IngramSpark.

[00:25:57] So you just, as we said at the production program, your interior file will do for both, you just need a slightly different cover. Their systems are quite different, and you just get your head around that and you just upload to the two, but you've only got two. It's not like on ebook world where you've got 200,000. So, it is relatively simple, and we are very lucky. I know that there are problems with the platforms and the platforms are not perfect, but they are amazing tools. There was no way an author could publish, print, and distribute it around the world, just ten years ago. Ten years ago, that was an actual impossibility. The only way you could then self-publish a printed book was to go to a printer, run off thousands of copies, and then you were left with the distribution headache. How am I going to actually get these to people? How am I going to let people know they exist?

[00:26:49] The fact that we have these tools, they're not perfect, they're getting better. Ingram is having trouble at the moment with the integrity of its catalog, I know, and some people are getting caught in that process and it can be very frustrating if you've planned your launch, and you find you can't do it because you get caught in some problem within the platform. But these platforms are working hard on our behalf. They're taking indy authors into places that we couldn't go before. And yeah, they really are fantastic tools. So, take your time and get used to them. I really recommend you use them.

[00:27:58] Matty: I wanted to use that as an entree to talk about discounting and returns. And we talked a little bit earlier about how by discounting we don't mean putting something on sale, but rather a discount that you as the publisher provide to the retailers when they're purchasing your book to sell it in a bookstore, for example. Can you talk a little bit about how that works and what considerations indy authors should take into account when they're considering the discounting options?

[00:28:24] Orna: Yes. So, the first thing to say, I think the most important thing to say, is we talk about using IngramSpark because it opens the potential for bookstores to access our books, and wholesalers and distributors to access our books. And Ingram is more satisfactory in some territories than in others. So in the US it's very straightforward. Outside of the US, depending on the country, it's less so. And even here in the UK, where it is the most developed outside of the US, Ingram would not be the first distributor of choice for most bookstores. So it's worth bearing in mind. What uploading your book to IngramSpark does is it gives you the opportunity to have your book chosen by a bookstore or a retailer.

[00:29:14] Now, bookselling of print books through bookstores is a crazy business and it's a miracle that anybody makes any money at all. First of all, it's done on sale or return basis. So, they take the books. If they sell them, you get paid. If they don't sell them, they send them back to you or destroy them. Hundreds of thousands, countless numbers of books are pulped each year because publishers don't want them back. As I said, it’s a crazy business.

[00:29:45] Say the book costs $10, then the wholesaler or distributor will take a percentage from that. By the time it gets to the bookstore, they want to discount 55% to sell your book, to put your book on a bookstore shelf. Very often indy authors, when they do the math, it just doesn't add up. They cannot make a profit, but they may decide to go ahead and do it anyway because it opens up a distribution outlet and they may develop that relationship, and then perhaps use a different form of print. Or lots and lots we've seen all sorts of different things happen, and there are different programs on the platform as well that can help you.

[00:30:30] You won't just get your book into bookstores, generally speaking, there's going to have to be some sort of marketing going at the receiver end. And what it does allow is that if there is an event that you're at, a literary festival or something like that, if you're running an event in a bookstore, and then sometimes just for some reason, a store does start to sell your books.

[00:30:59] So it's all about the ability to have it there, but it's not by any means guaranteeing that now my book is up on IngramSpark, now all the bookstores are going to start carrying my book. No. The main publishers have sales reps who are going in and persuading people at head office level in the chains and all the way down the chain to actually take their books this season. And bookselling is based very much on a front list and a back list kind of mentality, because they only have so much space on the shelf. This is why the launch is so important in traditional publishing. Your book only has a number of weeks to make it. If it doesn't start to really sell, then you're into the returns thing.

[00:31:44] So this is a very long-winded way of saying, unless you actually have a plan for bookstore distribution of your book, then you may want to forget about putting the higher level of discount that the bookstores demand, the 55% plus discount in Ingram. You may want to offer a lower discount and you may not want to take returns because all of that is set up with a bookstore in mind. But if you don't have an actual plan for bookstore sales, they are unlikely to suddenly take off by themselves, and then you're setting lower discounts for the books that do sell.
[00:32:25] Matty: At all. My books are non-returnable. I give the maximum discount I can and still make a profit, which in some cases is like 7 cents. But, as much discount as I can up to 55%, which I think is the standard retail discount. but turn off returns because I did get burned big time once at a bookstore event where they ordered way more books than they should. And then they all went back except a couple. And I think that event costs me like $150.

[00:32:54] And in my business plan, bookstores I'm kind of doing it as community outreach. I'm making it available as community outreach because it's not a significant part of my business, but of course I don't want to deter someone who is interested, but I'm not, it's not a market I'm going after.

[00:33:09] Orna: Very wise. And that's the way to do it. And the returns thing just doesn't work because when you get the books back, they're not even salable. Very often they're damaged. And it's actually a real environmental problem as well, undermining that whole business model. So, whether it will change or not in times to come, a lot of intelligent people have tried to improve this system, failed so far.

[00:33:34] But yeah, so that's really why, Matty, I would kind of urge listeners to do is to work out the plan. We all involve the idea of our books being at the front of a bookstore, but the truth is without the backing of a major publisher who has paid for that placement as part of their marketing on the authors' behalf, it's highly unlikely. And even those authors who have been trade published have got into bookstores that way, very often the book is there in the back, invisible to people, doesn't move, and just ends up being sent back. So for most indy authors, keep the focus on online selling from your own website, ebook selling, audiobook all much, much easier. Nothing is harder than print book through bookstore.

[00:34:28] Matty: One organization that I think is doing a good job of stepping into a needed spaces is Bookshop. So a bookshop.org being a group that people can order books through but print copies of books and a portion of the proceeds goes to indy bookstores. And if you're an affiliate, which I am, you can set up a shop, I've set up shop with my own books. And so if somebody buys one of my books through Bookshop, I'm getting a royalty, but I'm also getting a little bit of money as an affiliate. Is bookshop.org, an organization that ALLi recommends?

[00:35:01] Orna: Yes, we love them. They're great. And love the creative thinking behind the organization and the wish to shake up this world that does need a shaking up. So, yeah, they're a great organization.

[00:35:16] Matty: The other thing I've really liked about Bookshop is that I really wanted to get out of the business of packaging up and sending out books. Very occasionally people would purchase books. The one selling I actually do on my website is I do have it set up so that people can purchase signed copies, but it was a lot of trouble, and it didn't happen enough. Like I wasn't going to disappoint that many people. So what I ended up doing is pointing people to Bookshop, and then if they drop me a note, I'll send them a signed bookplate, because that's much easier to handle. And in the end, they have a book that's inscribed specifically to them. But yeah, just another, as you were saying, hold it up to your business plan, and I did not want to spend my time packaging up books and driving to the post authors. So a Bookshop was a nice alternative there.

[00:36:03] Orna: That's great. And then there are other people for whom packing up books and sending them to their beloved readers is their idea of heaven. They actually love it. And if that's you then by all means, and if you are determined to get your book into bookstores, we have seen indy authors do great things in bookstores. I'm not saying it's not possible, but I am saying too many indies think just putting their book up on IngramSpark is going to do it. It's not.

[00:36:30] Matty: Yeah. And for all these things, I always say, weigh the time you're going to spend with the benefit that you expect to get and then align your actions to match up to your goals.

[00:36:40] Orna: Absolutely.

[00:36:41] Matty: Would you consider pricing part of distribution, the determining the price for your books?

[00:36:47] Orna: Yeah, again, it's one of these crossover ones, isn't it? A crossover is between promotion and distribution. But yeah, the way I tend to think about it is that setting your base price is distribution and then setting your promotional pricing is promotion. So yes, I think deciding or experimenting to find out your ideal price point is part of becoming a good book distributor. And that is very often for people, a bit of trial and error.

[00:37:20] So this is the question that comes up in ALLi a lot. People hear from other people, I didn't buy your book because it was only 2 99, I just assumed it wasn't any good. And then people who think pricing is all about being cheaper go, that's crazy, nobody does that. But they actually do. And so people have very different relationships with money. And you need to get clear about your genre and where your typical readers fall around that. There are genres that are price sensitive and the big genres that are read by the whale readers tend to be more price sensitive. So the romance and fantasy and so on. There are other genres that are not price sensitive at all and there are genres where they really want quality books, something like say poetry, some really beautiful books that don't have very many words in them, but a huge amount of production has gone in and the pricing reflects that accordingly. So yeah. The main thing for you to know, first of all, is your readers typically, are they price sensitive?

[00:38:27] The other thing to be aware of. And I think I did mention this already, but just to say it again, because it's important, Amazon is the most price sensitive of the platforms. It's whole raison d'etre is you won't buy it cheaper anywhere else. So they will price match if your book is cheaper somewhere else. So just holding that awareness that your book doesn't have to be the same price on every platform, and it doesn't have to be the same price on your own website. You can't undercut Amazon on your own websites. They will just price match or lower. So you don't want to try to do that, but the opposite very often, if the reader who's on your website, it's not going to be running around comparing prices and seeing if the book feels like a reasonable buy to them, that would be quite happy to buy it directly from you for a bit more.

[00:39:14] So the main thing to do is play with your pricing as well. Don't feel it's set. And it's well worth seeing what your sweet spot is, and that can take a bit of trial and error. You want the place where the price doesn't put off volume, so that you're getting that sweet spot between the number of copies sold and the amount that you're charging for the book that delivers the most revenue for you. And as I said, we have had many times on I myself can attest to having put my prices up and having sold more copies when they were more expensive than when they were cheaper. So it definitely does happen.

[00:39:54] Matty: I'll point people to another Mark Lefebvre episode of The Indy Author Podcast, which was way back in 20 WORKING WITH LIBRARIES AND BOOKSTORES. So Mark had some great information to share about that. And then, I just spoke with J K Ellem about TAKING THE LONG VIEW FOR PUBLISHING SUCCESS, and he was encouraging me to put up the price of my novels. I don't know why this is such a mental block for me, but they're now 4 99 and I'm on the fence about going over $5.

[00:40:21] But I think my biggest pricing challenge is international pricing. So there are all these platforms that are now enabling reach into more and more countries. And oftentimes on platforms like Google Play is the craziest, because you can set your book price in all sorts of countries, and it could be a full-time job just to research what are reasonable prices. And normally they'll suggest the price. So you put in 4 99 for the US and then it'll suggest the price that you could charge in other countries in other currencies. But I have never been able to tell if they're strictly doing a dollar conversion into that currency, or if they're somehow factoring in that country's price tolerance. Do you have any insight into that?

[00:41:08] Orna: Yeah, unfortunately it's just a straight currency thing. So that leaves your book too expensive, generally speaking, in India or other countries such as you say that the price thing tolerance isn't high enough. Again, I would say not to get too hung up on this, and certainly not at the beginning. If you have a relationship in a particular country, if you find the difference are selling a lot in a particular country, then it's worth going in there and working at your pricing there just as you would in your home territory. But if they're selling little or nothing at all in those countries, then don't worry too much about it. It's unlikely that just changing the price is going to be the thing that will actually start or stop them selling. You would want to be going in and fixing up the price and fixing up some marketing as well, to have a plan in other words to make it worth your while to go to the bother of working out of what you feel that should be there.

[00:42:04] Matty: Yeah. Other thoughts about distribution of print books?

[00:42:10] Orna: I think that's it. It is the trickiest one to distribute yourself. It's much easier for you to distribute on your website. I'm talking about not a direct distribution, which is your few to distribute books and audio than it is print. Print is harder and you may not want to do that. And you can develop print partnerships, I think is something that we're seeing indy authors do more. So small indy publishers that are already working in print and have a print distribution outlet, some have worked out a good print strategy. It can be a good thing to team up with them and let them take that weight because print is different and it's harder. So unless you really want to go into print in a big way, I would say keep it simple, just KDP and IngramSpark it and it's available and then you can go from there.

[00:43:07] Matty: Okay, great. So now we're going to turn to distribution of audiobooks, and we covered this a little bit in the last episode about what platforms are available. Do you just want to do a quick recap of the distribution angle on that information?

[00:43:22] Orna: Yeah, so audio again, it's kind of Amazon and the rest. So in terms of distributing your books on Amazon and getting them available on Amazon, which also means Audible, and Audible is the biggest seller of audiobooks in the US by some margin estimates in some verticals, they say up to 90%, so that's a lot. So yeah, you go through ACX in terms of distributor, your book through, Amazon. I, I mentioned in the last program that there are issues around that, but nonetheless, we do recommend indy authors not to turn their back on, on that enormous platform. but not to go exclusive with ACX. So in other words, to keep your options open.

[00:44:11] There are lots of new options emerging in audio. Audiobooks are in growth almost everywhere in the world and there are lots of different platforms that are emerging to take advantage of that. So in addition to ACX, you may want to Findaway or Authors Republic or Soundwise or one of the other end distributors of audiobooks.

[00:44:38] It's not so much with eBooks the different aggregators, you can match them up, there are ones that some aggregators go to and others don't. There is overlap, but there are lots of different ones. With an audiobook distribution, ACX and one other, will suffice, will get you into the vast majority of the audiobook distribution outlets around the world.

[00:45:05] And don't neglect audiobook. It is as easy to download an audiobook as it is to download an ebook. And that's kind of hard for some people who are not used to audio to wrap their heads around, but basically, it's just a digital file. So once the device can take it and your mechanism, again, I do a shout out for BookFunnel here. They do a great job in terms of distributing audio directly for authors. And so don't shy away from audio because you're not an audio listener yourself, for example, or because you think it is hugely complex. From a distribution point of view, it is as easy to distribute an audiobook as it is an ebook.

[00:45:46] So do you remember, I was saying this a transaction method and then there's the download method. So BookFunnel provides the download mechanism, but you need to set up your payment facility and then you just give the BookFunnel link. And you don't have to do that. You can just provide your EPUB yourself and that should be downloaded, but for a not very significant annual sum, they look after all the "my ebook hasn't downloaded" emails that you don't want to be getting. And their system is just so well set up. They can also collect email addresses for you. So you can see exactly who did download or didn't, sometimes we make sales, and the person doesn't read the book, it happens, all of these kinds of things.

[00:46:34] So there's loads of things that BookFunnel can do for you that you can't do for yourself. It's a service that's well worth paying for, but it isn't essential. So all it is handling that download. There are many ways for you to take the transaction payment, which would be Selz or PayHip's the one that you use. There are lots of them and that will also deliver the download as part of the sale. I use WooCommerce and ALLi uses WooCommerce together with BookFunnel to ensure just ease of download.

[00:47:09] Matty: Any of those things where somebody might call you up and say, my download didn't complete or something like that. Like we were talking earlier about the fact that one of the things I wanted to get rid of was packaging up books. And you pointed out quite rightly that there's some people who would find that very gratifying. But I don't know that anybody really finds it gratifying to answer questions about why a file didn't download. And so any of those things, I think that the options for asking some other expert person and organization to help you do that, they're so affordable that from a business point of view, it would be hard to justify, no, I'm going to slog through that myself because I want to save the cost of having somebody else take care of it for me. Just pay the money and then spend that time writing more stuff.

[00:47:51] Orna: I totally agree with that. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:47:55] Matty: We had talked a little bit before, also about the difficulty of coordinating launches across media. I guess now we're sort of spilling into the next episodes, which are going to be about marketing and promotion, but we had said that it is very difficult, but it's very hard to anticipate when an audiobook is going to be available. So with eBooks, you can go on there and say, my launch date is December 1st or whatever it is. And you have control of that, but I don't know of any platform for audio that you don't just put it up there and then sit back and then pretty soon they say, your audiobooks up.

[00:48:28] And I think you could almost make a benefit of that by just making it like a separate launch. Because I think if you launch it all at once, there are certainly benefits to be had there. But, if you have to spread it out, then you can make a virtue of it by saying the audiobook isn't going to get lost in the availability of the ebook and the print book. I can kind of rev up the excitement for that again.

[00:48:49] Orna: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, traditionally again, and we can learn a lot from traditional publishing and how they do things. It was always the hardback launch and then the soft back launch, and they were seen as two different publicity opportunities. And it's the same for us. You can have your ebook launch, then do your print, then do your audio. There's nothing to stop you doing that. And all the while you're collecting reviews, hopefully, and blurb quotes and things that can be used in the next launch. And then very often if you've had two prior launches and then have your audio launch, at that point, you can begin to reach out to media and stuff because you've got some demonstrable feedback and reviews and things. So yeah, you could definitely make a virtue of a staggered launch.

[00:49:37] As you say, there's also something to be said for they all go up at the same time. They're all in favor of it. At the same time, you're not getting the emails saying why does he have your book out? All of that kind of thing. But the staggered launch if you're just looking at it from a marketing perspective, it makes sense to actually stagger your launches.

[00:49:56] Matty: Do you have any thoughts about audio to libraries?

[00:50:01] Orna: Yes. It's becoming much more popular, digital audio. So libraries always liked audio. They've had CD ROM and CD and tapes and things going way back when and digital audio is now really popular. So in terms of reaching that library market, Overdrive has traditionally been the distributor for ebook, and they are also active in audio. There are lots of people coming into that market to provide that bridge. Kobo is involved as well.

[00:50:37] So yeah, again, it's just a matter of making sure that you have widely distributed. If you've used the various services that we're talking about, then you will find yourself in the right place. If you haven't, then you're just not there so it won't happen for you. Being there doesn't guarantee that it will happen, but it makes it possible.

[00:50:59] Matty: Yeah. We did talk about audio quite a bit in the previous episode, but are there any other aspects of audio distribution that you want to highlight?

[00:51:10] Orna: No, except I probably want to just say again, what I said at the beginning is not to neglect audio as a format that is easily distributed on your own website. And I suppose the other thing is not to neglect audio overall because I do hear indy authors saying, oh, I don't listen to audiobooks, who listens to audiobooks. To recognize this really is a growth market. The other thing that I hear a lot when it comes to audiobook distribution is authors are selling their audio rights to audiobook "publishers" who are really distributors, who are taking them I'm out there and paying very little for the privilege.

[00:51:52] So when you speak to an author about that very often than say, oh, for me, audiobooks are just the jam. So I concentrated on my eBooks and anything that happens with audiobooks is. But I would say that every format, audiobooks really have the potential to do extremely well for indy authors. And I think we're not taking advantage of that enough. So I would say, think again if one of the audiobook distributors does approach you and offers you a bit of a lump sum to give over all your rights, some of them for a very long term for very low percentages. These are not good deals in the main and, it's worth, okay, you get the book, you get the audiobook made, you get maybe a good narrator, a narrator that you're happy with and so on, but maybe not. My point is don't undervalue your audio rights. They are very valuable.

[00:52:59] Matty: I will put in a plug for the ALLi Watchdog desk. Is that open only to members to ping that group.

[00:53:08] Orna: And we have an outreach aspect to the Watchdog desk where we do a ratings list. So you can look up a publisher or a distributor or any service and see what the ALLi rating is for that service, so that's available to everybody. In terms of actually looking at your contract and saying, this contract's a bad one, your advance is too small, percentages or there's no reversion clause, that kind of stuff, and that's for members only.

[00:53:38] Matty: Great. Well, thank you once again for talking through distribution. What number were we up to there? The fourth in our series of the seven processes of publishing. So three more to go stay tuned for that. And please let everyone know where they can find out all about you and the Alliance of Independent Authors online.

[00:53:55] Orna: So the Alliance of Independent Authors, which is a nonprofit association for self-publishing writers, is at www.AllianceIndependentAuthors.org, and I'm Orna Ross and I'm at OrnaRoss.com.

[00:54:11] Matty: Thank you, Orna.

[00:54:13] Orna: Thanks Matty. Bye now.

Episode 103 - The Third Process of Publishing: Production with Orna Ross

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Orna Ross of the Alliance of Independent Authors joins me for the third of a series of seven episodes devoted to the Seven Processes of Publishing: Production. We talk about the production process for ebooks, print books, and audiobooks, including how the requirements for text-centric books is becoming increasingly easy for indy authors to meet; the expanding options for print, including easy-to-produce hardcover editions; and the opportunities that audio opens to indy authors. And we discuss what I have always thought of as the thorny question of ISBNs—those identifiers attached to each iteration of each of your works—and I discover that the answer is actually quite straightforward.

Orna Ross is the founder and head of the Alliance of Independent Authors, a non-profit professional business membership organization for self-publishing authors. ALLi provides trusted advice, supportive guidance, and a range of resources, within a welcoming community of authors and advisors.

Episode Links

Introduction:

Episode 088 - How to Receive and Give Critique with Tiffany Yates Martin

Episode 065 - X-raying Your Plot with Tiffany Yates Martin

Episode 053 - What Authors can Learn from TV and Movies with Tiffany Yates Martin

Episode 074 - Perspectives on Personal Branding

​Episode 100 - Becoming the Relaxed Author with Mark Leslie Lefebvre

​For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.

Interview:

https://www.ornaross.com/

https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/

150 Self-Publishing Questions Answered: ALLi’s Writing, Publishing, & Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets (Publishing Guides for Indie Authors 5) (affiliate link)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome back to part three of our series on the seven processes of publishing. And I'm here again with Orna Ross. Hey, Orna. How are you doing?

Orna: I'm doing very well, Matty, how are you?

Matty: I'm doing great, thank you.

[00:00:12] So today we're going to be talking about production and we're going to be talking about kind of the big three of production, so production of e-books, production of print books, and production of audio books. And then we'll address the thorny question of ISBNs.

[00:00:27] So I wanted to start out with e-books because I think that's probably the first foray that a lot of indy authors make into publishing and into the production process. So what do you and ALLi have to say about recommended partners? How you go about the ebook process? What advice do you have?

[00:00:46] Orna: Yeah, so you're absolutely right. Most authors start there. And it's actually our advice that they should because making an e-book is relatively simple when compared to the other two big formats, which are print and audio. So, yeah, in terms of production, you and I were talking about this when we were discussing how the processes break down across the seven different processes of publishing that we're looking at here and how the tools that we've got now as indy authors very often bringing a number of these processes together.

[00:01:21] So in terms of creating an e-book, it has never been easier, I think it's fair to say. And it's also standardized a lot in recent years. So you can do it in a very detailed sort of way, or you can do the simplest way. And we recommend when you're starting out to keep it simple. And what you're mainly looking to create when it comes to an e-book is the epub format. And I think we may have mentioned this last time. epub 3 is now the e-book standard and can be used on practically every platform. There are advantages to using a particular ebook for different platforms and keeping a track of that marketing wise and everything. This is not something you need to worry about at the beginning.

[00:02:08] And then in terms of the actual creation of it, there are just such great tools now that make this very easy. So lots of people use Vellum if they work on a Mac. That has made things almost laughably easy. It's as easy to make an epub and a print book, lots of different formats of books, with them as it is to just create a Word document.

[00:02:33] But speaking all of the wonderful classic Word document, which most of us need to use anyway because of the editing process, most editors are going to ask you to work in Word because that's the format that's really most widely, I think almost universally accepted in the editing space because it is so easy to track changes there. So you will end up with a Word document usually after the editing process. Now when you went to upload your book to Amazon KDP or a variety of other platforms, they will actually transform your Word document into an epub for you. So the production of e-books has just become easier and easier.

[00:03:20] And different indy authors swear by different tools. So, I mean, I use Vellum, so I tend to talk about it, but I hasten to say there are lots and lots of others. Reedsy does a great editor, which will create a fine e-book for you. There's Jutoh. There's Calibre. Lots of people have their own particular favorites. And lots of these softwares are partner members of ALLi. They're really widely accepted and they're constantly improving. Scrivener is another tool that allows you to create perfect e-books, you know, very highly stylized.

[00:03:59] So some of the tools will keep you very tight. So Vellum, for example, tries to save indy authors from ourselves by giving very few options in terms of headings and layout and so on. Others are much more sensitive, and you can make a lot more changes and things.

[00:04:17] So it very much depends on what you want to do. I would say, bear in mind that as verbal people, we may not be visual. So keeping things, I think with an e-book, particularly if it is a straightforward text e-book and like most novels and straightforward how-to nonfiction, simplicity is the best way to go. You want formatting to be invisible. You want the readers not to see it.

[00:04:45] Matty: Yeah. I am also a happy user of Vellum and I do like the fact that they don't let you go too far astray. And I'm sure there are ways to do this in many of the different packages that encourage more. Manipulation of it, but I love going in there, I've picked a style and Vellum for my fiction work and a style and Vellum for my non-fiction work. And I know that as long as I keep picking that style, that all the books across the series will look consistent. So that's a nice plus of that.

[00:05:11] And you had mentioned the fact that epub is sort of the industry standard, but you can have a Kindle epub, you could have a Nook epub, you can have different flavors of epub. Can you talk about that a little bit?

[00:05:24] Orna: Yes, so, Vellum again will produce a particular epub for the platform that you are working with. And this is not so much that the platform requires a different production process or that you end up with a particularly different file, but it's very useful when it comes to the distribution, which is the next stage of the process that we'll be talking about, which you're able to trace back which book sold and you're able to keep tabs on your books because you'll know the Apple one is connected to the Apple store. The Kobo one is connected to the Kobo store. And so at the end, when you're adding links and things to take people, you can actually get a clear idea of where the book is selling by tracking the format.

[00:06:14] And there are little differences in the platforms and just having little tweaks that make a difference. But quite honestly, as a beginner, I would not get too hung up on this. If you use Vellum, it makes it really easy. It spits it up for you. If you don't, forget about it. It's not important to know at this point, you know where at the beginning, I always think, you've got to go through the production process at least once, all the different stages of it. That's the most important thing. And if we get too hung up on some of the details, we can actually stop ourselves in our tracks and spend too long worrying about things that don't really make that much difference until you've got a few books up and running anyway.

[00:06:59] Matty: Yeah, I think that is great advice. Better to spend the time writing than to spend the time figuring out how to make a new header and some formatting software.

[00:07:08] We had talked about the fact that epub has become the standard and mobi used to be the standard for Kindle based books. The one place where at least fairly recently I found mobi was still helpful to have is when people are sideloading books from their computer. So let's say I have my books up on PayHip. So if a Kindle reader downloads a file from PayHip, at least until fairly recently, it was better for them to have a mobi because it was easier for them to get onto their Kindle from their email or wherever they're downloading it from. Is that still true or is that starting to be a thing of the past?

[00:07:50] Orna: It's still true for those who have Kindles of a certain age. So it's still convenient from that point of view. But, you know, this is definitely going to disappear over time.

[00:08:03] Matty: So any other cautions you have about the production of e-books, any helpful tips or tricks on the ebook front? Why don't we start talking about ISBNs now, because I know that's always a question. So let's start out. ISBNs for e-books. What do you think?

[00:08:19] Orna: Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So ISBNs are how the book industry keeps track of which format of the book it's got. So if you ever want your book to be distributed by a library, if you ever want your book to be picked up by a bookstore, your e-book I mean, then it needs to have an ISBN. So, yes. And it also makes you the publisher of record for that book. And so we 100%, no ambiguity, say yes for the small cost involved. It is well worth having your own ISBN for your e-books. One for an ebook. One for your print in its different formats. One for your audio book.

[00:09:11] So the whole point, if you think about what the ISBN is for, it is the book identification number. Say a library wants to distribute your book, your e-book, to its patrons and they want to acquire your e-book in order to do that. Well, if they go looking for your e-book and you only find an ISBN for your print book, then they simply can't get out your e-book. Because they're not going to go to the trouble of sending you an email and saying, hi, we're the library, we want your e-book. It doesn't work like that. So, yeah, it's important, we feel.

[00:09:47] Matty: So for my print books, I do have ISBNs that I've purchased through Bowker. And I think that one of the interesting things I learned early in the process is that one ISBN from Bowker, I don't know what it is, 125 bucks or something like that. It sounds ridiculous. But then you can buy like a hundred for not very much more. If you buy them in quantity, even if you are just planning on publishing a couple of books, it pays you to get a batch. Can you provide some maybe more updated information on that?

[00:10:18] Orna: Yes, absolutely. You're absolutely right. You know, ISBNs and the cost of them is something that troubles American and UK citizens but doesn't trouble French citizens at all, because ISBNs are provided free by their library service. So there are lots of countries in the world where you don't have to pay for ISBNs. It's just some people. Nielsen is the company in the UK and Australia and Commonwealth countries generally and Bowker in the US.

[00:10:50] So yes, buy in bulk because you pretty quickly to start to go through them. You're going to need one for your e-book, as we said, one if you do paperback, hardback, large print, and one for your audio book. And then once you start to produce a few books. And then you'll probably sometime do an upgrade or and update and upgrade to such a degree that you need to do a new edition, in which case you will need a new ISBN. So think of this just as one of the costs of doing business.

[00:11:20] And definitely buy in bulk everywhere. It pays to buy in bulk, and I think they're more expensive in the US than anywhere else in the world. They are pricey enough there. But if you think about the overall costs in relation to other things, it's not that expensive when you consider the that is what makes you the publisher of record in the eyes of the world compared to not having it.

[00:11:47] It also allows, for ALLi, this is important. It may not be that important for an individual indy author, but for some people it would be, it allows us to be counted, you know, all the statistics that are done around publishing use ISBN for the research. It's very hard to get up what's going on with the ISBNs. So the fact that we are purchasing our own puts us in there and people know what's going on, are able to evaluate and give us information about what's happening in the indy author world.

[00:12:22] Matty: I think I know what the answer to this is going to be, but I'm going to ask, because I've never heard this actually addressed, that when people start hearing about bulk purchase of ISBNs, and you can buy them in big bulk because publishers of various sides are buying them in bulk themselves. I can imagine it would be tempting to say, you know what, let's have all the writers in my writer's group go in and buy a bunch of ISBNS and then we'll all share the pool. But I'm assuming you can't do that because the purchase is affiliated with an imprint. Is that true?

[00:12:54] Orna: Yeah, the purchases affiliated with the publisher. So if you all go together, and you're in Writers' Group Illinois or whatever, then Writers' Group Illinois becomes the publisher. So when you actually make your application, you have to put down the imprint name, the publisher name, all of these details. And so if you buy one bulk group of ISBNs and there will be one publisher name on that and everybody else who's using that will fall under that agreement.

[00:13:25] Matty: I had one more question about ISBNs for e-books. So again, I have Bowker ISBN for all my print books and that's always the advice I hear from people, i.e., they don't recommend that you allow Amazon to assign your ISBN. But for my e-books, I distribute to most platforms on Draft2Digital, and they will provide an ISBN that then moves on to the library platforms because Draft2Digital is how I'm distributing to library platforms like Overdrive, for example. What is the danger of using an ISBN from an aggregator like Draft2Digital?

[00:14:04] Orna: Well, in future times, if somebody wants to trace back that book and find out who the publisher is, supposing they wanted to license the rights and they didn't know, for example, how to get at you, and I know they probably could find you relatively easily on the internet because of your website and so on, but just supposing for whatever reason, you no longer exist. And it's your heirs, for example. So they want to get in touch. It's Draft2Digital, they'll end up with, because Draft2Digital owns that ISBN. So Draft2Digital is the publisher of record for that e-book. So, yeah, we would really recommend that you use one of your own purchased ISBNs on the e-books as well as the print.

[00:14:51] And yeah, you will hear varying opinions about that, but I think a lot of this arises from almost a sense like an e-book isn't quite a real book or something. You know, why would you give different advice for print and e-books? If you think about just from a publication perspective, as opposed to from a saving money perspective. From a business perspective, why is an e-book, which would probably actually generate you more money at the end of the day, something that you wouldn't actually want to have your own ISBN for. I don't quite follow the logic, I guess,

[00:15:29] Matty: Is the considerations for not using an ISBN that would be assigned by Amazon KDP, for example, is that different? Is Amazon taking on more ownership by providing the ISBN than Draft2Digital is taking on by providing their ISBN?

[00:15:44] Orna: No, they don't take on more, but there is a reason that all of the services are "kindly" providing us with "free" ISBNs. There is an advantage to owning the ISBN and that's why they are claiming that advantage for their business rather than you are claiming it for your business.

[00:16:06] Matty: So that we don't make the production segment of this all about ISBNs, I don't want to have to title this, "Everything You Wanted to Know about ISBNs but Were Afraid to Ask," let's move on to print books. So same question that we started out with for the e-books. Is there an approach, a platform, vendors that you and ALLi recommend for print books?

[00:16:25] Orna: Yeah. When it comes to print, using just two platforms is easy, right? And it’s the same PDF interior that you will use for both. It's KDP Print for the Amazon ecosystem and IngramSpark for kind of rest of world. And you use the same interior, generally speaking. They both know are doing a hard backs in most countries. They're both doing obviously your straightforward paperback and large print is an option with both now as well. But it's a distribution issue as to why you need both, and it's advised that you do.

[00:17:06] So essentially to create a print book, you are literally physically creating a file that produces the interior, the pages, and a file that produces the cover. And KDP Print and IngramSpark require slightly different cover production, so you need a different cover for each of them, and then you just upload them to the platforms. And when you upload to Amazon, you don’t go for an expanded distribution in Amazon. And then it would distribute around the world through IngramSpark, and it will distribute on Amazon online retail store through KDP Print.

[00:17:53] Matty: Currently I have regular print and large print for my books and the investment to make the large print was fairly small because I just went into Vellum and I picked one of the large print formats and I hit generate, and then there was the interior. And I'm not even sure I paid my designer that much more to provide me with a large print cover along with all the other covers, the regular print, the e-book, the audio book and all that. When you're doing hardcover, is there more work on the author side to set that up?

[00:18:28] Orna: It's exactly the same. It's just, again, the same interior file and you would just need a slightly different cover for the hard back, generally speaking. And it's just the same thing. When you're actually setting up a paperback to simultaneously set up large print and the hard back it is not difficult. And is recommended because there are lots of people who only read large print for eyesight reasons, libraries like large print, and as you say, it's very little extra costs and very little extra effort.

[00:19:06] And so our advice is always as a general rule of thumb to be in as many formats as possible and as many territories as possible. It just makes sense just to be where the readers are. So sometimes authors will say to us, but I never read our hard print or I'm not going to buy a hardback because blah, blah, blah. Fine. But, you know, the readers are there and it's about, if they want to buy a hard back present of your book that they loved for their mum at Christmas or whatever, because they liked it so much, and you don't have one, well, why not? For very little extra effort, as we said, you can have that.

[00:19:44] Continuing on the print production thing. I think the other big question that comes up for people is whether to use print on demand or consignment print, you know, do their own offset print run. And this is a sort of an ongoing debate in the indy author community. And I think for most indy authors, print on demand is the way to go because it means you don't have to invest in expensive inventory upfront. For some people, though, if you've got a distribution outlet worked out and you are distributing in bulk or to lots of outlets and through bookstores or whatever it might be, it can make sense to actually run consignment print.

[00:20:32] And because your cost per book is much lower, it makes it easier in terms of getting a profit. Sometimes with print on demand, and particularly if your book is complex or has a lot of illustrations or it's very long, the economics of print on demand can just mean that it barely works. And it's certainly impossible for indy authors to compete on price when it comes to the average novel that or the average how-to nonfiction or a straightforward nonfiction memoir, whatever. Trade publishers with their economies of scale and their consignment runs are going to be cheaper than us every time. And it isn't right for us to expect the print on demand can deliver a similar sort of price.

[00:21:20] So in terms of pricing very often, you're best to just add on the profits you want to make per book on top of your costs when it comes to print. That's a straightforward way of doing it as any other. And your readers are likely to buy online and may not be overly price sensitive. So don't worry too much about the price of your print book, because people are willing to pay more money for print. e-book tends to be very price sensitive, particularly e-books on Amazon.

[00:21:52] Matty: When you're uploading your print books, the platforms are quite clear about what the production cost is for the print book based on basically, I guess, how long it is and I'm sure there are other considerations. So you can very clearly see, oh, it's costing me this much. There's also a small fee for e-books, I guess, based on the length of the book and the file size. I assume like 10 cents per book, just to be safe, I believe, with my books that are about 80,000 words and don't include any fancy graphics or anything like that. Are there other costs associated with that, especially on the print side, that authors should keep in mind, other than that number that shows up as the production costs that the retailer or the producer is charging?

[00:22:40] Orna: Just to say on that e-book pricing, that's a delivery charge and it's very much related to the size of the file. And sometimes the size of our file can be very big because of illustrations and stuff like that. In other words, the pictures and stuff in the file are bigger than they need to be, thereby making the book far more expensive to deliver than it needs to be. And this is something to watch out for in the production of your e-book. And it's something that's worth discussing with your designer to make sure that the pictures are optimized for size.

[00:23:19] So the pricing of print and the selling of print is an absolute minefield because it's done based on this crazy system, if it's done through bookstores, of discounts. And so the wholesaler gets a discount. Distributor gets a discount. The retailer gets a discount. And the author gets whatever's left over in the end. So it's really, really tricky and difficult to work out how much is going to be left for you, because they're talking about that use of the word "discount" means the trade discounts.

[00:23:57] So say it will cost $10. The distributor takes the discount of up to 55%, sometimes, of that and before anything happens at all. So they're not talking, when they talk about trade discounts, so this is how they get paid, they're not talking about the book is actually discounted at retail, which it often is as well. Very often, the author is getting a very small percentage of a book that is sold through bookstores because so many of the people are getting their percentage from that book.

[00:24:39] So I think for most indy author to really focus on the selling of your books online, selling your e-books and print books online, and audio books, makes life a lot easier, a lot more straightforward, particularly at the beginning. When you're getting into distributing through bookstores, selling through bookstores, producing books for bookstores, because you will produce them differently if you have decent orders for bookstores, and when you're getting into that, that definitely is more advanced stuff.

[00:25:10] At the beginning, your production question is just literally making the epubs, making the PDFs, making the covers. It literally is a production question. And then putting them out there on the platforms, then you start thinking about how you're going to distribute them.

[00:25:28] Matty: Right. What are you finding in terms of the quality? If you look at the quality of a print on demand hard cover as a reader, what's your reaction quality-wise?

[00:25:40] Orna: It's just getting better and better. Like print on demand, what used to be awful, I remember when it was a palpable quality difference between the two. We also often hear people say, IngramSpark books are better quality or Amazon books are better quality, or I have problems with Amazon. I never have problems with Ingram or vice versa. Just from our vantage point of kind of seeing the overview, we can quite safely say that there is very little to choose between them. That you can run into, and I think this is important from a production point of view to bear in mind, you can run into production problems at any time with print.

[00:26:18] Funny things can happen with machinery. These machines are incredible. They are pumping out, it's extraordinary that they can do what they do, they're pumping out books such a rate of knots, each one individual and different, so things can and do go wrong. It's amazing that they don't go wrong more often, to be honest. Customer service on both Ingram on the Amazon side are really good about it. If something does go wrong with your batch of books, if a reader ever says to you, you know, that the book they got, they weren't happy with or anything, they will replace those or you. They don't want that happening and you definitely don't want it happening.

[00:26:54] So it's a good idea to spot check your print. Definitely proof your print yourself at the beginning. Take your time. By the time you get round to proofing print, very often you're tired. You've been through a lot, especially the first time. You're also a bit overwhelmed and a bit confused and you may not even know what you're looking for. But it's really important that you proof, that you sit down and read through the thing and you're sick of it by now, but you need to read it through again from start to finish like a reader and just make sure that everything is where it ought to be.

[00:27:31] Look at the contents page. Sometimes that gets left off for some reason. Your ancillary, your back matter or your front matter. Make sure your ISBN matches, that it is the one that's supposed to be there. And all of those kinds of spot checks are really important. For e-books, of course, as I said, sometimes by the time it gets right to the print book, you just flick it and think, oh yeah, that looks lovely. I'm delighted with that. It's great. So do check.

[00:27:58] Matty: Yeah. I try to make it a practice whenever I upload any new files on print, on either KDP or IngramSpark, I'll page through the whole thing. And I'm paging through it pretty fast. But I look at it all just in case.

[00:28:13] The funniest production experience I've had, this was more of a as a consumer than as an author. But I thought I kind of had a sense of how KDP print on demand must work. And at one point I needed to order a copy of my own book and I didn't feel like waiting for an author copy so I just placed an order as a customer. And pretty soon my Amazon Delivery Day box showed up that had my book, my coffee mug, a thing of toothpaste and something else.

[00:28:40] I'm like, how did that happen? How did they get a print on demand book into a box with my other stuff? And someday I do want to find somebody who's affiliated with Amazon who can explain that to me because in my corporate world, I supported the distribution center of an online retailer and so I'm especially interested in that kind of stuff, but I thought I  have to rethink my whole idea about how they're doing it.

[00:29:39] Anything else you want to share about print books before you move on to audio books?

[00:29:43] Orna: Just to say that what you did there, purchasing the book as a customer, I think is worth doing. It's worth getting the author copy and then also just buying a copy and just to make sure. I would just say, just be really careful, yeah, just check and recheck and check again is the advice I'd like to give.

[00:30:00] Matty: It is nice to always interact with your products as a customer when at all possible. So you can sometimes see things. For example, I had put my book up on Amazon in the UK. And I was going to send my sister, who lives in the UK, a copy as a thank you because she had helped me out with it, and it was 9.99. So I put it in my cart and then I went to check out and it said, books over 10 pounds ship free. So I was like, good to know.

[00:30:25] So I went into Amazon KDP for the UK. I changed the price to 10 pounds and now it was cheaper for any customer because any customer who is just buying one book is now going to benefit from the fact that for one penny more, they don't have to pay shipping and handling. So it's nice to get the reader perspective.

[00:30:43] Orna: But it's a fantastic example of something you just could not have known if you hadn't done that. And yeah, I really do encourage everybody to use every platform that you're publishing on this is e-book, audio, print, whichever, do become a user, if only briefly. You will have your own preferred way of reading on your own for readers and all the rest of them to get outside your comfort zone and use every platform as a reader, just to see what goes on because they're not all same. They’re really quite different. The experience could be quite different from the reader perspective. So that is, I think, probably one of the best examples I've ever heard of that.

[00:31:25] Matty: So onto audio books. So the same question, any recommendations for platforms or vendors or services that you went ALLi recommend?

[00:31:34] Orna: Yeah. So, again, as in e-books and online, print on demand, Amazon is the world leader in audio books. There has been, and I'm not going to get into this on your show because we're very much focused here on the actual nuts and bolts of production and distribution and the processes of publishing, but from a campaign perspective, there have been a number of problems with the two, which is ACX, Audiobook Creation Exchange, which supplies books up to recently to Audible and Apple, which up to recently most of the audio book market in the US, the UK, most of the places where audiobooks are most sold.

[00:32:19] So there has been a problem with that supplier and they are being challenged by a number of authors in terms of payments and so on. But ALLi still recommends that you use ACX to produce audio books because they are a leader and we're hoping that they will continue to make changes that improve the situation there.

[00:32:41] However in the wake of that, and really it was happening anyway, as it has happened with e-books, there have been a number of alternative services that have come along in recent times. Most notably, I would say, Findaway Voices, who also offer a way to sell your books directly online through Authors Direct. You can sell your audio books online through them, and Findaway is the actual tool that you use to put the audio books together.

[00:33:10] So in terms of production, what are we talking about with an audio book? Again, you need to cover, it's the same as print and e-book. And for each of these formats, you need different kinds of covers. So an audio book cover is a square. And when you're designing your book, you need to, we talked about that when we discussed design, you need to take these things into consideration. So you need your cover and then you need your sound file. The sound file has lots of different requirements on all the platforms in order for it to pass quality control.

[00:33:42] So you need a narrator to actually speak your words. Some authors do this themselves, both again, as with cover design, hiring a professional is recommended. Unless you are already a skilled voice actor, it's very difficult for you to do justice to particularly fiction. Nonfiction is easier and readers are more forgiving of the author reading non-fiction. But again, you need to be good, not a boring monotone. You need to know what you're doing. You need to know voice. Audio is skilled work. People train to do it. It's just picking up the book of doing it yourself is not the same thing. So recommendation is to get a skilled narrator.

[00:34:25] So between the costs of production, narration, narration is expensive. It's generally charged per hour, finished hours produced. So what ACX did, Audiobook Creation Exchange, the exchange part was about bringing author and narrators together and allowing them to come into a royalty sharing agreement, which would mean that there was no big upfront expense for the author. Findaway has now also introduced a marketplace for this as possible. There are also marketplaces, too.

[00:35:05] Our recommendation is, if you can afford it, to actually pay the narrator and own, you know, have the rights to the audio. And saying that, recognizing that it is a big expense. However, the return on audio is much higher. So it's a matter of like anything else working out your return on investment rather than just thinking about what you're going to be spending. And owning those rights outright, you need to work out how many copies do I need to sell before I move into profits? That is your real question. And for most authors that we have seen who are cognizant of the value of their audio book rights, they are doing extremely well.

[00:35:48] There is an unfortunate sort of attitude in the indy community that audio books are jam, you know, they're kind of extra, and I think that's a mistake. In the old days, yes, a publishing house for them, audio was a subsidiary right because they have to kind of sell the rights to an actual audio production company because they produce things like tapes and CDs and stuff like that. We're dealing with digital audio and a digital audio file is just as easily sold from your website, directly online, and picked up by the reader. There are all sorts of great tools that will allow you to do that.

[00:36:25] We've mentioned BookFunnel before and I would do a shout out for BookFunnel again here with audio. They're really fantastic in terms of delivering it directly on to the listener's device, whatever that might be. We want a fantastic customer service operation that allows that to happen.

[00:36:41] But there are lots of other tools. Soundwise is a very interesting audio company, Authors Republic also. So there's lots going on in the audio space and I would recommend people to get stuck in and think about what they want to do with their audio books. Because for lots of our members now, in terms of financial return, e-books first because they're so much cheaper to produce, but audio books are moving rapidly into second place for lots and lots of indy authors. Because yes, there is that upfront payment, but once you've earned back from that, you begin to really see a good return on audio.

[00:37:20] And there's such growth in the audio book market, whereas the e-book market in the US particularly, also in the UK and beginning to in other parts of the world, it's there, you know, it's fairly set. There is some growth, but it's slow. Whereas audio books are still growing rapidly. Young people love them. People are commuting listen to them. They used to be for older people, people who couldn't read, the sight issue again, but they've completely moved out of that now.

[00:37:51] Matty: You had mentioned ALLi's recommendation of ACX for production. Is it possible to use ACX for production and still take advantage of some of these other platforms?

[00:38:01] Orna: I should have mentioned, as always, non-exclusivity is our recommendation always. So ACX, one of the problems we have with them is KDP will encourage you to go exclusive into KDP Select, but they won't punish you if you don't. ACX does to some degree, and your return on your books really drops with Audible if you don't go exclusive. So it goes down to 25% versus 40 if you are exclusive. Nonetheless, we recommend non-exclusive and going wide in audio as in everything else, because it's a slower build but over time you will see far more results because, I'm not going to go into now, but exclusivity generally is not a good look, whether it's ebook, print, or for audio. So yes, use ACX but also use the others.

[00:39:04] Matty: There's sort of a comparable thing here, I think, between in the e-book world, there's KDP and Draft2Digital as an example. In the print world there's KDP and IngramSpark. In the audio world there's ACX and Findaway as an example of an alternative. Am I understanding that correctly?

[00:39:25] Orna: That's exactly right. And then it's not either, or it's both. So, yeah, instead of thinking of it as do I use this one or I do I use that one, when the answer is always use both. Use as many as you can, time and money allowing, as many formats, as many outlets, that is the general rule of thumb.

[00:39:45] Matty: Yeah. I'm realizing I may rethink how I'm treating my audio books because for the last two I hired a narrator directly. I paid them directly based on finished hour. And then they graciously loaded those documents onto Findaway for me. But I realized I'm I think distributing to Amazon through Findaway rather than I could uncheck it on. Findaway, I think, and go in and load it on ACX but choose the non-exclusive option on ACX. Note to self to fix that.

[00:40:23] Orna: Because you will already be on the reduced rate of 25%, but then you will also be paying Findaway's 30% of the 25. Also like most of the platforms there's often by going direct you can be put in for things that you won't necessarily be able to avail of if you are distributed by the aggregator. And this is again a general rule, it doesn't apply across the board, but most platforms when you upload directly, there are marketing tools and things that you can take advantage of, and you get communications and things from those services that when you go through aggregators you don't. So, yeah, but I definitely would recommend you go direct to ACX. It does make sense.

[00:41:11] Matty: I'm realizing that another benefit I think, is that for the books before Findaway became a thing, early on when I was doing audio books and I was doing them all through ACX, then pretty soon they would show up link to my e-book and for all my other books that were distributed that way, if somebody buys the e-book, they get the audio book for a vastly reduced rate. And so, especially when the e-books were on sale, like let's say I ran a sale for an e-book at 99 cents. And then people could always add on the audio book for 7.49, I think. So it was a good deal. And I don't see that for the books that I've done through Findaway, but I imagine that if I went direct to ACX, perhaps that option would show up for those books as well.

[00:41:55] Orna: Exactly. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. And that it's true for all the platforms, generally speaking, when it comes to aggregators. And then on Amazon, you've got this nice link between the e-book and the audio book through Whispersync so if you leave off the audio book and then you want to read your book and bed at night, it'll actually pick up where you left off on the audio, and then you get up the next morning, get into your car, and it would pick up where you left off on the e-book the previous nights. So all of that is very, very nice from a reader or listener's perspective.

[00:42:30] Matty: This is one of these things where whenever I learn something like this, and I'm always weighing retrospectively the pros and cons of now going back and fixing it, or just having this be a lesson learned going forward. I don't know that there's an answer to this question. It's just, the perennial question of indy authors is you learn a better way and then you have to weigh do you go back and fix it or do you just figure, well, that's water under the bridge. I'm just going to apply that lesson going forward.

[00:42:55] Orna: Yeah, it's a hard one. My general rule, and this has nothing to do with ALLi, this is just me as an author, my general rule is if there's money involved, I do it retrospectively. If it's just a lot of administration, unless it's something important, I generally say, okay, live and learn.

[00:43:14] Matty: Yeah, that sounds like a good measuring stick to use. And based on what you'd said earlier, ISBN for audio books as well, or do you purchase those through Bowker or Nielsen?

[00:43:25] Orna: Yeah, what's the same just audio book. It's just another format to the same distributor for the same ISBN agency.

[00:43:33] Matty: Yup. So each time you register an ISBN, you assign it to the title. One of the questions is what's the medium, and so you would just assign one of the ISBN, but you would assign it as an audio book.

[00:43:42] Orna: That's exactly right.

[00:43:46] Matty: Other thoughts about production for audio books?

[00:43:50] Orna: Quality is really important. So you will be rejected if the quality isn't there. It's another reason to work with narrators who have proper microphones and record in proper conditions and stuff like that. So quality control is high. There are lots of delays at the moment at ACX. So do not plan a launch based on an assumption that your audio book is going to be ready in a very short time, because at the moment it's taking them quite a long time to get, in some cases it's been months. It's just worth taking note of.

[00:44:22] If you find a narrator you like, it can be worthwhile sticking with that person and developing a relationship. And I think it's another art form. So there's a lot of learning. I would really recommend that you would have gone through the e-book process at least once, if not twice and print before turning to audio. Trying to learn all three at once on a first book, I mean, it can be done. It has been done by better people than me, but certainly I would get myself into a right old tizzy if I tried to do them all at once, because they are very different processes. The audio is very different from others.

[00:45:02] So from that point of view, I think, there's no rush here. That's what I always tried to impart for people who are starting out. You feel like you're in a hurry, you feel like I've got to get my first book done, then I'd go to my second, my third, and I've got to get into all these different formats and so on. And all of that is true. You do need to do all that if you're going to have a successful indy author business. But you don't need to do it all at once. And you're much better, and much more likely to stay there, if you ease off a bit, in terms of the time pressure. Give yourself the time to enjoy the process and to learn the process and embed it.

[00:45:41] The other tip I would give you is write everything down in your own language. All of the platforms are fantastic, you know, pages where they tell you what to do and how to do it, and they really are very good and very clear. But there are lots of things you will learn along the way that you may forget next time out. So just write everything down for yourself in your own way.

[00:46:02] On this is good because once you've started producing a few books, and you start to see an income flow, you may well assign the upload or even aspects of the production of the books to an assistant or somebody else. And so if you have your process very clearly documented, that's really helpful for them.

[00:46:24] Matty: Great. Well, I think that is a great note to end our discussion about production on. So, Orna, thank you so much. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and ALLi and all you offer on this.

[00:46:36] Orna: Yes. So ALLi is the Alliance of Independent Authors and we're at AllianceIndependentAuthors.org because we're a non-profit organization. And I'm Orna Ross. I wrote novels and poetry. I had also some nonfiction and I'm at OrnaRoss.com.

[00:46:55] Matty: Great. Thank you, Orna.

[00:46:57] Orna: Thanks, Matty.

Episode 102 - The Second Process of Publishing: Design with Orna Ross

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Orna Ross of the Alliance of Independent Authors joins me for the second of a series of seven episodes devoted to the Seven Processes of Publishing. This week the focus is on Design. We talk about cover design, and how it needs to be not a work of art but a billboard that will appeal to your target readers. We discuss the importance of a professional cover designer who will understand the tropes of your genre and options for making that path affordable. And we talk about book formatting, including the tools that are available to indy authors to effortlessly create the various file types needed by the online platforms.​

Orna Ross is the founder and head of the Alliance of Independent Authors, a non-profit professional business membership organization for self-publishing authors. ALLi provides trusted advice, supportive guidance, and a range of resources, within a welcoming community of authors and advisors.

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150 Self-Publishing Questions Answered: ALLi’s Writing, Publishing, & Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets (Publishing Guides for Indie Authors 5) (affiliate link)
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Episode 088 - How to Receive and Give Critique with Tiffany Yates Martin

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to this second in the series of the Seven Processes of Publishing and I'm here with Orna Ross. Hey Orna, how are you doing?

[00:00:08] Orna: Hi, Matty. I'm very well. How are you?

[00:00:10] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. As I mentioned, we're on to the second of the seven processes, the first being Editorial, and now we're on to Design.

[00:00:19] And this is really, what does the inside and what does the outside of the book look like? And I'm going to start out with cover design. And one of the things that I thought was very interesting, I'm going to use this as kind of an entree to this conversation is, in the book 150 SELF PUBLISHING QUESTIONS ANSWERED, which is where much of this material can also be found, there was the conversation about cover design: billboard or work of art. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you think of when you think of cover design, billboard, or work of art?

[00:00:51] Orna: Yeah. The function of a cover design is so sophisticated now and covers are so beautiful. I mean, to see just how much design has moved on. It's really interesting to look back at covers say 10 years ago and just what is possible now is just amazing. Digital publishing has enabled extraordinarily beautiful covers. But it isn't really the function of a cover to be beautiful. That is all very well. But if it doesn't work as a cover if it doesn't do the billboard thing, then it's a failure, no matter how beautiful the cover is.

[00:01:34] So I think we've got to always be thinking about our cover as the vehicle that will cause the reader to look further into the book. A cover doesn't actually sell a book, but what it does is it's the first step towards the sale, and that's what we've got to think of. It. It's got to be an attractor. It's got to speak to the reader that you want to attract to your books. There's absolutely no point in somebody picking up the book because they like the cover if they don't read it. I mean, it's fine, but it's not what you're after. You want them to pick up the book and go further. You want that cover to speak about some emotional connection that you are trying to have with the reader. It's really a bridge between your heart and the reader's heart. That's what the cover should be.

[00:02:30] Matty: Are there some markers that people can look for or red flags they should watch out for if they're starting to think through, maybe they're finishing up their first book and they're thinking through what they want the cover to look like, they're thinking that they might want to ask a professional cover designer for, any tips to lead them more to the billboard than to the work of art?

[00:02:50] Orna: Yeah. So I think in these early stages of the publishing process, the same thing we were talking about editorial last time, you're moving from being the writer of the book, which calls on all sorts of skills and ways of being in relation to the material, into being the publisher of the book, which calls for a completely different set of skills and ways of relating to the material.

[00:03:16] So the first thing is to begin that process of objectivity that we talked about last time in relation to editorial. So with the editorial, it's about creating a distance through time or space and all the ways that we've discussed then. For cover design, it's the same. You've got to take two steps back and ask yourself all sorts of questions about the reader and what's going to attract the reader. But the main thing to do I think is to look at other authors in your genre. So go online. Go to the top 10, look at the book covers that are there. See what is actually attracting your ideal readers right at this moment and begin to break the cover down in your mind.

[00:04:02] So look at, okay, that's the image. That's the author name. That's the title. What sort of fonts are being used? What sort of colors are being used? And why? What are these, what's this image? What are these colors. What's the overall mood? What's it saying to the reader? Why were these particular choices made? What does this cover have in common with the other nine at the top 10? These kinds of questions I think are well worth beginning the exploration, long before you're finished your book, as you're writing.

[00:04:38] Matty: I think it kind of fun exercise is to subscribe to the reader email newsletters like BookBub and similar in your genre. Because a couple of times I found, you know, I'm subscribed to thriller, suspense, mystery kind of that set of genres. And it's surprising how often there are two and sometimes three almost identical covers in the list. And the one that I bring up a lot because I've collected a bunch of examples on The Indy Author Facebook page is the historical book with a woman in the red outfit from the back during World War II with the World War II planes in the sky and an identifiable architectural feature from either London or Paris in the background.

[00:05:21] And they're so similar. I mean, not similar in the sense of plagiaristically similar, but it is sending a very clear signal of, if you like this book with the woman in the red dress, you're going to like this book with a woman in the red dress, too. And it's very clear when you look through book lists like that, that are genre based, in addition to looking at the online retail pages, what those tropes are in your genre.

[00:05:45] Orna: Definitely. And I think it can be quite a process for some authors to get from the normal kind of relationship that a writer has with their own material to understanding that. So this is the kind of thing that if your trade published, you criticize your publisher for, but when you become an indy author and become a good publisher yourself, you actually begin to see the value all the time, like, why publishers do it. Because you're thinking about the reader or you're thinking they've got five or 10 seconds that they're going to spend looking at this cover.

[00:06:17] So there is no room for subtlety and, very often authors talk about, for example, she had a red dress on in the cover, but my heroine never wore a red dress all the way through. And that's not what a cover is about. It isn't about reflecting your book in that way. It's just about getting all the shorthand signifiers that say to the reader, this is a book you're going to enjoy. And it can be quite a journey for some writers to go from how they relate to their book as a writer to that.

[00:06:54] Matty: I think an interesting analogy is to think of it as like visual keywords. I don't think anyone's ever putting together their keywords and saying, I can't use that set of keywords. Everyone else has used those. I want a different and fresh set of keywords. No, you want to find all the keywords that match the other books that you. it would be comparably interesting to your readers. And the cover can be like the visual version of keywords.

[00:07:15] Orna: Such a good way to think about it. It really is. And that's because you're taking the art of it away and it is because we're thinking of either our own art in our own work or the artwork that's making up the image in the cover. That's really good. I'm going to, I'm going to use that one, Matty.

[00:07:34] Matty: You had mentioned the importance of thinking about why the covers work, looking through the top 10 in your genre and looking for the similarities and why they work. That's probably going to be comfortable to people who are not only writers but also have kind of an artistic bent. But if that's not your thing, are there any resources people can use to better understand the why of that?

[00:07:56] Orna: Yeah, we have a post on the Self-Publishing Advice blog, which is selfpublishingadvice.org and it's how to commission a designer. And in fact, we have a few key, big posts on design and book design and what it is and why it matters, so it's definitely worth checking those out.

[00:08:18] I think understanding cover design to becoming good at commissioning a designer and I suppose this is a good place to say, don't do your own book design please, unless you already are a book designer. Even if you're a graphic designer, don't do it unless you understand the composition of book design, because it's not just again about how it looks, it's about much more than that.

[00:08:44] But I think to understand that it's a process as well, commissioning good design, and as I spoke of in relation to editorial, I think we skip over the research process that is necessary here. So the more time that you spend looking at them, the more you're going to get a sense of the why, if you like, which lies behind those design choices.

[00:09:10] And it can also be an interesting exercise to read the book description in relation to the design of the cover and just see the way in which certain tropes and things that turn up again and again in book descriptions in your genre will also be turning up in the actual visuals. And all of this helps you to understand those kind of trigger points that make the reader take the action. So when you're thinking about your why, you're thinking about why would a reader actually, why would my ideal reader pick up this book?

[00:09:49] Matty: There are some conventions and I'm not going to remember them specifically, but for example, the type of font that's used, like serif versus sans serif font, or size of the font and things like that, that as a non-graphic designer, I might be responding to that as a reader, but I don't fully understand as an author, and so I think if people can maybe follow book design blogs or just keep a finger on the pulse of that. Or at least, maybe ask your book cover designer, when you get it back and the font is way bigger than you think looks nice, ask them why they did it. And they'll say, oh, so it will show up in a thumbnail, or whatever their answer is, to use that interaction as a learning experience as well.

[00:10:36] Orna: Definitely. Romance books for example, will tend to have swirlier fonts than techno thrillers. And that's a very kind of obvious distinction, but that kind of thing is going on all the time, and authors would say, why is the title bigger than my name, or why is my name bigger than the title? Usual convention would be, if you're an established author who has a platform that it in itself is going to attract readership, then the author name gets more billing. If it's your first book, first time out then your well-chosen title is probably going to get more billing. So there are things like that going on as well.

[00:11:16] But what I find with most writers is that they love design, you know, the creativity around design, they actually like to follow book design blogs and to learn more about book design and what's going on there because it is actually quite fascinating.

[00:11:31] Matty: It is interesting to see the effect, and then why, have professionals explain why it's giving the effect that it has? I know a lot of book cover designers will ask clients or prospective clients to provide them with covers that they like. Might that lead down the wrong path if the author doesn't have a good sense themselves about it?

[00:11:54] Orna: I think the question they usually tend to ask for is the covers that you want the end design to emulate onto to explain why. So again, it's back to this question of why, so an experienced designer would be able to take all your amateur author kind of assessments of the covers, and from that get a sense of something that should go into the cover, of which they will obviously know the genre tropes and stuff like that, because you would have chosen a designer who is suitable for your genre. Did we say that point? That's really important that you get a designer who has experience in your actual genre, so they'll be able to take your responses and your sense of what you're doing.

[00:12:41] And designers are very good at ignoring you as well. You'll find we'll come up with all sorts of things, ideas and stuff, and they'll kind of ignore that and they come out with something. And the power of a good visual is very powerful, but of course you may not always love what they come up with.

[00:13:00] My own designer who I've worked with since I began indy publishing, which is now a decade ago, she has said to me that it is really important to her always that as well as everything else working, that the author likes that the end result is really key for her. And I think for me, as I said, publishing, also one of the reasons I left trade publishing was I hated the covers that they did so much. And I know why they did them, and I know how they were positioning the book in the marketplace, and I know which was successful and worked and all of that. And I'm grateful for that part, but I also know it's horrible to hate your cover because you just never feel great handing the book over to somebody or inviting them to read it.

[00:13:45] So I think as an indy author, one of the perks of the job is that you love your covers. So they have to work commercially, but you also have to like them. So if you don't, it's back to the drawing board. And most designers will give you couple of worlds and won't settle it down too much at the start. It can be exploratory and stuff at the beginning, so there's room to change things up.

[00:14:11] Matty: I had an interesting experience with my first Ann Kinnear cover. It was the first book I had published, and at the time I think that when the designer asked me to provide covers that I liked, there's an edition of the Patricia Highsmith books where there's an image, but it's not a clear image, it's an architectural detail that's used as a design element. So if you look carefully, you realize it's a spiral staircase or something like that, but when you're just glancing at it, it just looks like a design element. And I love the covers of those books. And I gave him those, I said, I love this idea of the architectural element as a design feature, and I gave him the summary of the book, which is this woman who can sense spirits and has a consulting business around that.

[00:14:58] And so I got the first one back and it was a Gothic house on a hill with a creepy tree, a moon and then hands around a crystal ball. I was like, no, no! Where's my design element? And looking back, I realize that would have been a totally legitimate, and this was like an experienced, pretty well-known cover designer, that would have been a totally legitimate choice depending on how I wanted to position my book.

[00:15:29] But part of my pitch for my book was that sure she can talk to dead people, but it's in the context of this otherwise very normal world. She has a consulting business, that's like a CPA and she has a business manager and it's not like the woo-woo Ouija board kind of thing. And so I feel like if I had gone with that, I probably would have sold a lot of books initially, but then the story wouldn't have paid off the expectation that the cover set.

[00:15:58] And so, I initially did find a cover designer who did the single architectural element. And even though I recognize that I may be losing some sales because they don't jump out at people the way hands around a crystal ball would, I feel like the story's paying off the expectations the cover sets, and like you're saying, I just love showing people those books because I love the design. Any thoughts about that story?

[00:16:24] Orna: Yes, very much because back to my story of why I didn't like the covers, it was the trade publishing thing. It was very much that. So the book sold well, but I very much felt I wasn't building a readership because it was always this disjunction and people were constantly saying to me, I only bought your book because somebody said I should. I would never would have thought I would enjoy it because of the cover, but I actually did enjoy it. And of course the contrary happened probably more often. People bought the book expecting one sort of reading experience and got quite a different reading experience.

[00:17:02] And I think it's shortsighted, and I understand why trade publishing does it because they mostly are working through the bookstore model and you've only got a short period of time in which to move the books off the shelf, or the booksellers sending them back, and so you do this. But I think in the long-term it doesn't do the author or the publisher any favors really, because you're not building that readership. And in these days where you've got customer reviews, when people get a book that the reading experience doesn't match the cover and they're very quick to say, you know, you get your one-star review, not because the book is bad, but because the reader expected something quite different.

[00:17:45] So, I think it's really, it's the single most important thing I think is that you're positioning your book correctly in the marketplace. And as we said, that takes a bit of research. That is a skill. That's not something that most of us as authors, lots of authors, are not very visual, we're verbal and not brilliant on visuals. And so that whole way in which the visual elements of the cover are positioning your book is something that you need, it's a skill you need to develop, and your designer can hopefully help you to do that.

[00:18:21] Matty: So for people who are convinced that a professional is the way to go but they don't have boatloads of cash to sink into it, let's start with the most expensive, tips about working with a professional designer who's creating a cover specifically for your book, and then if you could work through some of the maybe more financial accessible options as well.

[00:18:41] Orna: Yeah. I think the main thing in terms of saving money and making sure it's as cost-effective as possible in terms of the designer that you're working with is to respect their time. So the more you can give them up front, so we've spoken about providing your book description and providing a sense of what you want the cover to convey and having a clear idea of who your target reader is and going for somebody who already has experience in your genre and giving them some samples of book covers that you like yourself and explaining why. All of these things that we have discussed, these are ways in which you can actually make sure the process is as cost-effective as possible, because if it takes extra time or the designer has to do lots of different rounds, actually, sometimes it means that it's more expensive, but it can also mean it's over, because there's something about the nature of the whole commissioning and design and production process that, it's a way, even if you have to go back at it too many times, it kind of goes out the window, and taking care of that level is important.

[00:19:48] And pre-made designs are a possibility that some people use. So these are not templates that are just a made up beforehand, but what they are is designs that a designer has produced in advance. They are relatively inexpensive, they are there, and you choose it, and the designer sells it to you with maybe some small modifications or no modifications, you're happy with it, off you go. It's a unique design, it's not going to turn up somewhere else. It's not like they're selling it and it's not like they print and sell a hundred of them. And it could be a more cost-effective option.

[00:20:25] You can try some of the marketplace sites where you can actually get designs, and sometimes good designs, really quite cheaply. So Fiverr and places like that. You need to be careful there though that you know what you're doing and that you have a very clear idea of the brief and that you are hiring somebody that's able to deliver. But you can actually get surprisingly cost-effective cover designs. And some designers who work in different countries where the cost of living is not so high, and they are prepared to actually give you really quite amazingly good cover designs at a really reasonable price.

[00:21:07] So those are some of the ways in which you can make sure that it doesn't cost you a ridiculous amount of money.

[00:21:14] Matty: One thing that I had not thought of before, but I was so excited about this realization that I've mentioned it a couple of times on the podcast already, but the idea that image design and typography are sort of two different skills. And so I thought of it because you were mentioning the fact that designers who are working in other countries where the cost of living is lower can often be less expensive, but oftentimes English isn't their first language. And I know with one of my designers, I almost put a book out that had a typo in the back cover text, because English wasn't his native language.

[00:21:48] And not only just the correctness of it, but I do think it is a completely different skillset. And I feel really fortunate that my current cover designer for the Ann Kinnear books is very good at both of those. But if I were spinning up a new series or going to a new designer, I would definitely consider having somebody do the design and then, I actually feel like I would have more of a flair for typography. I don't have any flair for the visual design part but working in some other way on the typography part, so you're sure you're getting the best of both worlds.

[00:22:21] Orna: Yeah. Any creative kind of ways of approaching it that makes sense, it's the joy being indy, do whatever works for you best. And some of us are working with very tight budgets, especially at the beginning. So this is an area where you can spend thousands if you're not careful. You do need to be careful, and you do need to remember that it is just the function of the cover to sell the book to the reader and to get their interest. So not to overspend is important.

[00:22:52] Matty: I wanted to grab a couple of my books because I wanted to use them to illustrate something.

[00:22:57] One was your comment about getting on a cover designer's schedule early. And I definitely found that with my current designer for my Ann Kinnear books, and I'll describe it so people are listening can follow along. So this is the cover that I ended up after I rejected the house on the hill with the creepy tree and the crystal ball.

[00:23:16] So it's a, a brass doorknocker in the shape of a hand. And I've had this rebranded a couple of times, mainly just by having the font changed. So when it first came out, it was a scripty font. And then there was this brief period where it was this kind of big, jagged font. And then, I just recently got it rebranded with this font that I think does a nice job of combining a classic look, but sort of retro as well.

[00:23:42] Orna: The whole cover, elegant is the word that jumps out at me. It's beautiful.

[00:23:47] Matty: Thank you. And I liked it because people who have the earlier versions would recognize this as the same book they have, but it's still freshened up. And then the nice thing about that was, once I'd established this, I just want, you know, I want a central design element, then it was very easy to basically just find photos. So the second one is a kind of similar thing in this case, it's the doorknob that's the central design element. I have one that has an aviation theme and so a broken aviation instrument is the central theme. And then this padlock has a connection to the story as well.

[00:24:23] And so, if I have to book my cover designer far in advance, I could be only partway through the story, and she says, okay, you're at the top of the list, and I can say, there's a padlock on it. And so it saves her time, and it saves me money because she doesn't have to start from scratch each time. She knows it's going to be this font and it's going to be this placement, and once we've decided what the central image is, it's a relatively fast process. So that ability to kind of repeat a design I think is a time and cost savings.

[00:24:57] And then the other book I wanted to show is the first of my Lizzy Ballard series. And I had gotten the designer for this from 99designs and I did an open contest. So with the Ann Kinnear books, I had a really clear idea of what I wanted the cover to look like. For the Lizzy Ballard books, I didn't have clue one what I wanted the cover to look like. And so I did an open contest and so I was getting a lot of entries and then I could vote and tell people which ones I liked and didn't like and ended up with one that I love. But I found it was very dark, and the subtleties that I loved about it in the design made it not successful as a book cover because it really faded into the background. And so fairly recently I went back to the designer, and I said, could you brighten it up a bit? And he came back with a cover that was brighter, and also, I think more consistent with the covers of two and three, which he also did.

[00:25:49] Being able to loop back and freshen up covers, I think, or regroup a little bit, if it's not working is important. What are some markers that people should be looking out for that would make them revisit a cover?

[00:26:04] Orna: Well, if you're not selling, if you're not converting, particularly if you know that you've had people land on your page but not convert, or land on your cover and not go any further, I think that's the big one. And I had that experience with the cover. When we changed the cover, it was an instant change. So I had commissioned the cover. It was a mother and a daughter story. I'd wanted a mother and daughter on the cover and the designer did exactly what I asked. And I liked the cover. They liked the cover, blah, blah, blah. Just did not work, just died a death. And we changed it and immediately the sales started. So it totally was a cover issue, and the replacement was completely different. It was completely different.

[00:26:50] If you're not selling, I would say, do look at your cover. First of all, also fresh in your descriptions, but do look up at your cover. And if it is vastly different to what's around it, so covers change over time. And if your book is looking very different in a lineup, you might want to think about why that is, compared to other books in its genre. And you might be happy to leave it, if it's selling well. And sometimes standing out can be a good thing. Not being the fourth red dress but being like different to can actually be a good thing.

[00:27:28] So there's no hard and fast rule about covers on, it's not a science, it's very much an art. And so it's very difficult to give absolute instructions about what does work and what doesn't work, because while you are going for a certain effect. It's an emotional response and it's not going to be the same for everyone.

[00:27:50] If you get feedback on a cover, people find it distasteful or inappropriate or whatever. I mean, if it's one person, not at all. But if you're getting regular feedback from people that they have to get beyond the cover and people will tell you that. It's something that readers will say to you. I really had to get beyond your cover. And I'm so glad that I did because blah, blah, blah. That might make you want to look at it again.

[00:28:18] And the other thing that happens is covers get stale. Like you, any book I've had that's been around for a good while has had a refresh. They've all been refreshed over time. I think you love it one year, but three years later, you don't necessarily cause it's like fashion. Why do we suddenly start wearing yellow? And you look around and everybody's wearing yellow, and you realize, oh gosh, I was caught again by fashion. It's like that, you don't know why these trends change, but they do change and your book, begins to feel stale. And if it's feeling that way to you, it's probably feeling that way to readers as well. So those are some of the multiple reasons why you might make a change.

[00:29:33] Matty: Are there any differences in advice you would give about cover design if someone is only planning on publishing an ebook or they want maybe different covers for ebook or print. Any distinction that people should make based on the medium in which the book is going to be printed?

[00:29:51] Orna: I think it's best to have consistency across audio, print, and ebook, and keep them consistent, generally speaking. If you're only doing ebook, then you can get away with a very simple cover. The ebooks, people don't have quite the same cover expectations, and they're not going to hold it in their hand. And digital audio is the same, not going to hold it in their hand. When a book is going into print, the cover, everything about the design becomes more complex, and will take more of your time, more of your energy to get it right. So with an ebook, you can get away with a simpler sort of approach.

[00:30:29] And I think you need to also decide, we had an interesting thing within ALLi with some of our covers where there was a discussion about making them more like self-help, self-improvement, or more like an organization's instructional books. Authority on the one side versus friendliness on the other end, which you're going to go for.

[00:30:55] And these are also the kinds of decisions that you have to make as an author whereby you might not be making the decision that is just about which cover is going to sell more. You might have other reasons why you will want your covers to convey something to the reader that you need to keep in mind. I think the most important thing with the cover is to have the confidence to go with your gut and then have the confidence to change it if it doesn't work out. But across formats, I feel myself that keeping it consistent is good.

[00:31:27] Matty: What kind of elements where you debating or considerations where you debating between the authoritative organizationally sponsored thing versus the self-help, and which did you come down on?

[00:31:40] Orna: We decided to go with the authority thing, for now anyway, because a lot of the books that we publish, they're not quick, fast reads. And we do have a short guide series, which are quick reads about one specific thing, like getting a book into libraries or getting your first reviews or ISBN, just short, sharp, just one thing. So we do have books like that.

[00:32:04] But our general guides tend to be quite longer, they take in a glossary, you know, the organization has done a lot of work, done a lot of research around best practice and so on. And we felt that should be reflected in the books as well as just saying, okay, we might get more sales if we had a more kind of sexy puppy picture or something on it but at the end of the day, it's like what you were talking about earlier. There is the expectation then, and you'd almost need to have slightly different books when they opened up, you know? So, yeah, we went for the authority in the end.

[00:32:46] Matty: I had to ask about rights because I couldn't really talk to you without talking about IP and rights. So when it comes to materials that are used in a book cover, what should an author keep an eye on and what do they need to keep tabs on or manage themselves versus what can they rely on a cover designer to keep tabs on and manage?

[00:33:07] Orna: Well, I think, as businesspeople, we need to keep rights issues to the front of our minds, always, in terms of respecting our own rights and also respecting the rights of other creative professionals, and so there is a fairly standard sort of rights set up with the images that are provided for your book cover. So your designer generally retains the rights but gives you the publishing licensing rights. And so you can do what you need to do as the author. Sometimes authors want to buy those rights out, in which case you should be prepared to pay more because, as I say, it's about respecting other creative professionals' work.

[00:33:52] Sometimes designers can get very uptight about what you can and can't do, but actually that's often because they don't understand book publishing and what is necessary. So, you know, reproducing postcards, posters, this kind of thing, you need to ensure that you have the rights to do all of the things that you need to do to market the book and use the cover appropriately within the marketing of your book. So these are all things that you need to be aware of as you go through the process. And really, the onus is on you as always with rights issues, to make sure that you're properly informed and that you're following best practices.

[00:34:35] Matty: I understand that it's still not all that common for an author and cover designer to have a contract, which kind of surprised me. Can some of these things, if in the spec that you provide to the cover designer, you include things in that email, let's say, like, I assume you'll pull visual resources from these sites, or just be aware, I'm planning on printing this on mugs and magnets. So, you know, I'm expecting to use it beyond just the book cover. Is that a reasonable step for authors to take to try to protect themselves on these things?

[00:35:09] Orna: Yeah, I think so. I'm a great believer in getting as much information as possible in upfront so everybody knows where they stand, and with anyone who's experienced these, there's very little that's going to cause any problems around rights because it's all very well worked out in terms of his normal best practices, very established. So there shouldn't be any issues. But sometimes you have inexperienced designers or inexperienced publishers who don't quite know what's what. So, yeah, once it's written down in an email, that's as good as a fancy contract to doubly signed and exchanged. Once it's written, it's there in writing and it's clear that you agreed. what your contract expectations were.

[00:35:54] The main thing I think is to educate yourself so you know what your expectations should be. And so you're going in with confidence that what you're asking for is reasonable. And if you have any questions about anything like that, ALLi can always help, so don't hesitate to ask.

[00:36:12] Matty: One of the things that I like about working with professionals through platforms like Reedsy or Upwork, those are the two primary ones I use, is that assuming you're keeping your communications to those platforms as they encourage you to do, you have a history of all of that. And so if there turns out to be some question, you can go back and say, no, on June 1st, 2019, I told you that I was going to be using this on t-shirts and mugs, and there isn't any question. That log will always be there.

[00:36:40] Orna: Absolutely. I think it's well worth paying the price for the split of marketplaces just for that alone. And they always have these safeguards built in to protect both you and the person you're hiring. As a publisher, you can find yourself hiring quite a few people across the seven stages of the process. So if you are using a platform like that, it's also much easier to keep track of what's going on than it is on conventional email.

[00:37:16] Matty: So we've talked a little bit about how you can get a good, high quality and professional exterior that's going to appeal to the readers that you want to reach. So we wanted to talk also about the other side of design, which is book formatting. And I think that this conversation has probably changed a lot over the last five years or so. I know for me, the way I go about this has definitely changed because of the tools that are more readily accessible to authors themselves to deal with this. Do you have recommendations or does ALLi have recommendations about how people go about this?

[00:37:49] Orna: It depends on what you want as an outcome. So most authors of straightforward text-based books, like novels or a straightforward type to nonfiction or something that doesn't have illustrations. And what most of us are looking for is the simplest, most cost effective, most non-noticeable interior. So if you don't notice anything too much about the interior because everything is just fine and it's not going to trip anybody up and it looks good. It's clean, it's crisp, the reader can read it and they're happy with it.

[00:38:24] And the tools are just amazing now. I mean, you can get just fantastic formatting for your ebook and there are no excuses anymore really, just brilliant, brilliant tools. You mentioned Vellum. I'm a Vellum believer as well. And it's fantastic software, but there are lots of them. And we have a directory of approved partners and formatters and softwares in there. And if you want something a bit more unusual, though, or if you do illustration books or you're a children's author or poet and your needs may be different, and you may need to hire a professional who will lay out the book in a certain way.

[00:39:07] I've heard authors say that they don't like using software because your book ends up looking like so many other books and readers don't like that. But to be honest, I don't think we just even notice that. A lot of the time, readers have not conscious even of design and formatting, unless it doesn't work or unless it is calling attention to itself for all the wrong reasons. I don't think readers tend to notice it. So I wouldn't let that be a worry, myself.

[00:39:36] So if you're a novelist, if you're a non-fiction writer who's doing a straight textbook, I really would recommend that you wrap your head around one of the many good formatting solutions that are out there, and you save yourself a ton of money. But more than that, you get the thing that the indy author loves, which is control. So if you pay a formatter or if you pay a typesetter for your print book, then that's it. You get the files; they have set up the files. You often don't know what tool they use to do it, and if you need to change anything, you have to go back and ask for it again. And you have to pay. And it's not just the money. It's also the inconvenience.

[00:40:18] Whereas if you have done the formatting yourself using one of these tools, then you just hop in and make your change. So if you find a typo or something, that doesn't require you to be sending files off to somebody else to get them to do and send it back, which is work they don't even want to be doing really. And I think that's our core recommendation really.

[00:40:37] But, if it's a specialist book, then it's going to need specialist treatment. And also, we have members who just love making really beautiful books, you know, so the interior is extremely important to them, and they want all the individual elements, and they take a real interest in making the book, which is very much part of their creation process. If that's you, then that's a different thing.

[00:41:05] Matty: When I weigh the satisfaction, I would get out of doing that with the time and effort, I choose not to do it, but I can understand why people would want to make that effort for a print book. But for an ebook, it just seems like trying to do it yourself. I don't know. I remember listening to a cooking show once and they said that they had tried to make Triscuits. I'm like, why would you try to make Triscuits? Like, just buy Triscuits. They're pretty much perfect the way they are. You don't need designer Triscuits.

[00:41:33] And I think of eBooks the same way. It's going to look different anyway, right? It's not like you do an ebook and then it's beautiful and that's how every reader is going to see it. No, it's going to be different if they're on a phone or an iPad or a Kindle or a Nook or how big they've made the font or which font they've selected. So I imagine there are people who are focused on that for the print book but are willing to let it go for the ebook. Or are they also spending that much time on the ebook as well?

[00:41:57] Orna: Again, depends. So you're absolutely right I think again, when it comes to a fairly straightforward book, but if you're a children's author, for example, you will take a lot of interest, more and more. It wasn't an issue for a long time, but now kids grow up, you know, they're born with iPads in their hand. So you may find yourself spending just as much time on the ebook design and making sure as much as possible that it works the way you want it to work. And so on.

[00:42:30] So on there is fixed format E books also, which people are sometimes creating. So it does depend. There are certain kinds of textbooks that are heavily illustrated that people will take a lot of trouble on the ebook, just as much as own on the print book. And I think that's something we're seeing more and more as technology gets better and better, and the reading technology, I mean, more than the production technology. As it improves, then the same sort of care that's going into print books is now going into e-books.

[00:43:08] Matty: One of the other benefits that I see of a program like Vellum and many others I'm sure are that you press a button and you get all the different types of files you need so that you get an epub, you can get the files that depending on the metadata you've entered are specific to upload to Amazon, specific upload to Barnes and Noble, Google Play, all the different platforms. So that, for example, if you get to the end of an e-book and someone clicks on a link to get the next in the series they're being sent to the appropriate store, not some store they want to have nothing to do with.

[00:43:39] And one of those was always mobi files. So can you talk a little bit about, the brief history of mobi files and what the status of mobi files is today and how they're used?

[00:43:48] Orna: Yeah. I think mobi is probably on the way out. So it's not something to worry about. And new authors, if you haven't heard about it before, don't worry. And so mobi was, it was Amazon's proprietorial format, not was, it is, it's still very live. Don't get me wrong, it's still there, but you had to have mobi files for publishing on Kindle for some years and you no longer do, you can publish on Kindle using an epub file.

[00:44:21] So mobi is, it's still in existence, but it's not something we need to worry about. And I think epub has become the standard electronic file and it’s cross-referrable. As you rightly say, Vellum provides the different ones for the different stores, but in theory an epub file travels across all the different requirements across the web. And if you can create an epub file now, you should pretty much be able to go anywhere with that file. and see it uploaded, and see it uploaded well.

[00:44:57] Matty:

[00:44:57] The one area where I find I still need mobis is when I'm sending in like an emailing copy to someone who's using a Kindle and they need to sideload it. Is that still a thing or is that kind of an old-fashioned issue to be worrying about?

[00:45:12] Orna: Well, it is a thing because lots of people have Kindles forever. Kindle isn't like similar technology that's changed after a year and which will remain nameless, you know, that you upgrade all the time. The Kindle readers, and readers generally, they come very attached to their reader. Kobo as well. You know, whatever your reader is, you become very attached to it, and you see they're very simple technology, so they don't tend to break. And so readers whose Kindle can only read mobi need that mobi file.

[00:45:46] Matty: The last thing that I wanted to talk about, well, actually there may be two more things. There are two more things. The next to the last thing I wanted to talk about was large print. So I know when I first started using an e-reader, I thought, oh, well, this is perfect. You know, the people who used to have to rely on the small percentage of books that ended up being offered in large print now are going to go to Kindle. That's so nice for them. And then, via our mutual friend, Joanna Penn, I was hearing that she was having good luck with a large print, and I decided to do that too, because the time investment and the money investment was fairly small. I just had to go back to my cover designer and ask for a large print version of the book. And I had to generate a large print interior that using Vellum. Is large print something that you continue to see being worth authors investing their time in?

[00:46:36] Orna: Yes. It's like so many things, when something new comes along and people think that's the death of an old thing. And we generally seems to happen as it sits in beside what was already there. And people don't move, and readers particularly are quite a conservative bunch. They're not quick to, some are, but there's a great big tranche of readers who don't read on ebook and don't ever intend to. So large print, I think like you, I completely agree, it's very little extra investment to create a large print edition, to create a hardback edition, using Vellum and all the other tools.

[00:47:16] So why wouldn't you? If there are readers out there who only like to read in large print or only can read in large print, so it's an accessibility issue as well, you're providing books for readers who can only read large print. They can't read small print. Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you do that? We are seeing people doing really well with their large print books. Yeah.

[00:47:39] Matty: You had mentioned the other thing that I wanted to talk about, which was hardcover. So it's something that I keep considering. And the times that I've seen illustrations of other people who have gotten hard cover books, it hasn't been appealing to me because it's been just the cover printed on the cover, and it looks like a textbook to me. And it's like unpleasant flashbacks to grade school or junior high textbooks. But I understand that you can also get a dust jacket. I'm just curious as to your opinion on where hard covers are going. Is it worth it?

[00:48:16] Orna: Again, I think it is worth it. I think those kinds of things that you had, I think that's more a US thing, by the way, it must be something to do with US textbooks. I think it's more US associations outside of America. But the other thing is don't assume because you feel that way, that the reader feels that way.

[00:48:36] And again, it isn't a lot of money. It's not a lot of extra investment. And the thing about hardbacks is there isn't a rush to buy hardbacks in the sense that they generally cost more money and so on. But it can be really nice and showcase the thing. At some people accountably do well in hardback. So providing it as we're so lucky to have these print on demand tools that we can for very little, I mean, this sort of stuff used to cost thousands. You would have to that your minimum investment would be $2,000 to $3,000. And now that will be for a tiny book and then you had the whole distribution headache. We don't have any of that.

[00:49:20] Matty: Well, this is sort of a preview because our next episode is going to be on production, and we might be able to get into a little bit about where bookstores and libraries like to buy their books from and where they don't like to buy their books from.

[00:49:35] So Orna, thank you so much for that perspective on design. please let the listeners know where they could go to find out more about you and your work online.

[00:49:42] Orna: Sure. So I'm Orna Ross. I'm at OrnaRoss.com. And I'm also director of The Alliance of Independent Authors and that's an association for self-publishing writers and you'd find us at AllianceIndependentAuthors.org.

[00:50:00] Matty: Great. Thank you so much. And everyone should stay tuned for the next episode where we will be talking about production. Thank you, Orna.

[00:50:07] Orna: Thank you.

Episode 101 - The First Process of Publishing: Editorial with Orna Ross

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In this week's episode of The Indy Author Podcast, Orna Ross of the Alliance of Independent Authors joins me for the first of a series of seven episodes devoted to the Seven Processes of Publishing. This week the focus is on Editorial. We talk about the different stages of editing, and the importance of distinguishing the deepening and development process from the correction and clarification process. We discuss how you can gain distance from your work by experiencing it in a different time, place, or format. We discuss the different types of professional editing, and how to balance your opinion of your work with the opinions of others.

Orna Ross is the founder and head of the Alliance of Independent Authors, a non-profit professional business membership organization for self-publishing authors. ALLi provides trusted advice, supportive guidance, and a range of resources, within a welcoming community of authors and advisors.

Episode Links

Personal Update

Alliance of Independent Authors SelfPubCon

Interview

https://www.ornaross.com/

https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/

150 Self-Publishing Questions Answered: ALLi’s Writing, Publishing, & Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets (Publishing Guides for Indie Authors 5)

Episode 088 - How to Receive and Give Critique with Tiffany Yates Martin

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: We're here for the first of our series of the seven processes of publishing. So, hello, Orna for rejoining us on The Indy Author Podcast!

[00:00:08] Orna: Hi Matty, delighted to be here, for this big project.

[00:00:12] Matty: Yeah, I'm delighted to have you back. And today in this first episode, we are going to be talking about the editorial process, but I thought that because ALLi doesn't consider the writing part specific to the seven processes of publishing, that's pre publishing, but I didn't want to overlook the writing portion. So obviously we could do another seven episodes on writing, but I thought just to ease us into the editorial discussion, are there any parts of the writing process that you think are especially important to prepare yourself and your manuscript best for the publishing processes that follow?

[00:00:51] Orna: Yeah. Sure, so obviously writing is the most important thing. By not including it in the publishing process is not in any way to say that it is a stage to be rushed or anything like that. On the contrary. So, I mean, officially the publishing process begins when you bring in the professional editors. But obviously writing still goes on after that, and we talk about that in a few moments, when we look at the formal editorial process, if you like. But it's really important to prepare your manuscript really, really well when you're a self-publishing writer. So it's always important, to do the very best you can.

[00:01:34] So, there are seven stages as you so rightly said to the writing process itself. And those end stages of the process for a self-publishing writer are more intense, I think, because you are going to be publishing your own work and that in a sense means that you have to get to a higher degree of perfection before somebody else sees it.

[00:01:59] So very often when you're submitting to traditional publishing, there is a whole series of sending it out, getting feedback, getting it back, getting it rejected, and if you're lucky, in the rejections, people will pick out some aspects. Or even if they don't, very often when it comes back, you'll read it again and you'll think, okay, I'll polish it up another bit before I send it out again. So very often there's self-editing processes going on in the submission. When you know you're going to publish yourself, you can rush things. I think that's the main thing I would like to say is, take it easy at the end.

[00:02:36] So after your first draft there at least two other drafts that you need to do. The first one is the deepening draft and it's best done when you've completed a first draft to your own satisfaction. It's best to put it away for a while and get some distance and then do a deepening draft.

[00:02:55] And the deepening draft is an elaboration. The first draft is for you to see what's there, explain it to yourself. The second, the deepening draft is about explaining it to everybody else. And so you identify gaps. And I think the most useful thing to do in this draft is to look at bits that you really like, pick out their shining qualities and then try to bring those qualities to the bits that you're not so happy with. So it's an elevation process, really.

[00:03:22] And so I always recommend that people go through, they begin after the first draft, after they rested the first draft, they begin by picking out the bits you like. Our inner critic is so alive that the first thing we want to do is correct, but actually strengthening your strengths is better, is equally important, but I actually think it's more important. You could argue that it's equally important, but for me, I think it's more important to recognize your strengths and to develop those and augment the awesome. This is how I like to think of it.

[00:03:56] And then the next draft is clearing the crap, so the correction draft then comes afterwards, the fixing up. And there's a lot of information and advice there about the correction, but not so much about strengthening what's good. And all of us as writers, we have strengths and weaknesses, and it really does help us to develop our craft and to recognize which aspects we are good at and which ones we need more support in. So the deepening draft, then the editing, the self-editing and clarification draft, and then there's all the finishing actions that we need to take to wrap it up as it were.

[00:04:39] And then I think the other thing that really is good to do before it goes to a professional editor is to get some form of beta reading done, whereby you send it out to some trusted people who know what they're talking about. You could give it to your family and friends, and you will get feedback there, that's fine, if you want to, if you have kind of family and friends that want to read it or will finish it or whatever. I don't. But if you do, great.

[00:05:05] I know that for a lot of people, they have family members kind of the first reader and their ideal reader. That's great if you have that. But go beyond that. Go to people who actually have some expertise, either who read a lot in your genre, or who actually are writers themselves in your genre or have worked as editors. The more they know about your specific kind of book, the more useful their feedback can be.

[00:05:30] So, send it out to I would say at least five trusted others and get some feedback. And as always with feedback, read it, absorb it, and see what makes sense to you. If a few people are saying the same thing, it's usually something to take note of and make some changes accordingly.

[00:05:49] They may suggest ideas for what you should do. You may accept that idea straight up, but more often what you'll do is say, I don't love the solution, but I do see the problem and then get stuck in there and solving it in your own way. And then you should be ready for a professional edit.

[00:06:08] Matty: I felt that one thing that I've learned over time is among my pool of people, my pre edit readers, my beta readers, I've started to realize what their focus is, what the focus of each of them is. So I have one beta reader who is great at the big picture, who can step back and say, I really felt like about a third of the way through there needed to be something else big that happened in order to sustain me through the following chapters. And so I'm always sure to give that person an early copy.

[00:06:40] And then I had the reader that's, more, I found a typo on page 75, and so I give that person later. So I think it's also important to adjust when you involve each of the readers at the point when their strengths and reading are going to do you the most good. Because it doesn't really help me to find the typos when I'm still trying to figure out the plot. And it doesn't really help me to find out a great plot idea when I'm at the end and it would be harder to adjust.

[00:07:05] Orna: Terrific tip. Yeah, really good. And I mean, this is great when you establish a team, when you've done more than one book, when you have a few books under your belt, and you get used to working with the same people. Yeah, it's fantastic when that happens, and you have dedicated readers. Because the relationship improves on their ability to read your work and to understand what you're trying to do, all of that improves as the relationship becomes more long-term so, yeah, that's really great.

[00:07:34] Matty: I always think it's interesting to hear people talk about writing because I'm almost always astounded, I'll hear authors whose work I love talk about it, and I just want to say, seriously, you can create a book doing that? I mean, the thing that strikes me every time is, I've interviewed a lot of crime fiction and thriller authors on the podcast and almost all of them are of the, and that I was so surprised when I found out who the murderer was family. And I think how can you possibly do that?

[00:08:03] And for me, I've always found that doing this full-time now and needing to be as efficient as I can, the more I outlined ahead of time, the fewer unproductive paths I went through, and that worked pretty well until the book that I'm trying to finish for the editor now. And so this is my, I guess, eighth or ninth novel. And I felt like it was getting more and more efficient by sort of going through and doing a very high level, you know, the whole story in 10,000 words, and then fleshing it out a little more. Now it's the whole story in 30,000 words and doing passes through it.

[00:08:41] But this time I feel like I stretched it out too long and now I'm really struggling to retain my interest in what is probably the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, I don't even know any more, pass through it. So I think it's just something that people have to keep an eye on and not get locked in and realize that something might've worked for three books and maybe not so much anymore and it's time to rethink.

[00:09:04] Orna: It's funny, isn't it? The way writing goes like that, and I think that kind of thing happens before leveling up. So usually a change in your process, a change in your way of doing things is a breakthrough at the craft level. It's usually my experience there's something there that's about to change and be different. So it's actually quite an exciting time. But finding your way through to a whole new way of doing things, it can feel quite painful actually, because you can feel a bit lost and confused until it rights itself.

[00:09:38] Matty: And I think the beta readers can play a great role in that, especially if they're trusted colleagues, but also generally fans of your work, because you can get done with the almost final draft and think, oh my God, this is so boring, who would want to read it? And then give it to people, and you can, it's very therapeutic to hear, as you said, you know, what you're good at.

[00:10:00] Orna: Yeah, and they see things you didn't see. And Michael La Ronn, I think I may have said this the last time I was on your podcast, but it really struck me and I'm always quoting him. Michael La Ronn is one of the ALLi team here. Novelist and nonfiction writer and poetry, he writes across the three genres, and he has a saying that the worst judge of a book is its author.

[00:10:24] Just forget it. If you're bored it does not mean somebody else is bored, if you think it's fantastic, it does not mean somebody else, or even you tomorrow, are going to think it's fantastic. Your opinion really isn't important at all. Just keep on moving through the process.

[00:10:41] Matty: Yeah. It's what the readers think that really counts in the end.

[00:10:45] Orna: Sure. And even then, what's it going to be? Some of them are going to like it and some of them aren't going to like it, and what do you even do with that except do the next book? So it is constantly that kind of keeping your eye on what needs to be done next rather than getting too lost. And I see this with new writers, I suppose I'm speaking particularly to people who may be listening who are on their first book, because I do see this a lot with people who are starting out. But there's great energy for the first draft and even a second or third pass through. But then there could be a reluctance to finish and get on with it, as it were, and you can get stuck in the writing and rewriting.

[00:11:30] And I'm not suggesting that's what's happening here with you at all because you're very experienced, that's different. But there can be a fear about putting your book out for the first time and you can get caught in a perfectionism that's not really improving it very much. You're just going round and round in circles really, and anything, any major improvements you're going to make has been done. There's nothing else for you to do. And the most useful thing for you as a writer is actually to get it up, get it out there, publish it, get some readers, get their feedback, get going on book number two. It's going to be much better for your development as a writer than doing another pass.

[00:12:07] Matty: Yeah. And I also liked the advice about letting it sit for a while because you can, if you're just slogging away, slogging away, slogging away, at some point, you're not going to have any new ideas. And I know you and Michael, although I think you have different recommendations for the duration of time to let it sit, but both have that common recommendation about letting it sit for some time.

[00:12:27] Orna: Yes. I suggest much longer than he does. You know, he had a heart attack when I was saying, if you can, leave it for a year and we'll go away and work on something else. But of course, Michael doesn't take Michael anything like that, it takes me a year to put a book together. It doesn't take him anything like that. So, I do think it's very useful to go away and work on something else and come back because we get so closed to the work, particularly, if we've been drafting and redrafting and you just don't see it clearly. And working on something else actually improves you craft a little bit, so when you come back, you're a bit better than you were when you were there previously. But it's really, you want enough distance to approach it like a reader rather than the person who authored it.

[00:13:17] Matty: It is fun sometimes, and I think I had this conversation with someone on the podcast fairly recently about going back. Of course, if you ever reread something you've put out before, like if you're preparing for a reading or something like that, and of course you're going to see things you want to fix, but then every once in a while, you do come across the things that are like, whoa, that's pretty good. I'm pretty proud of it. So that's fun too.

[00:13:44] So let's assume we've taken all these steps, we're at the point where it's as good as we and our beta readers can make it, and now we're looking at the professional edit. So talk a little bit about the different types of professional edits that are out there and what the differences are among them.

[00:13:59] Orna: Yeah. So, I mean, I think we touched on it a little bit already. I think of them as three. People break them down in different ways. So the way in which we break them down is threefold.

[00:14:09] So you've got the big picture and editor who looks at the work as a whole. And there's all sorts of names for these different editors, so it can be a bit confusing at first when you come to it, because the UK terms and the US terms can be a bit different and then the people have different terms for it. But essentially, we're looking at the development of the novel. So, the book could be nonfiction book either that we're talking about or poetry books.

[00:14:35] So we're looking at the book as a whole, its structure and if it is fiction, whether the characterization is consistent, consistency generally, repetition. Repetition of effect at this level, at the developmental level, so you have, a tendency for revelations to come in the same sort of way each time it happens, for example. And we all have favorite tics and things, that we don't even know that we have.

[00:15:04] This is the big picture person. And, really, really, the most important editing for a first book, for new writers who are publishing for the first time. It's expensive and a lot of writers resist actually forking out for this kind of work, but I can't stress how important it is and how much to view it not just as a publishing expense, which it is, but to view it as an investment in your writing craft.

[00:15:39] So lots of authors go off and do MFAs, MAs in creative writing. Honestly, the investment in a good developmental edit of a book that you've already done is a better investment in terms of learning what you need to learn to progress you to the next level. I'm not saying you shouldn't do MFAs or MAs, but I'm just saying if you have to choose between one or the other, I know which one I think is more important. It's just so important to begin to understand a book at that level, at that big picture level, it really develops your craft as a writer.

[00:16:17] The next level then I think of as being on the kind of the paragraph and sentence level. It's called copy editing, and again, there are lots of different terms for it. But the editor here is looking more at the actual structure of your sentences and your paragraphs, your chapters, but particularly how you use words, making sure that grammar is okay, again, calling repetitions, smaller kinds of repetitions, the repetitions of words or phrases that you tend to overuse, all that kind of thing.

[00:16:52] And then the third and final stage is proofreading and that's at the word level where things are being corrected, proofreading, typos, and again, grammatical infelicities or misspellings or all of that.

[00:17:08] So I think the overall thing to say about the three kinds of editing is language is a very complex substance. If you're an artist who is working with mud or something, it's different. Language is very, very complex and it's very detailed, and we need professional help to see how we're using it. Our brain when we look at our own work goes into a sort of a blur zone. Working with editorial professionals really helps us to sharpen our awareness of language and how we use it generally, as well as obviously specifically improving that particular book so the reader can enjoy it. So all of this is about making what was in your head as clear, as crystal clear as possible for the reader to understand it.

[00:18:00] Matty: I had a question, this is going to be a little selfish because this is the situation, I find myself in now, but I think this is probably a scenario that other people share as well. But basically, I'm budgeting for one edit, and I have an editor that I've worked with on several books and in general, the copy-editing aspect isn't that intensive. And in fact, in some cases I've just told him it's generally cases where I'm trying to favor grammatical correctness over ease of reading in a genre type fiction book. And, I've even said to him, just highlight the parts that I need to work on because I can fix that myself. What I need is more of the big picture, more of the developmental edit.

[00:18:40] And so, as an example, in one of the books that he edited, there was a storyline that I had wrapped up at the end, but he was saying, this is supposed to be more of a thriller. You've wrapped it up, but it could be wrapped up much more excitingly. And so we had a conversation about sort of weighing adding some excitement with plausibility and how to balance that, so it was satisfying but also plausible. And so that's always what I'm looking for from my editor. And then for the proofread, I have some beta readers who are excellent proofreaders. So I generally just give them the final copy to get the proofread done.

[00:19:16] But the situation I'm in now is that my book is eventually going to be, let's say, 80, 85,000 words. And I probably have about 70,000 words of fairly final copy. So in a way, I want to give it to him as-is because if he says, oh, this whole subplot is just not working at all. I don't really want to have polished it up, taking the time to polish it up before I give it to him. So there's always this balance between giving them as much as possible so you get that professional perspective, but not so much that you've overworked something. Do you have any advice on that front?

[00:19:54] Orna: Yeah, I do. I know exactly what you're talking about because you can waste our other, as well as money, you can waste our most valuable resource, which is time. And if you're going to lose big chunks, particularly in the developmental process, you don't want to have polished it too finely. And this is what I find again happens a lot with beginner writers and stuff, they can spend a lot of time polishing the small stuff way too soon, long before the other stuff has been organized.

[00:20:24] So, yeah, I mean, the other thing that your question really highlights, and I think it's so important to say this is, this is not linear, and this is never straightforward. So it's always a little bit messy and it's always a balancing of different needs and we don't have infinite resources, time or money, for this edit, and so we're always balancing. And so, yes, I think if what we're asking for is a developmental edit, then there's not a lot of point in getting very stuck in certainly at the proofreading level.

[00:20:57] The problem with not doing it well enough at the copy edit level is that there can be a lack of clarity. So sometimes if the words are loose it's because something else is loose. And so while we do want to protect our time and protect our money and so on, sometimes it's nothing for it except to get stuck in. And I know this is a really unsatisfactory answer because the answer is, as it so often is with publishing and indeed with writing, is it depends.

[00:21:28] And really you are the best judge. If you feel that giving it to him as it is, you have the skills to do the copyedit when the time is right and that it is written well enough for him to be clear about what happens there, because sometimes if we haven't done, if we haven't gotten in there at the paragraph level, it's blurry. It's not clear what you're trying to achieve. It's not clear what you're saying, for example, about a character. Or your setup might be very clear in your own mind, but because you haven't done the work at word level, it's not actually that clear to the reader what's going on there.

[00:22:07] So as long as you don't have that kind of thing happening, as long as there's clarity there, then particularly if you feel there will be recommendations about, you know, that needs to be more exciting and you’re going to have to add in text, remove bodies of text, then yes, I think you could go ahead and give it in what might be a rawer state than you ever have before.

[00:22:33] Matty: It's interesting too, that you had mentioned earlier that even the terminology that's used for these different kinds of edits is different, and so when people are going out to look for an editor, there's not a guarantee that their expectation when they say "developmental edit" or "copy edit" or well, I think "proofread" people probably have a common understanding, but developmental editor, copy editor, other terms for that, that the terminology they're using is the same as the professional they're speaking with. Are there any recommendations you have for people to make sure that the author and the editor have a common understanding of what the expectation is?

[00:23:07] Orna: Yes. You're absolutely right and the other thing that comes in here that also adds to this challenge for the author who's seeking the best possible professional, is that some editors offer different kinds of editing, but they really are best at one type than they are they're better at than. Sometimes the testimonials on their website are general sorts of glowing testimonials, but you're not necessarily getting the full picture because obviously their website is there to sell their services and that's 100% the way it should be from their perspective.

[00:23:42] So I recommend to treat the hiring of an editor like you treat taking on a spouse for life. You know, it's a really huge decision. Do not rush it. Really do your research. So when you get to the point, first of all, have a look around and create a list of possible editors for your work. And then when you're seriously considering somebody, really investigate that person, first of all, in dialogue with them, so ask lots of questions and see what kind of answers you get. If there's somebody that does samples, get a sample, so you see what's there. Some editors don't do that. Lots do.

[00:24:27] And even if you feel this is the right editor for me, go through that process, do take your time. Look at the testimonials on their website. And then contact the authors. Ask the author what kind of edit they did, what they most valued about it, ask them about their weaker points. You know, we feel very grateful to our editors because they really do improve our books. They are the great unsung heroes of the publishing industry. They are just amazing, and I love the fact that indy authors now are really bringing their editors to the forefront, foregrounding them in their acknowledgements and so on, which didn't always happen in the past, they were very invisible. So I think that this is all marvelous.

[00:25:09] But having said that, every professional is good at some things and not so good at others. So have that discussion with the authors on the website, or if you come across an editor who's tying in to an author's book and you think they would be right for you. So in other words, do your research. Really don't take somebody on until you've answered a lot of questions up front because by the time you get the service, it is too late.

[00:25:37] And also recognize that even with all of that, it may be that you'll end up with an editor that isn't perfectly right for you. And also that sometimes they're right for the first book and the second book, but then not so much after that. So don't be afraid to change your editor, and if you are changing, you'll probably go through the same process again.

[00:25:59] Don't take your friend's recommendation, my editor is great. Sure, they probably are great for them, and they might be great for you, but do not take that for granted. They may not be at all.

[00:26:14] Ideally, you should be working with an editor who's experienced in your genre. There are trope and particularly some genres have very strong tropes that you need to be following and your editor can really help you with that kind of thing if they're experienced in that genre. If they're not, they can't, they won't know, so that's important.

[00:26:35] Matty: I can speak to that from an editorial point of view because I made a brief foray into providing editing services. And the manuscript that was brought to me was a fantasy book, which I not only don't write, but I don't read. And I wasn't sure about it. So we did a sample edit, and in this case, I charged, it was like $50 for 5,000 words or something like that. And I made some comments, and I stand by the comments I made, but I didn't have that pool of knowledge to be able to say, if you think about how so-and-so handled it in such and such, whereas in more like the crime, fiction, mystery, suspense genre, if I were having that conversation, I could have a conversation that would be meaningful for the client. So we both agreed that we weren't going to go ahead. We were both happy with the decision not to go ahead with that. But it did make me realize the importance of having someone who's familiar with your genre, so you're all speaking the same language. Also the idea of paying for a sample edit I think is well worth it.

[00:27:36] Orna: I do too, because even though you guys didn't decide to go ahead, I'm sure she got value from that experience. And you did too. So, I think that's the thing about writing and editing and the relationship and the relationships indeed, because over time you will have had relationships with lots of different editors, is that it is an unfolding and that is a learning. And every single book, every project is an opportunity, is a learning opportunity and I think that is the way to approach the editing process, to open yourself wide up as an author to this being a learning process.

[00:28:12] And, again, I know after you've done it a few times, this becomes much easier. At the beginning, our very first book, our baby, which has been pulled up from the bowels of our toes. Bad biology there, but you know what I mean? And we're so emotionally attached, and it can be difficult to get any sort of editorial response. It can be difficult to take it in the right way.

[00:28:41] So a lot of self-care, I think, when you're going into your first dealings with a professional editor. Again, depending on the editor, some are super sensitive and say all the right things, and some writers say, I don't need you to say all that, give me the hard stuff, you know. And then other writers, particularly at the beginning, no matter how sensitively it's couched, it hurts at some level. And you’ve got to know yourself and if you are that kind of person, you have to take time and care of yourself in that process, or you won't get beyond it.

[00:29:16] And you can trust that after you've done this once or twice, it stops hurting, actually. And you get to the point, you cannot wait for your editor's feedback, and you want it to be as tough, for them to really go there, that's what you actually want. That can be impossible to imagine when you're starting out, but it totally does get to that. So yeah, look after yourself in the editing process, if you're a sensitive and particularly if it's your first book.

[00:30:15] Matty: There's a great episode I'd like to refer people to, which is Episode 88, which was "How to Receive and Give Critique with Tiffany Yates Martin." And one of the things we talked about was the idea that an editor, or a reader for that matter, their comments are about their reaction to your book, not about you. And so if you can look at an editor's input and say, oh, it's interesting that they thought this character wasn't well-developed when I felt he was a fully fleshed out person. Not, I can't believe that they didn't think I did a good job developing this character. If you can think of it as almost like market research. It's a professional market research of your book on what their experience was while they were reading it. That could help soothe the sting a little bit.

[00:30:57] Orna: Yeah. Any tricks, anything you can do that helps you through that at the beginning, especially. And for me it is wearing that learner's hat and really trying to open your heart as well as your mind to what's being said. Because the editors sometimes may slightly miss the mark. But the fact that they've raised something nearly always means it's worth your attention, to turn your attention to whatever it is they've raised.

[00:31:28] And sometimes we take the editorial report, take it away and don't go back to the editor. But most editors will be very open to you saying, I saw it this way. You see it that way. Could we go a little bit more deeply into this? I mean, they won't do that if you're doing it for 25 things, but if you've got a genuine query about something and you don't quite get what they're saying, or you really feel they got it wrong and you'd like to tease it out with them a little bit, most editors are very open to that.

[00:32:05] Matty: I had an example of that with Ann Kinnear 4, which was "A Furnace for Your Foe," and it takes place on Mount Desert Island. And my editor was questioning, he was saying, it's quite a coincidence that this group of people just happens to already know this group of people. And my position was, it's a small community, especially off season, the population is like 10,000 and these are both people who are running in the fancy upper echelons of that society. So it would be actually weird if they didn't know each other. But what I took from that is I haven't set up the context for people to understand that it's a small, insular community. You know, it wasn't that that was the wrong decision for me to make. It was that I hadn't set it up effectively for the reader. So I think that's a good example of what you're talking about.

[00:32:51] Orna: It's a really good example. And it's those things we don't know we don't know. We take it for granted that it's there because it's so much in our head, we don't realize that we failed to mention it or failed to develop it enough. Brilliant example.

[00:33:06] Matty: I did have a question. Earlier you were saying that sometimes the person who is an editor for a couple of books becomes not the right editor for subsequent books. And if you're in a situation where you're writing a series and you've decided to switch editors, what's the best way to ensure that the new editor is sufficiently familiar with the previous books that they can make the transition and not have the effect be jarring? You know, you want it to be a seamless transition for you and your readers. How can you enable an editor to do that?

[00:33:36] Orna: Yes. A series, it's tricky. So I will preface it by saying that ideally, same editor from beginning to end of series. That is the ideal and that happens most of the time. But there are all sorts of reasons why that might not happen, and it doesn't happen sometimes. So it might be that the relationship just deteriorates. It might be that your editor decides to stop editing and wants to become a skydiver. There are all sorts of reasons. So the thing is, if you are asking somebody to pick up books three or four or five of the series, then they need to read book 1, 2, 3, and 4. And that may very well end up costing you money. Because ideally, they should have a good lead in and full understanding. And the best way for them to have full understanding is to read the full books.

[00:34:30] And some authors think that if they want the business, they should read the books. Well, the better the editor is, the less likely that's going to happen. So it's going to cost you, probably to switch editor mid run. You can brief them very well, and probably both is ideal. You should give them a good indication of where everything came from before the book that they're receiving now and where you intended to go if you know that, which you probably do, where things are going to go in subsequent books.

[00:35:01] So in short, it's a headache. It's a headache to switch mid series. And if you have to do it, it's like everything in life, preparation cuts out lots of problems down the road. So the more you can actually give your editor to prepare them for the job of it, picking up the series, the better. Yeah, so there isn't really an easy answer for that.

[00:35:27] Matty: One idea I thought was good, and I think this came from the "150 Self-Publishing Questions Answered," was basically hiring them as if they were doing a proofread. You know, if you have to come up with a way to quantify the value of them reading through a series, that that would be one approach. I mean, hopefully they don't actually find a bunch of typos, but I would think they would be sort of reading at a speed and depth that would be equivalent to proofreading, because proofreaders probably aren't assessing plot structure. They're breezing along looking for the missing comma. And that's what you need your editor to do. Is that something that seems like a reasonable way if you do find you need to pay for a read of those earlier books?

[00:36:12] Orna: Absolutely. I mean, you're not paying for them to developmentally edit those books. Absolutely not. And you may find that they may not even charge you the full cost of a proofread for all of those.

[00:36:24] You might want to get them to do a proofread while they're there, because every book, you can find millions of typos. No book can be over edited, really. Books just stop because everybody has had enough of them and doesn't want to invest any more time and energy into them. And it's time to move on to the next one. But every book's improvable no matter how good it is. So, yeah, it's a good way to approach this.

[00:36:49] Matty: One thing I have found is that there are two times when I want my book to be proofread. One is right before I upload it to the platforms. And one way I've done that, and I think an economical way, is to send a note out to writers' groups I belong to and say, for the first one or two people who get in touch with me, I will give you a pre-publication copy of the book, ebook or PDF or whatever, and I'll pay you a $5 bounty per typo up to $50. And there's always a couple of people who are interested in doing that and I always pay them $50. Don't tell, but I always pay them $50 regardless of how many typos they find.

[00:37:28] And then the other time I really want somebody to take another look at it is if I ever have my book open in Vellum, for example, when I was proofing, proof listening, I guess you'd call it, the audio book I had Vellum open and every once in a while, I'd see a missing comma or I'd see I use the word evidently too many times or whatever, and I could just make it right there in Vellum. So it was ready to generate an updated version. But my fear is always that I do something in the process, I do an unintentional cut and paste or something like that. And so after I've done that kind of work, I send a note out to a private Facebook group and say, I'll give a free copy of the book and all you have to do is read it and tell me if there's like an inexplicably chunk of text right in the middle of a chapter that makes no sense with the surrounding texts. And so those are some economical ways people can get some editorial help, right at the end when it's just the tiny cleanup.

[00:38:24] Orna: That's fantastic. That's really, really, really nice. And I know what you mean about introducing errors. I'm terrible. If I crack open that file again, I'm off again because I actually love editing. That's the part of writing that I enjoy the most. And yeah, introduce a whole new error, then I need a whole new proofread. Don't do what I do.

[00:38:48] Matty: So the last thing I wanted to ask about with regard to editorial is that the "150 Self-publishing Questions Answered" has some great suggestions about how you can gain distance from your work. How do you gain that kind of distance, and at what point do you recommend doing that?

[00:39:07] Orna: Obviously, there's just leaving time, which we discussed earlier. There is the text to speech function, which you can play and hear. I think that's probably one of the most useful, when you get this mechanical auto robotic voice reading the text and it picks up on your mistakes. That's a really good one.

[00:39:29] Matty: Another one was the idea of editing actually in a different location.

[00:39:35] Orna: Yes. Michael does that, I think. He has a writing place and an editing place. Yeah. Any trick you can think of. Who was telling me they read backwards when it comes to proofreading? Yeah. They go backwards through the sentences, so they're just reading words, not meaning.

[00:39:51] Matty: That sounds awful. More power to them if they can do it.

[00:39:57] Orna: All of this is awful. And one of the things I really liked for me, I only did it briefly and I won't do it ongoing for other reasons, I just find it exhausting and it's not the best use of my time, but I did find narrating my own audio was fantastic in terms of picking up the errors. So I think definitely getting it into a different format is great.

[00:40:23] Another thing is to really pump up the text size so that you're looking at it in 24 point or something. Anything where you just break that habit of the brain, which is to skim right over the mistakes. It'll be interesting. I'm sure your listeners will probably have other ideas.

[00:40:43] Matty: I have a friend who uploads her books to KDP Print and then gets a print proof. And not just for the final proofread either, but she can read through that and then she says she can pick up plot issues and things like that that you would never otherwise, because she is being able to read it as a reader.

[00:41:02] Orna: I always do my editing on hardcopy. I think that's just my age. I grew up with typewriters and cut and paste meaning actually cutting the pages up and sticking them back together. So I always do my editing and I look forward to printing it off. And since we've had POD, it's just been fantastic to actually get it looking like a book rather than it typewritten form.

[00:41:27] Matty: And that's probably cheaper. I'm guessing that ordering an author proof of a book from KDP, for example, maybe the same as true on IngramSpark, is cheaper than the toner you'd spend.

[00:41:40] Orna: It probably is. It's certainly there's little or no difference. It's just that experience of reading it as a book really helps to for the stuff to jump out.

[00:41:56] Matty: I did hear an author interview, and I'm not sure I'm getting this right, so I won't say who the author was just in case I'm conveying this incorrectly, but she either retyped or rewrote, hand wrote her book. Like when she thought she was done, she reentered it or rewrote it. And she said, yeah, I'd never do that again. But it did help her. I think she was just assessing the cost / benefit ratio and decided it didn't help her that much. But she said she did catch things that she fixed in the final manuscript.

[00:42:28] Orna: Did she have a print version beside her, and then she was retyping it?

[00:42:32] Matty: I believe so. Yeah.

[00:42:34] Orna: Yeah. Yeah, we can do these things. With all this technology that helps us to go faster, faster, faster. But the thing about editing is it's slower, slower, slower. And I think that's the thing, is to edit well, you've got to change your pace and you've got to change your push. And in the good old days, the bad old days that I was talking about a minute ago, that's what you have to do. You cut it up. You changed it. You did your corrections in pen, and then you typed it up again and then you did it again and again, until you were happy with it. And that's how loads of people wrote loads of books back in the day.

[00:43:15] So it can be done. I suppose the point I'm trying to make is whatever gets you to pay the right level of attention and to slow down and really see the thing as a separate thing from the original creation, then just do it.

[00:43:33] Matty: Yep. Well, I think that's a great note to wrap up our conversation about editorial on Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and ALLi online.

[00:43:44] Orna: Sure. I'm Orna Ross at OrnaRoss.com and I write fiction and nonfiction and poetry. And I cover all my doings, my personal, doing some writings over there. And I'm director at The Alliance of Independent Authors, the professional organization for self-publishing authors, and we're at AllianceIndependentAuthors.org.

[00:44:11] Matty: Great, well, Orna, thank you so much. And next up is going to be design, so people will want to listen to the second of the seven processes in the next episode.

[00:44:20] Orna: Fantastic. Thanks so much, Matty.