Episode 214 - Your Persona is Your Brand with Jami Albright

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Jami Albright discusses YOUR PERSONA IS YOUR BRAND, including the power of surrounding yourself with reminders of your brand; the role of genre conventions in branding; the importance of repelling the right readers; how to find out what your reader's "butter" is; positioning a rebranding effort and whether it requires a new pen name; whether rebranding cover design is the first or last option (and an inexpensive option to pursue); the importance of tweaking the dials delicately; the fact that authenticity doesn't require over-sharing; and how (like it or not) every public-facing action, including the community you build, is part of your brand.

Jami Albright is a born-and-raised Texas girl and is the Amazon top 100 author of the sexy, swoony, and pee-your-pants funny Brides on the Run and the Small-Town Royalty series. She is also the co-host, along with Sara Rosett, of the WISH I’D KNOWN THEN podcast.

Episode Links

Author website: https://www.jamialbright.com/
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063473599652
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/jamialbrightauthor/ 
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@jamialbright5683

Summary

When starting your writing journey as an indie author, there is more to think about than just writing your manuscript. One factor that might not initially come to mind, but is just as crucial, is branding. Branding is tied to every aspect of your authorship and it is essential to create and maintain a strong, consistent brand that carries through everything you do.
 
A recent episode of the Indie Author Podcast featured Jami Albright, an Amazon Top 100 author, and co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then podcast. In the episode, she shared a wealth of knowledge about the concept of branding and the practical implications for authors.
 
Defining Branding for an Indie Author
 
According to Jami, for an author, branding is the promise you make to your reader. She refers to her brand as "Sexy, Swoony, Pee Your Pants Funny, Rom Coms" which immediately gives readers a sense of what they can expect when picking up one of her books.
 
She also emphasized that it is crucial to remain consistent with your brand. This not only applies to the contents of your books but also crosses over to your online presence.
 
The Importance of Persona
 
A part of your branding could be a certain persona or character you portray when interacting with your readers or audience. This does not mean being inauthentic, rather, it can be a 'version' of yourself that fits best within your brand. Whether it’s personal life shares or just interactions centered around your writing journey, your persona can be molded to match the profile you want your readers to associate with your authorship.
 
For instance, Jami refers to herself as a helper and that fact influences her interactions with readers and fellow authors. It even extends to her marketing methods where she shares other author's work with her network of readers.
 
Implementing Your Brand in Blurbs and Taglines
 
How you use your brand in your book descriptions or taglines is also an essential factor.  Blurbs and taglines are some of the first things potential readers will encounter about you and your work, and they can set essential expectations.
 
For instance, Jami uses a catchy and intriguing tagline for one of her books: "I did her wrong in high school. Now she's living in my pool house. What the hell could go wrong?” This simple sentence gives readers a compressed view of the central conflict, the tone of the book, and aligns with her overall brand of humorous romance.
 
You can use things like tropes that resonate with your target audience, or common themes in your works, to establish your brand in your blurbs and taglines.
 
The Evolution of Your Brand
 
As an indie author building your brand, it’s important to note that this will be continually evolving. You might have a clearer picture of your brand after a few books or after significant interactions with your readers.
 
Mistakes and missteps in branding are bound to happen, but it's part of the process. The important thing is to learn from these instances, and make gradual adjustments where necessary. Remember, your brand is a reflection of you as an author, and ultimately, it’ll be crucial to remain consistent in the promise you make to your readers.
 
Branding might seem daunting at first, but by focusing on the promise you want to make to your readers, and how you choose to present yourself, it can become an authentic and enjoyable process. It is this authenticity that will resonate with readers and make your author brand truly memorable.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Jami Albright. Hey Jami, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:05] Jami: Hi, how are you?
 
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you.
 
Meet Jami Albright
 
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Jami Albright is a born and raised Texas girl and is the Amazon Top 100 author of the Sexy, Swoony, and Pee in Your Pants Funny Brides on the Run and Small Town Royalty series. She's also the co-host, along with Sara Rosett, of the excellent Wish I'd Known Then podcast, which I can highly, highly recommend as soon as you've caught up on all the backlist episodes of The Indy Author Podcast. Definitely, go over and start listening to Wish I'd Known That because you guys and your guests share some great, great insights.
 
[00:00:38] Jami: Oh, that's great. Thank you for saying so.
 
[00:00:40] Matty: Always learn a lot every time I listen to an episode of that.
 
[00:00:43] Jami: Yeah. Sara and I both got our indie publishing education from podcasts. So we always say that our podcast is a love letter to podcasting and indie publishing because it's just that's how we learned about indie publishing.
 
[00:01:00] Matty: That's a lovely way to frame it up. I like that.
 
[00:01:03] Jami: Thank you.
 
[00:01:04] Matty: Very nice. So, Jami, I know, and anyone who listens to the Wish I'd Known Them podcast knows that you know tons and tons about loads and loads of things related to indie publishing, and we had tossed around a couple of topics and we landed on author branding, which I think is always a great topic to revisit periodically because I think it is still something that writers don't necessarily think of, branding themselves. You know, that's for Nike or McDonald's or something, but that reminder that no, there's an author brand as well is great. And so why don't we just start right out with the question about what is branding for an author? What does branding mean for an author?
 
[00:01:39] Jami: For an author, branding is the promise you make to the reader. So if you promise the reader, either through your books, like with your cover and your blurb, if you promise them fun, rompy, rom-com, then you need to deliver on that promise, and the same can be said of your brand. I brand myself; someone told me that some time ago, and I should probably do that just because I do have a pretty strong voice when I write. So, across whatever I write, my books are pretty much going to be the same thing. And so, my brand is Sexy, Swoony, Pee Your Pants Funny, Rom-Coms, and if that changes, the only way it would change would be it might not be sexy because if I wrote something that didn't have sex in it, not a romance, but something else, then, but the rest would still be emotional, they'd still be swoony, they'd still be funny. And so that is my brand. And that is the promise I give my reader. And I try to deliver on that promise every time I write a word on the page.
 
Surround yourself with reminders of your brand 
[00:02:53] Matty: Well, one thing you're doing for branding, which I think is brilliant, is your name on the wall behind you. I
 
[00:02:58] Jami: Oh, yeah.
 
[00:02:59] Matty: You know, people always put their books up and things like that, but having your name like that, I just have to ask, where did you get that?
 
[00:03:04] Jami: Etsy. Etsy. I redid my office during 2020. And so I found it on Etsy. Yeah, I love it.
 
[00:03:13] Matty: That will be a little encouragement for anyone who's been listening to the podcast to hop on over to YouTube and check it out because it's a, you have a very cool background, and one that's both showing your name, but also has some nice elements of yeah. Flowers it was kind of like you could tell somebody who was writing romance and things like that.

[00:03:29] Jami: Actually, that's—this is Happily Ever After, so you can't really read it. But yeah, it reminds me. Yeah. Yeah. And I have something across from me that says the secret, hang on. Y'all know I can't see without my glasses. I was trying not to put them on. The secret ingredient is always love. And so I try to remember that. I mean, it's just little things to remind me of that when I'm writing. So yeah, that's, this is my brand. This is who I am. And really, and truly, it is my name. I mean, if you get in, if you encounter Jami Albright, In book, speaker, podcast form, you're pretty much going to get the same thing every time, so,
 
[00:04:10] Matty: And that's nice, surrounding yourself with those reminders because it helps you in the same way that I think sometimes people put something, or like, listen to music as they're writing because surrounding yourself with those branding things, I think, would help make more concrete that commitment. You're making a promise and you need to deliver on it.
 
[00:04:33] Jami: Right, right, right, yeah.
 
Genre conventions and branding 
[00:04:34] Matty: Do you feel like there's an aspect of genre conventions in branding? Because you were saying you've made a promise to your readers, and not only is there the sexy, swoony, pee-your-pants funny aspect, but there's also the sort of underlying expectations about if you're writing romance, then there's certain tropes. To what extent does complying with conventions of genres overlap with branding?
 
[00:04:57] Jami: Oh, well, I think so much because You know, there are genre expectations that are for every genre. You know, a sci-fi author needs to have a spaceship. I mean usually they need to have a captain that's reluctant and he needs to have probably a broken-down spaceship and a very ragtag crew.
 
Are you repelling the right readers? 
[00:05:22] Jami: So there are always genre expectations. And so, because of that, you want to make sure that your branding is hitting those expectations. Because in marketing, it's as important to repel the wrong people as it is to attract the right people. And so, because of that, I mean, you can do that with your branding before they even open a book.
 
That's why it's so important to have it right. Because if you don't, you might repel the right people. So you want to make sure that you are always hitting those expectations in your blurbs, in your covers, in your branding, across a series, in the interior of your book. Are you giving them a Happily Ever After, which is a romance genre expectation.
 
Now, I know that there are books that, and there are readers that don't care about a Happily ever after. But for the most part, the majority of romance readers want that happily ever after. If you're writing romcom, is it funny? I mean, is it really funny? And if you think it's funny, that's great.
 
But do other people think it's funny? You know, if you're writing suspense, is it plot-driven along with character-driven and does your branding indicate that it's going to be that kind of suspenseful, thriller kind of book. And if it doesn't, then it's fairly easy to change. You just need to come up with some ideas.
 
[00:07:06] Matty: Well, you're saying that the idea of appealing to the readers you should appeal to and repelling the readers that you don't want to. So what are the ways that an author can investigate who they're reaching, de facto who they're reaching, and then are they reaching the people they think they're reaching? Or are they looking at that audience and saying, "Oh my God, that's not at all who I thought would be buying my book."
 
[00:07:29] Jami: Right. Right. Well, one of the easiest ways is covers, you know. I mean, looking at the top, looking at your cover and looking at the covers of the top 25 in your genre. Are your covers matching those covers? And if they are, then you're on the right route to finding those right people. Another good way is to get involved with promos that are genre specific. If you are getting sign-ups to your email list or something like that because of your cover, because of your blurb, then that's a good way. You know, if it's genre-specific, you're hitting those people that like what you write.
 
Compare reactions of different beta reader groups. 
[00:08:19] Jami: Another is like reader groups that are kind of specific to the genre that you write. Being in there, talking with readers, asking questions, polling your readers to see if what you're offering is what they expected when they picked up your book.
 
[00:08:38] Matty: It would be interesting if somebody were writing something that was a bit cross-genre. I think this is easier if you're really center. What's the term that Sacha Black uses? Very center of genre. But if, as you get to the edges, let's say you're writing something that is sort of like a rom-com but also sort of like a murder mystery. Well, Lucy Score writes her Riley Thorne books, which are romances, but they are also mysteries. Not like suspense, not like romantic suspense. They're mysteries with romance. So, yeah. If somebody was early in their career and they were in that position, it would be interesting to go find some of those beta readers that are very specific to romance or very specific to mystery and then give them the book and say, "At what points did this appeal to you or didn't appeal to you?" and kind of tally, where did I land?
 
[00:09:28] And I think that's important and one of the things that you can do once you kind of settle on what your brand is even if you are kind of melding genres a little bit, if your brand is specific to that, if you're saying that, you can use that in your advertising. A love story with a mystery. I mean, that is so bad, but you know what I'm saying? Whatever it is, you can use that in your branding so you are reaching those people and you're making people interested. "I've never seen that. Let me read the blurb." And then so it's just a step down and a step as they dig deeper to see if this is who they like if your book is something they like.
 
[00:10:11] Matty: I'm thinking of this in terms of a new writer, but I think it's a good test for people who have more books out there. But if you're putting your first book out or even if you have more books, there's the brand you want to be conveying.
 
[00:10:25] Jami: There's the brand that you actually convey, and then there's the, when you have no idea. Let's talk about the new writer. They're writing a book, they have no idea, they don't know where it's going to be they don't even know what genre to name it.
 
[00:10:35] Matty: Is branding important at that point? And if it is, how do they go about defining a brand if they're so early in their career?
 
[00:10:43] Jami: I mean, I think it is. For me, I knew what my brand would be. Did I have it narrowed down to sexy, swoony, pee-your-pants funny? No, but I just understood my voice. Also, I was in a critique group with some really great people. I know critique groups take a hit sometimes because you can get into not-great ones, but I was in a great one with really experienced writers who helped me define my voice and things like that.
 
Using word clouds to understand your de facto brand 
[00:11:18] Jami: And so, having someone else read it, like a beta reader or something like that, and having them give you feedback. If you had beta readers, you could have them write down words that specifically came to mind when they were reading your book. One of the things I say about how to find your brand, if you've already got reviews and stuff, is to go into that word search in your reviews on Amazon and see what keeps coming up. There could be some words there that you could use in your branding or give you an idea of what other people think your brand is.
 
[00:12:00] Matty: Yeah, I really like that idea of giving the assignment to beta readers to write down a list of words because I think that's a great way to get the most possible value without making it onerous for them. You know, if you have beta readers and you're giving them some assignment like describe your favorite parts of the book and why and what you describe your least then it gets not fun for them. But if they can just be dropping in words here and there.
 
[00:12:21] And if they do it in the format that would enable them to do this, like highlighting it in an EPUB or whatever format you use to give beta readers your work, they could highlight all the words that you liked in green, yellow or something like.
 
What's your reader's "butter"? 
[00:12:37] Jami: Yeah, or the parts you like, you know. Theodore Taylor calls that the butter in your book that really just... And I love, for me, I love A Kiss in the Rain. If I read a book and it's got a kiss in the rain, I'm like, yes! And so it's sort of the same. I put that in my books because I do love that. Knowing what that is, that just good stuff that you like when you read a book, whether it's a romance, a thriller, or sci-fi whatever it is in those genres that you really love or that the reader really loves, those are the things you want to incorporate into your brand when you're telling other people what it is you write.
 
The chicken-and-egg dilemma of branding 
[00:13:31] Matty: It is interesting, the idea that it's sort of a chicken and egg thing. So you could go into it knowing right off the bat, in general, what you wanted your brand to be sexy, swoony, and funny, even if you haven't framed it up in a lot of detail. And then I think there are people who are just writing the book of their heart, and they have no idea. If they decide, they think it might be noir, so they decide to join a noir writers group. And then all the noir writers hate it because, in fact, it's a cozy Agatha Christie Mystery or something. It would be hard to—I've never thought of branding in this way, of having it be like an intentional thing that you should start out from the beginning, but the coincidence sort of drives it as well.
 
[00:14:13] Jami: And I think I think that's how most people are. Very few people start out going, "Okay, this is what I'm going to write." I have a very clear image of branding. I was fortunate because, again, I got my education from podcasts. So I listened to a lot of smart people.
 
Also, I held my first book for a year before I published it because I was trying to learn this business. I did not want to just throw a book up; I'd done that before. I wanted to give my book as good a chance as I could for success. So because of that, I had thought about things like branding—like, what is it that I can give the reader that they can't get anywhere else? Or if they can get it someplace else, is it the kind of thing they like when they go to find that kind of thing? And then play that up in everything: in my writing, in my marketing, and everything. But most people, I think, stumble into it. Honestly, my author tag or whatever was something I saw on a pillow. It wasn't clever, but I felt like I needed something. So I put it on there and on my website and stuff.
 
The intersection of your and your readers' understanding of your brand 
[00:15:33] Jami: But I think that most people do stumble into it, but that's okay. I mean, you can change. I mean, you can hone your brand. After a few books or a series, you can realize, "Hey, wait, these all sort of have the same themes. People seem to be saying the same sorts of things about my books." And then you can come up with an author brand. You can go back and put it on your website, put it on your cards, put it on your marketing.
 
So, I don't think coming into it not knowing and letting your readers decide—or not decide, but like getting feedback from them—is a great way to come up with your branding. And most people do that. I think what you said is true: we think our brand is one thing, readers think our brand is another thing, and then there's someplace in between. And that in-between is really what you want to home in on, I think.
 
Positioning a rebranding effort 
[00:16:40] Matty: Yeah. If someone has started out writing what they think is noir, and then they start putting the books up, they look at the reader reviews and say, "This is the coziest noir book I've ever read," and they realize that what they're really writing is cozy, and they have to rebrand because of that. How big a separation do you feel like they need to make between their work before and after that rebranding? Would you recommend people use a new pen name or just be explicit in their reader-facing materials?
 
[00:17:09] Jami: Yeah, I think, I don't think you really have—I mean, it depends, I guess it depends on how many books and how many people have read those books. You know, if it were me, I would probably just recover and write new blurbs and change my categories and let them go under the name they're under. Because the fact is that people who've already read them clearly don't like cozies. And then the people that were reading them aren't going to read them if they're branded towards a cozy.
 
Does rebranding require a new pen name? 
[00:17:41] Jami: So, yeah, I wouldn't necessarily do a pen name unless it was something where you'd gone years putting up books and they weren't hitting the mark, but you felt like this set of books would hit, let's say, a cozy market. Then maybe, yes, have a pen name then because a confused reader is a reader that just moves on. They don't. There are too many books; they are not going to sit around and try to figure out what it is you have to offer. So if you had six or seven books and they were all kind of all over the place or they weren't branded correctly and marketed to the right people, then I think maybe at that point doing a pen name, if you knew you had something that was specifically, let's say, cozy or let's say thriller or something like that.
 
[00:18:38] Matty: Yeah. It sounds like Nora Roberts. Doesn't she have, I don't know how many different pen names and different genres that she's writing in? I guess it also depends on whether you're looking at what you're going to do from a certain point out, if you're continuing to write, or if you're wanting to go back and relook at previous works.
 
Rebranding cover design--the first or last option? 
[00:18:56] Matty: I would think that you could even subtly change the colors of a cover. I just talked with Michael around about a rebranding effort he went through, and we were talking about how you can tweak colors in a cover to have a different effect. The idea that if things are really more cozy maybe you take the guy with a gun and the dame sitting on the desk off your cover, and you replace it with something a little bit.
 
[00:19:20] Jami: Yeah, a cat sitting on the desk. Yeah. Yeah.
 
[00:19:23] Matty: Yeah, the cat sitting on the desk.
 
An inexpensive option for cover rebranding 
[00:19:25] Jami: If it's cozy, but yeah, no, I agree. And in my consulting that I do, cover change, unless it's just a terrible cover, is always the last thing. I mean, changing colors on a cover is a lot less expensive than a whole new cover. So, yeah, I'm all for doing the thing that costs the least amount of money. Blurbs, in particular, that costs you nothing unless you're going to pay somebody to do it. And that can change the tone of a book and the tone that the reader gets when they read the blur.
 
[00:20:07] Matty: Well, I have almost convinced myself that for the Ann Kinnear books, anyone who is tired of me talking about the Ann Kinnear covers can fast forward for a minute, but I've almost convinced myself that rather than going for a full cover design, I'm going to get the back, the equivalent of the background of the print copy, and put all the text on it myself, because I think I have a flair for the text. Also, because, especially for the ebook, so I would just clip out, like, the right-hand side of the print cover for the cover of the ebook. I've done this once, and I can see doing this quite regularly that as I look at You know, my BookBub emails coming through and they're very clear trends, like for month to month, you can definitely see what the trend is for the cover text, and it would be quite easy and quite inexpensive to just maybe like once a year, once every other year, update the text to whatever the current thing is, at least for the ebook, and that gives you a slightly different look but still recognizable as the same.
 
Like, I think the images in my Ann Kinnear covers are really part of my brand, and I'm loathe to change them, but those tweaks that you can make on your own to continue to comply with the evolving standards of the brand that you want to allot yourself.
 
[00:21:24] Jami: Right. I agree. I think anything you can do for the least amount of money and time, really, I mean is what I would start with. I always say that because time and money are a precious commodity. So, yeah.
 
[00:21:42] Matty: You don't want to be thrashing around too much with something like that if you're investing both of those resources.
 
[00:21:47] Jami: No. And if you realize that, I'm not really branded very well.
 
Look for a theme in reader responses 
[00:21:53] Jami: You know, I mean, if people look at my books, they don't know exactly what it is, what they're getting, if my readers, if I pulled my readers and there's not a theme that runs through the things they say, then, I'm, I probably need to tighten up my branding or whatever. That's something that can be done over there.
 
Thank you. I mean, it's not something that has to be done tomorrow, but I do think it's important that you start moving in that direction because as the market gets more flooded it's just better to be the one that stands out because of, let's say, your branding, as AI becomes more prominent than your branding as a person and with specific emotional, or well, emotional things that you can give the reader, even if you're writing horror you're going to give them an emotional experience.
 
And if you can really bake that into your brand, then that's going to help you to stand out against books that may not be written by people. So I think that's something to think about.
 
[00:23:08] Matty: That point about leaning into being human is very important. And one change I'm making on, I had two thoughts about social media. One is that the comment you had made about what people are saying about your books, a private group like a private Facebook group can be a great way to gather that kind of marketing information. Because periodically, I'll post a question in my Matty Dalrymple Readers Group private Facebook group that says, "If someone said that they liked this Ann Kinnear book or this Lizzy Ballard book, one of my books, what's another book you would say, 'Oh, if you like that, you'll like this,' because it's a great way to get comp information. But doing it in a private group is nice because if everybody says, 'Oh, Agatha Christie,' and you don't want to go that direction, you don't want a bunch of that on your Facebook feed.
 
And then the other thing I was thinking just apropos of your comment with regard to being an actual person is I'm starting to back away from just sharing things that I think are cute. For a period of time, my Facebook feed was all just me sharing cute dog videos, and I thought it's going to be better; they're going to have a better sense of me if I'm posting my own pictures of my own dogs. There's a concept, or here's a picture of where I'm going on a walk, and so you can build your brand by allowing people to see that human side of you, to the extent you're comfortable.
 
Authenticity doesn't require over-sharing 
[00:24:22] Jami: Yeah. Well, I was going to say authenticity, but it doesn't have to mean that you're sharing all your personal business. I mean, I am an oversharer from way back; you know, that is sort of my brand. And so for me, I'm okay with that. But there are people that don't want to share their personal stuff, but if you have a brand, and you have a persona connected to that brand, then you be as authentic as you can be to that brand and that persona.
 
It doesn't have to be you. It just has to be your forward-facing self with your readers.
 
[00:24:58] Matty: That’s a great point. It's kind of fun to think about; it's a performance.
 
[00:25:10] Jami: Yeah. And I mean, for introverts that don't like they don't want to share. I mean, I'm not saying only introverts don't want to share their personal stuff. But I mean, if for some introverts that I know, it's really nerve-racking to go through. Onto Facebook, even chatting with people in a group, but if you're going on as your author self, as opposed to your real self, then it's different. It's a different sort of thing. You are not tricking them. You are not being inauthentic. You just created a persona that writes these books that's the person that relates to your readers.
 
[00:25:45] Matty: Yeah, I really like this idea of aligning persona with brand. I think that can be really useful to people. In the same way that people sometimes feel uncomfortable promoting themselves, you have to put on your promoter hat, and not your writer hat. I really like that.
 
Branding through cross-promotion 
[00:26:05] Matty: And it does—the groups you... I'm trying not to draw a weird comparison to cliques in high school, but the group you associate yourself with matters. One of the reasons that I had not really delved into doing cross-promos in email is that I'm afraid of recommending a book I don't like to my readers, or now feeling committed to recommend a book that it turns out I don't like. Do you do cross promotions in emails or other forums? Can you talk about that a little bit and how that ties in with branding?
 
[00:26:37] Jami: Yes. So, from the beginning of my—I mean, when I was starting, and I had an email list before my first book came out, so I was sending emails out six weeks before I started sending them out. I don't think I had other books in my newsletter until after my first book came out. And then I have something called Jay Albright's Spotlight in my newsletter. I don't read these—some of the books I've read, some I haven't. And my readers know that that's a thing. That's just a thing, because I don't publish very often, but I do want to give them the opportunity to read other books and other authors. They're usually authors I know, and they're usually in KU, so if they get it and don't like it it's pretty low risk.
 
But I do make sure that they are books like the books that my readers would like in that the rom-coms or light romance or something like that. Every once in a while, I have put a darker romance in, but I do have readers who like that. So if I look at the downloads, they've downloaded that as much as they have something else. So, over time, I've just learned that about my readers. But as far as branding goes, I do try to keep it on brand for what my readers like about my books. If I look because I will look at the books and I do look at the reviews and what's said about them and stuff.
 
Let your personality shine through 
[00:28:19] Jami: Also, part of my brand is that kind of sharing and, I mean, I've offered my art team to several people who write what I write that are new. I mean, I'm just, I'm a helper. I'm a two on the Enneagram. I mean, that's just who I am. And so I like to help people and I like to share things and stuff. And so that is on brand for me to share other people's books. It just is. And actually for a year, I think it was during the pandemic, on the two weeks that I didn't send out my newsletter, I sent out a newsletter that was an author discovery newsletter, and so anyone who had a newsletter of less than, I think it was 1,500 people, I sent their book out to my readers, and I made it very clear, I have not read these books, some of the authors I don't know, but if you want to take a chance, you might find your next favorite reader. But I was just giving the authors the opportunity to get in front of a larger audience. I have my newsletters around 25,000 people. So I mean, it was an opportunity to do that. My readers loved it.
 
Now, if, like on the form that the authors had to fill out, if they didn't have professional editing or professional cover, I did not feature them because. You know, we do have some standards. There, but if they did, and the reviews didn't say things like, "This author could have used an editor or something like that," then we would put them out. The downloads on those were so high, and the authors were thrilled because some of them hadn't sold any books. And then they get this bump, and they were able to move some books. That was exciting for them, and I got emails from my readers saying that they had found an author that they wanted to read more of.
 
But that is my brand. I mean, that is who I am. Nobody else. I don't think anyone else needs to do that or even wants to do that, probably. But for me, I just felt like it's so hard to get email followers newsletter subscribers, that it would be great to give people the opportunity to do that. That is just how my mind thinks. It's not because I'm this huge altruistic person, and that's just, I'm just constantly thinking about how I can help other people because that's who I am and I over-help. I'm an aggressive helper sometimes, and my daughter does not appreciate it. So I mean, it's good and bad, but that is part of my brand. So, for me, it was no big deal to do that.
 
[00:31:10] Matty: I think there's a lesson to be drawn, even for people who don't have tens of thousands of people on their email list, which is that if you said your readers really appreciated getting that information about the other authors, and I think that even if someone is just starting out, they're just starting out their email list, but they like this idea of demonstrating they're helping, and I think their helping tendencies. Maybe an alternative is including in your newsletter a review of a book that you read and enjoyed that you think your readers will also enjoy because you can start developing that. It's not like you're necessarily helping out the person. Maybe it's a big-name person, and they're never going to notice the blip on the radar that your email would produce. But, yeah, that establishing that kind of persona early on can pave the way for exactly the kind of relationship that you're describing you have with your newsletter.
 
[00:31:57] Jami: Right. And it just creates goodwill. Because that big-name person will probably never know, but you know, your readers know. I mean, they just know that about you. And, I think that can become part of your brand and who you are as an author and as a person.
 
Every public-facing action is branding
 
[00:32:15] Matty: I think the message that everything is branding is both kind of scary, but it's also super helpful because I do think that sometimes people think of branding as the color of my website or whatever.
 
[00:32:26] Jami: Or the theme that runs through each cover there's a ribbon that runs on every cover. There's more than that.
 
[00:32:33] Matty: Yeah. Yeah. It's not limited to just blurbs and taglines. But, how you use branding in blurbs and tagline, taglines is one of the topics that we wanted to hit. So, we've talked very generally about the persona you put out there, but this idea of how you implement this in blurbs and taglines I thought was very appealing. What, how do you recommend doing that?
 
[00:32:53] Jami: Well, I think finding the some people use trope, which I think is great. I've used tropes too, but finding that better as Theodore talks about that thing that is going to make your anybody reading is going to just go. And stop and go, whoa, what did she just say? And I suggest putting it bolded at the top of your blurb because a lot of people are not reading below the fold.
 
They are not expanding that blurb because there are just too many. There are just too many. Plus, if you have been able to boil down your book and the good stuff in your book into two or three sentences that can fit right there, you can use that everywhere. You know, when you do a promo on one of the platforms like Free Booksy or Bargain Booksy, you can use that there. You can put it in your ads. You can include it in other people's newsletters. I mean, you can use that, and it is powerful. It can be really powerful to be able to just use that tagline that encapsulates the whole book and, by association, encapsulates you as an author. Then you can use that. And people remember that. People will remember those things, especially if you're putting it out there enough; they will see that, and they'll remember that.
 
[00:34:26] Matty: Yeah, the taglines I've been using for my series, including my ads, are for the Lizzy Ballard thrillers: "What Happens When an Extraordinary Ability Transforms an Ordinary Life." And for the Ann Kinnear books, it's, "They say that dead men tell no tales; they don't know Ann Kinnear."
 
[00:34:38] Jami: Ah, I love that.
 
[00:34:46] Matty: Yeah, I like those because I feel like it gets to the heart of what the themes of the books are, and yet it's both a blessing and a curse that it doesn't clearly align with a particular genre. And I do feel like this is another one. Okay, fast forward if you're tired of hearing me say this, but especially with my Ann Kinnear books, I feel like if I just decided to go whole hog into saying Supernatural Suspense 100 percent and had the cover that had the crystal ball with the hands around it on the front, I might have sold more books, but it's not really the book I was going to be writing. So I feel in a way, I'm sacrificing some breadth to not pursue that. But I think that the fans I get, like, I often get the comments that I like this because it was different than these other books for these reasons, and I'd almost it's a business decision as well as a creative decision to say, do you know, do you go for the bigger pool of readers or do you go for the deeper pool of readers? I think that then when you hook someone, you've hooked them big because you're offering something that isn't completely compliant with the more obvious tropes.
 
[00:35:47] Jami: Right. I agree. In my Homecoming Teen book, the tagline for that is, "I did her wrong in high school. Now she's living in my pool house. What the hell could go wrong?" and then the blurb was underneath that, but really. But “what the hell could go wrong” is not even necessary, particularly, except I needed it for the lyrical part of it. But just, "I did her wrong in high school. Now she's living in my pool house." That's built-in conflict. That is, for some people who like that kind of conflict, like the icing on the top. They just want to dive into that. So if you can find those things that really grab a reader and boil it down.
 
[00:36:33] Jami: And sometimes you can't do that by yourself. Sometimes you need help. Sometimes you need to brainstorm. And I love brainstorming. It's one of my favorite things in the world because I can say something not great, but somebody can take a tiny bit of that not great thing I said and make it greater. And then the next person can make it greater, and it's just better and better the more you talk about it. So, I think that's a great way to come up with taglines and even your branding and any kind of tagline you're going to use for your author brand or anything like that, to brainstorm or to use ChatGPT, this is a good way — an ethical way to use the AI. You can just put in words that you think may define your writing and stuff, and ask them to give you another list of 20 other words. Some of them may not be great, but there may be one or two that you can take and expand on and come up with something that really hits the mark for you and your books.
 
I also think making a list of sayings things that might be a brand. Make a list of 20; the first 15 are probably going to be cliché and not great, but those last five might be awesome. So, because it makes you think, it makes you dig in, and we're authors, we're creatives, we can come up with catchy little things to say that aren't cliché.
 
[00:38:05] Matty: Yeah, I can attest to the importance of market testing because the first version of the Lizzy Ballard tagline was, "What happens when an extraordinary power transforms an ordinary life?" And it quickly became clear that people thought I was writing Christian fiction.
 
[00:38:20] Jami: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 
[00:38:21] Matty: Like, "Oh yeah, that's not the impression I want to be leaving." So, I changed "power" to "ability" because it felt like less of a religious connotation.
 
Branding as a Constant Evolution
[00:38:30] Jami: I agree. And I think that's what's so important for everybody to remember. It's not a one-and-done thing. We're constantly evolving as authors, in our writing, and we can constantly be evolving in our brand. You know, our brand, we can just get better and better at it as we go along because we have more feedback. We have more people we can poll or talk to, or we know ourselves better. And I just think starting the journey is what's important. It's not where you finish because until we stop, we're not really finished.
 
Tweak the Dials Delicately
[00:39:10] Matty: I think it's also important, generally, to make changes gradually. And I was thinking of this in terms of if you feel like you have to change. One of the things we talked about was how comfortable people feel sharing personal things. I can imagine someone saying, "Yeah, I'm going to be the kind of sharing person who talks about personal topics or shares stories about my family." And then, for whatever reason, you decide you want to back off that. You don't want to sully your brand by making some statement. What I'm thinking of is all the people who say, "That's it, I'm off social media now," and then a week later they're back on.
 
It seems goofy because they're always back and forth. But if you decide you've made a decision that you don't want to stick with, like sharing, just pull back from it. There's no need to announce it to people that you're changing because over time it will become clearer. And the people who are there because they wanted to know about your family life will gradually drop off, and the people maybe who were made uncomfortable by that level of sharing will filter in.
 
[00:40:09] Jami: But, like tweaking the dials delicately, yes, that is really smart. And I mean, depending on your brand—like my brand is Sexy, Swoony, Pee Your Pants Funny—you are never going to see me in a political conversation online. Never, never, never. I mean, there are one or two instances where I've shared because of my family and the family I have, and my granddaughters and stuff like that, that I have made statements. Actually, it happened before George Floyd. My granddaughters are black. And so, there was an incident that happened when we were all together, and I was like, "Come on, y'all, we got to be better than this." You know, and, but that was before George Floyd.
 
Not that I wouldn't say it. I'm not a coward. But there are places to say things and there are places not to say things. For my brand, my Jami Albright brand is not where I would necessarily get into a discussion about that. That's just the decision I've made. You can make a different decision, and that's fine. But for me, that is the decision I've made, that I don't—I'm not going to really necessarily publicly address controversial things. I mean, privately. And if someone did something or said something, I would go to that person, but I'm not going to publicly do stuff like that because I just don't think that's necessarily what my readers are looking for.
 
The community you build is your brand.
 
[00:41:43] Matty: Yeah, I think that's one of the benefits of having a separate personal page from your public-facing pages a public, private profile, for example. And I also think people can think of curating their social media feeds as a form of branding as well because I remember when I first started getting traction on Facebook, let's say, and 99.9 percent of the comments were great. But every once in a while, there would be a weird one. And for a while, I had this dilemma about what should I do with that? Is it ethical for me to remove it? I'm like, yes, it's perfectly ethical because it's the community I'm building. And I don't want some weirdo showing up in the community. And if I have a party and some stranger walks in and starts saying inappropriate things to people, I'm going to kick him out. And so, curating that you're creating the community you want to see, and you're doing that not only for yourself but for the other people who want to share that community with you.
 
[00:42:33] Jami: Right. Exactly. Exactly. I love that. Yeah.
 
[00:42:37] Matty: Well, I think, I mean, the, your conversation about everything you do really being part of branding and the idea of having the persona that is what you brand with, I is brilliant. And, so, thank you so much, Jami. This has been such a fun conversation, and please let everyone know where they can go if they would like to hear more from you about branding and many other topics.
 
[00:42:54] Jami: Sure. You can go to the "Wish I'd Known Then for Writers" podcast, and that's where Sara and I do a lot of our discussion on things like this. My website, Jamialbright.com. I also do author consulting, and if you are interested in that, it's Jamialbright.com/authorservices. And yeah, my books are on Amazon. So, I'm in KU, so that's where I'm at.
 
[00:43:25] Matty: Thank you so much.
 
[00:43:26] Jami: You're welcome. You're welcome.

Episode 213 - Melding Words and Animation - Exploring Storia with Todd Gallet

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Todd Gallet discusses MELDING WORDS AND ANIMATION - EXPLORING STORIA, including the growing interest in multimedia and bingeable content; accommodating different preferences in consuming content; the opportunity for introducing new readers and viewers to our work; the kinds of stories Storia is looking for and the downside of basing Storia work on an established series; IP considerations; tapping into cross-promotional opportunities with your co-creators; involving the reader / viewer in the creative process; and the opportunity to interact with those who are enjoying your content.

Todd Gallet has spent the past eight years helping independent content creators monetize their work across video, audio, and now short fiction. This is the third venture of the founding team, leveraging their expertise in scaling content marketplaces and advertising to build engaged audiences.

Episode Links

https://www.storia.io/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddgallet/

Summary

Exploring the Fusion of Narrative, Animation, and Multimedia: An Inside Look at Storia
 
In our continuous journey to embrace innovations and challenge the conventional ways of storytelling, a new realm has captured our attention. Welcome to Storia - an immersive platform blending narrative, animation, and multimedia. It's a creative hub that sees written stories come to life through dynamic animations. Exciting? We thought so too.
 
In a recent conversation, we explored this intriguing world further with Todd Gallet, one of the brains behind Storia. We delved into its concept, potential, and what it could mean for the future of storytelling.
 
Storia - Writing Meets Animation Meets Multimedia
 
Storia's primary aim is to revamp how narrative content is presented and consumed. It's a platform designed to accommodate a short, immersive, and mobile reading experience layered with visual effects. With Storia, stories stretch beyond the confines of text and mindfulness to present a multimedia experience complete with animation, original score music, and sound effects.
 
Launching in December, Storia isn’t just focused on one genre; it aims to layer short fiction across all genres to attract a new wave of readers and potential readers. With original animations ranging from 2D, 3D to gaming realism, this platform holds promising potential to revolutionize reading.
 
The Interplay of writing and Animation
 
Creating a story for Storia does demand a tweak in a writer's traditional approach. The platform encourages writers to stay true to their narrative voice while integrating enough visual points and creative pacing.  This mixture enables creators to maximize the animation component and the effectiveness of the final content. The goal is to keep the process collaborative, drawing from the strengths and style of both writers and animators to make the stories both enchanting and engaging.
 
But does a writer need to be a fan of visual platforms to create for Storia? No! Instead, it's about finding great stories that could be accommodated into the new format. Stories that resonate, provoke emotional responses, introduce compelling characters, and can be brought to life with animation.
 
Building a Community of Creators and Readers
 
Building a thriving community of creators who can cross-promote their work is pivotal for Storia's journey. With the inclusive framework of this platform, creators can collaborate on new ideas and bring them to life. Furthermore, as Storia publishes the work, authors are credited and can interact with their fan base on various social media platforms.
 
While Storia doesn't dictate that authors engage on social media, they note that the platform provides an exciting opportunity for authors to reach new demographics and interact with a broader audience. In turn, this exposure could potentially drive more fans to the author's future works, thus expanding their influence and reach within the literature world.
 
In essence, Storia has one foot in the familiar world of written narrative and another in the not-so-familiar realm of animation and multimedia. This potent mix promises to breathe new life into the texture and pace of storytelling. Its launch is anticipated as a potential game-changer in the literary landscape — a playground for innovative content creation beyond the bounds of conventional writing or animation.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Todd Gallet. Hey, Todd, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Todd: Hello, pleasure to chat with you.
 
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure as well.
 
Meet Todd Gallet 
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you. Todd Gallet has spent the past eight years helping independent content creators monetize their work across video, audio, and now short fiction. This is the third venture of the founding team, leveraging their expertise in scaling content marketplaces and advertising to build engaged audiences. I heard about the topic we're going to be talking about today, Storia, from Josh Pachter, who I was talking with at dinner one night at the Creatures, Crimes, and Creativity Conference. Josh had been involved in this platform, and it's sort of focused on short fiction. Everybody knows I love everything related to short fiction.
 
What is Storia?
 
[00:00:44] Matty: So, Todd, let's start out just talking about what is Storia, and what made you see this as an opportunity that you wanted to pursue?
 
[00:00:52] Todd: Absolutely. So, Storia will be launching in December. It is a new immersive reading experience, which is going to layer short fiction, as you mentioned, across genres. So we can get into that, but pretty much across all genres, we'll be launching with, layering that with animation, across different types of animation, from 2D, 3D, gaming realism, etc., anime, and original score, music, and sound effects. So again, a multimedia platform really trying to attract the new and next generation of readers and potential readers.
 
The growing interest in multimedia 
[00:01:25] Matty: We were talking a little bit before we got started about your background in, interest in podcasting as well, and I think that all of these are, and Storia is just another example. All of these platforms are now finding ways to bring in other components, so, you know, what people might have thought of five years ago as a podcast is now maybe a multi-actor recreation of a fictional story or so on and so on. I'm guessing that kind of thing led into your interest in a platform like Storia.
 
[00:01:51] Todd: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you mentioned podcasting; we'll talk a little bit about our history and how that led us to today. But even with podcasting, again, even with the recording of this, it's not just an audio component anymore. There's a video component and a visual component to podcasting, which historically was an audio medium. Now, most of the consumption of podcasting is done on YouTube because people like to watch, as well as listen to this content. So, you know, that's always been of interest to us, is how we can blend the different media platforms.
 
Our expertise, historically, over the last eight, nine years, has been in scaling original content. Marketplaces. So, helping independent creators. First with video, we were in the early days of YouTube when YouTube creators were just getting started, and influencers were just starting to be a thing. We knew that there would be millions of creators who have quite a bit of talent but will have a hard time scaling their audiences, collaborating with other creators, monetizing that content. So, we became the largest independent marketplace for YouTubers and then sold that to YouTube in 2016. And then, as you mentioned, we got into the audio space for a few years and sold that company in 2020.
 
Opportunities in Top-Heavy Verticals and Fragmented Platforms 
[00:02:59] Todd: As we were looking for our next venture, we always look for verticals where there are a lot of talented creators, but it's very top-heavy, meaning that a few people make quite a bit of money, get quite a bit of marketing push, and receive a lot of attention. However, the long tail typically has a hard time breaking through, which is the case for most creative ventures. You can say the same thing about anything, you know, music, etc. But that's typically the way it is, but also in industries where the distribution is very fragmented. And, you know, unlike YouTube where there's one distribution, one platform, and many creators, in the literature space, it's quite fragmented in distribution, which makes it even harder for a writer to find an audience, to find a publication, to monetize their content, etc. So, that certainly was of interest.
 
And then when you look at the other side of this, which is animation, you know, once again, you have creators worldwide who are very talented across their particular type of animation, 2D, 3D, etc. But for them, very few have an opportunity to create their own content. Most of them end up working for a bigger studio, where they do a very specific thing for a year or two and then don't get any specific credit. They are just a cog in the animation wheel, and for many of them, they want the ability to express themselves creatively, to create new characters, create new worlds, but what they don't have are those characters and worlds to develop off of, right? Many of them just create a monster and put it out with no real narrative behind it. So we felt there would be an exciting opportunity to combine these two creatives and create a new output, which in the literary space, there hasn't been much new age innovation, like you mentioned, kind of a multimedia innovation in quite some time.
 
Introducing New Readers and Viewers to Our Work 
[00:04:41] Todd: So, our hope is that we can bring in new audiences that don't consider themselves readers by layering in this animation, which there are quite a few fans of, in anime, and comic books, and the explosion of comic cons. There is obviously a huge fan base there, and many of them might not consider themselves fiction readers. But they certainly are fans of this type of content, whether it be in live action or Marvel movies, etc. So they certainly love fiction, they love sci-fi, etc. But maybe they don't consider themselves readers, so they're not seeking out this short form content, which we believe and we're confident they will enjoy once it's presented to them in a more exciting, visually stimulating way. And our goal here is to bring all these creatives together.
 
[00:05:26] Matty: I think that the idea of people, the creators themselves not really recognizing the possible overlap is interesting from the point of view of fiction authors because I know until pretty recently, in fact, until I did a podcast episode with someone who had written and produced a graphic novel, I was not a graphic novel fan. Because I still thought of them as comic books, and I hadn't kind of made the jump to understand that, yes, there were comic books, but there was a whole spectrum of genres and approaches and levels of readership and so on. So do you feel as if an author is wanting to combine their written words with more visual aspects, is it something that they need to participate in, like, do they have to be readers of those more visual platforms in order to understand what is needed from a story point of view?
 
[00:06:17] Todd: No, I don't think so. You know, in fact, again, as we work with writers across genres, we are really excited to work with them in their own voice. We don't ask them to write any differently than they normally would. Obviously, there are some formatting things because we are layering animation, so there are certain formatting considerations on how we can maximize the animation component. But on the textual side, we really want them to express themselves as they normally would, and that's usually how we look at submissions. We want original voices, original ideas, etc. So, they don't necessarily have to be comic book fans or graphic novel fans to understand what we're trying to do here. Really, what we want to do is find great stories—some that have great subtext, some that have emotional pull at your heartstrings, some that just have great monsters, and our job is to go through them and adapt them into our new format, which again is basically just layering in animation. It's not completely animating the short stories.
 
Our goal here is that it is a reading experience; it'll be a mobile reading experience where someone controls the speed at which they read the text. But we are going to layer in the animation, either behind the text. So if you think of the opening to Star Wars, right, where you're reading and you're also seeing space behind it in a spaceship. It's very similar, right, so you're kind of reading and watching at the same time, or there'll be portions where someone is done reading that section, and it might just be a 20-30 second animation, full screen for them to kind of enjoy. So they're kind of bouncing back and forth; part of it they're imagining in their own head, some of it we're providing to them what it actually looks like. So it is quite an interesting experience, plus with the audio and the pacing music, etc.
 
So, you know, the impetus of this, we actually found is that with anime—and I don't know if you watch any anime or if your audience does—but quite a bit of anime is subtitled, right? It's in Japanese, but there's a huge number of Americans that don't speak Japanese that consume this content globally. Actually, not just Americans, but globally. So they're already used to reading the English subtitles along with an anime cartoon, right? So they're kind of already experiencing this, and it was when we started realizing that there's quite a bit of that on Netflix or on other platforms. People are already used to this behavior where they're kind of watching and reading and consuming at the same time. But nothing that's been kind of cross-genre that's typically done in the anime space.
 
But, we think we could bring that across genres, and to your point, blend some of these audiences. So it's not that if I like sci-fi, I have to go to a specific website because they have sci-fi content, or mystery thriller content, or romance novels. Those already seem to be niche in the distributions. There are specific websites or apps that focus on those types of content. We believe that there is an opportunity to blend those audiences. You know, once again, there are fans of Marvel movies that also consume rom-coms, and also consume, you know, when you think about streaming platforms. So it really is an opportunity to kind of provide just great stories and let people pick and choose what stories draw them in, and the types of art they like, the types of writers that they like. And in the end, hopefully, it drives more fans to the novel of that writer. You know, all of our stories are credited, so our goal, in a way that's mutually beneficial to everyone, is that they write a great story for us, it finds a home, it finds an audience. And then they can build a new fanbase for their next novel that is completely independent of our platform. I mean, that would be a win for both of us. What kinds of stories is Storia looking for?
 
[00:09:35] Matty: So, what kind of stories are you looking for? Like if someone is listening to this, a short fiction writer is listening to this and they're intrigued, are there characteristics of their own pool of short stories, because I understand you publish both original works and reprinted works, is that correct?
 
[00:09:49] Todd: Correct. Typically, with the reprints, you know, again, candidly, it has to be something that we just really love. And there have been. We definitely have licensed reprints. But with those, again, we want to find it a home. You know, typically with all of our stories, we really want to find a home for it as we kind of invest in the animation and marketing. So obviously originals are always preferable. Even working with writers to work, you know, some of the writers you have spoken to, they've worked with us on originals just for our platform. But across all genres, I guess to answer your question, it's across all genres. For us, we already work, as I mentioned, in sci-fi, fantasy, horror, mystery thrillers, romantic comedies, historical fiction, so anybody in your audience should feel comfortable submitting work.
 
I think for us, more importantly, is that it is... Visual, quote unquote, in nature, meaning it's descriptive and can be imagined in a way that is visual. It's not overly heavy in dialogue. Many times we'll get great stories that are heavy in dialogue, and what that does, it makes it difficult for us to animate. If there's three pages of dialogue for us, with two people sitting at a table, even if that dialogue is amazing, it's very difficult to animate in a way that's really exciting because it's just two people sitting at a table talking. So when people are writing or submitting work, for us, it's to keep the pacing of this story visually exciting. You know, every page or so has something new and exciting happening that we can bring in to life in an animation.
 
Outside of that, it's fairly open. You know, like I said, we were, in fact, intentionally looking to explore new categories, new storylines. How do we bring subtext into some of these and deeper messages in a way that's entertaining? So we're very open to, you know, reading anyone's story. The downside of tapping into an established series
 
[00:11:34] Matty: And do you have any preferences in terms of if someone has a series? I'm assuming it's okay for them to write a short story based on the characters of that series?
 
[00:11:44] Todd: Again, certainly open to it. You know, we actually just had a conversation with a writer earlier today who has a novel and a series of novels with the same IP. You know, for us, we're very open to it. Once again, similar to the reprint, I think it's often preferable that we start with a clean slate. What we've run into with having these discussions, especially if it's an IP, characters, world, etc., that have a significant fan base, is that we don't want to have pushback, where it should be a good thing, right, where we can market to these audiences that they could have a new visual experience. What you often find is that they're disappointed because they've imagined characters a certain way for the last five years. And now our artists are reimagining it in a way that they don't feel comfortable with. And that's actually where we ended up in that conversation, is that it might not be worth it because our artists are going to imagine it based on the short story description, and the characters might not look the way that they were described in a novel from years ago.
 
And you see this with other properties, right? Sometimes, fans are not happy with the way that the real, live-action version is presented, right? So, that is a bit of our concern. Though again, we're always open to conversations, and if it makes sense, but candidly, that's where we've netted out so far, that maybe it makes sense to just start with a clean slate, and then hopefully bring them into a new world where we can write those into novels or the author can write those into novels in the future with a new world.
 
[00:13:07] Matty: So, if somebody wanted to spin up a new world for Storia submission, would there be an expectation or an opportunity to make that a series of stories? And then you had also mentioned novel-length work, so can you talk about that a little bit?
 
[00:13:21] Todd: Yeah, no, absolutely. So we are starting with short fiction. So, you know, again, I would say two-to-four-thousand-word stories. Two to three is probably our sweet spot. A lot of it comes down to the animation component, which, as anyone might imagine, gets very costly the longer the story gets. Because even with our short stories, there's about three or four minutes of animation.
 
The power of bingeable content 
[00:13:42] Todd: And we also want to make this bingeable. Again, as we bring in new audiences, we want to make this bingeable content and exciting content. So, for us, we are starting with stories that are standalone, though oftentimes we encourage writers to leave it a bit open-ended, like you just said, that there could be new stories that are brought into these worlds. If a story is successful, we want to be able to come back to that writer and let's see what happens with this character after that initial short story. Let's bring in new characters, new exciting adventures in this world; we certainly are open as we continue to grow and see what the demand is to do lengthier productions. Full-length novels eventually, potentially, if there's a fan base and an interest for it.
 
But we do think the quickest path to building that audience is with kind of the short, bingeable fiction, so that's where we're starting. As we grow and as we explore, we might be exploring other things. So, to answer your question, we certainly want to be able to revisit episodic opportunities, though typically our first kind of go at it with a story and a world is going to be fairly standalone.
 
[00:14:40] Matty: I know you're not launching until December, but do you have an expectation about to what extent authors who find an audience, probably a new audience, well, maybe a new audience on Astoria, could expect to have those visually oriented fans, then follow them on to other works? If they have a back list of unanimated text, textual books, do you have an expectation that there will be, that it will, in a way, kind of act as a reader magnet for their other works?
 
[00:15:09] Todd: We certainly hope so. As I mentioned, all of the writers are credited in will be credited in the app, and then also when you look, again, very early days, but in just the explosion and the reception and engagement of our content on social platforms, you know, we're going heavy on TikTok, but also on Instagram, but we're launching short trailers of our stories, think movie trailers on TikTok, and some of them are getting millions of views, and engagement, and the writers and authors are tagged in those.
 
So as we go into this new medium, if your writers don't have Instagram and TikTok and some of these platforms, it'll be a great opportunity, like you just said, to attract new audiences and fanbases that they might not even be going after at this point, so this could be an exciting opportunity for writers to not only reach a completely different audience, but let's say our trailer for this story has two million views or a million views, and the author's tagged. Of course, it's an opportunity for them to leverage that and also co-market it. All of our agreements have the opportunity for our writers to co-market this content, to drive people to the app, and to talk to their fan bases, etc. So, we certainly hope it's an opportunity for them to increase their personal audience and fanbase for their other work.
 
IP considerations 
[00:16:20] Matty: I'm interested in this IP aspect, which I think is always important, in 'Taking the Short Cut,' which is the book I co-wrote with Mark Leslie Lefebvre about short fiction. We talk about this a little bit, but also, I think another great resource is Douglas Smith's 'Playing the Short Game,' which talks more about legal considerations. And, I'm thinking through, you know, what you were saying about maybe it's not ideal to have it be a character that already has an established fan base and book form, but I just had a conversation with a podcast guest about series, and we were talking about spin-off characters and how sometimes a character that is fun as a secondary character is too much as a primary character, but I can imagine a character in my Ann Kinnear suspense novels that I think would be great in two to three thousand word chunks, and would also be very fun to see an animation. And I think he's described in such a way that probably the animators and my readers would have the same expectation about what his appearance would be because I'm pretty explicit about it. Is that more attractive to you than an established protagonist? And if so, what are the IP considerations there since there is some overlap between an established series and a story?
 
[00:17:30] Todd: Yeah, I mean, that is a great point, and I actually think we'd be much more interested probably in that. Even when you think more broadly, as we work with other existing IPs, video games, or movie characters, or novels, we're actually very interested in the idea of let's fleshing out some of the secondary characters that haven't had backstories of that secondary character. I think that's like a perfect opportunity. I think you just made a great point that maybe 3,000 words are perfect to just establish a backstory on a character that people want more of, right, and start building out that world. So I think that is certainly an opportunity that we'd be open and interested in.
 
And from an IP perspective, of course, that's an important question, and we can segue to it here. We're very open to those conversations. You know, we have various opportunities to work with writers, whether it be original story content or existing stories in IP, on how we work with them from an agreement perspective. We have everything from, you know, full rights, like almost like a right-for-hire situation. Typically, those tend to be on originals that we collaborate on, that are kind of intended to be on the Storia platform, to license agreements, where we are licensing the story for a period of time. I mentioned, ideally we try to extend that exclusivity on the story itself, for as long as possible as we invest in the animation. But on the characters, we are open to the writer kind of continuing to explore that in published work, in extended work, etc. You know, novels, etc. So, you know, we've co-written these agreements. It's in conjunction with writers, various writers across various genres. So we feel, and the writers so far have felt that they're all like very fair and transparent and allow them to decide the direction that they want to go with the story.
 
So I think there are opportunities for all these different things, whether it be existing stories, existing IP, or, you know, original content that we can find a home for and explore.
 
[00:19:16] Matty: I have a little homework assignment to write up a two to three-thousand-word story.
 
[00:19:20] Todd: Yes, we're going to get you for that; we're going to get you on the story. I promise you that.
 
A valuable craft exercise 
[00:19:24] Matty: I hope so. It is interesting, though, two to three thousand words. I think this is a really interesting thought exercise or creative exercise for writers because I'm actually pursuing a guest who can address the question or the comment I get a lot from novel writers, which is, I'll talk about the opportunities that short fiction offers, and they'll say, "Oh, that all sounds really good, but I can't write that short." So, knowing how to write short is one skill set, but then knowing how to write short in two to three thousand words for a story that is going to be animated is a really different thing. You have to bring a really different mindset to that, I think.
 
One of the reasons I'm thinking that this character would be very good for an animated presentation is he's kind of exaggerated. He's very tall and very thin, has sunken eyes, and, you know, I think it would be a more interesting visual experience than my protagonist. But some of those things almost go against what writers have been trained to think about. You know, they're trained to think not in terms of exaggeration. Do you have any thoughts about that? How writers could or should get over the hump to make their work as appropriate for a platform like Storia as possible.
 
[00:20:32] Todd: Yeah, absolutely. And I think most of the writers, again, having conversations with them, most of them don't typically write two to three-thousand-word stories, right? Even for them, short fiction is longer than two to three thousand. When they consider what short fiction is, or again, like you said, they're working on novels or, you know, whatever it might be. I think it is an interesting exercise. One, how do you give something depth in two to three thousand words because again, you know, we don't want it to just be very surface? It's not typically our stories; the ones we have enjoyed and found the most successful are not just kind of a single scenario single scene short story. A lot of them do have, even if a single protagonist, multiple characters or some level of character development or in a mystery thriller some level of build-up.
 
But for them, the exercise is, again, how do you cram that in a way that still is digestible. How do we raise the stakes without giving a ton of exposition? How do you care about a character on the first page without kind of telling readers why they should care about that character? This is part of the exercise that I think writers have found fun, and a good opportunity for them to work on this kind of more niche skill set, right? I mean, how do you cram in visual description in a way that isn't necessarily overkill but gives the animator enough, you know, description to really bring to life what they're expressing? To build relationships without a ton of dialogue? These are the kind of things, again, that we have been working with writers on.
 
And also collaboration with our editor. You know, as we read thousands of these stories, and we produce, you know, what we'll be launching with 50, but, you know, as we end up producing hundreds of these, that process will only continue to improve. You know, as we read more of these and as we see what is successful, it is a continual learning process in conjunction with the writers and animators. We kind of started from scratch, so to be fair, the first couple were a complete learning process. We didn't really know—I mean, to your point—how does this all mesh together? What's the appropriate length of dialogue? Or, how much description is too much description?
 
So, all of this stuff is what we continue to learn, and I think once we launch and readers can, and writers can read the final content, I think it'll only improve and streamline because they'll have a better idea of what the output is. So I think this is an exciting time for writers to kind of collaborate with us and find the right mix of all these things. You know, again, it is a new medium. So no one's an expert, not even us. We're very open about that. We're open to the collaboration. What we really want is just to find good voices, good writers, good ideas because from there, we're going to find—we actually handpick the animators.
 
So, once again, this is a complete collaboration where if you write about a certain type of environment, or you have a monster, or you are a romantic comedy, all of these are brought to life in different formats. So we're not trying to fit it into a certain pot. We are actually handpicking an animator that can bring it to life in an appropriate way based on how you're describing things, right? So, you know, our goal here is to make it work in the most authentic and organic way possible.
 
The Experience of Creative Collaboration 
[00:23:35] Matty: The idea of the creative collaboration is really important. I think that probably our listeners would have most experience possibly with audiobooks. And I know that the experience of listening to a professional narrator read my work has been both very gratifying, but also a learning experience. I can see her emphasizing things that I didn't expect to be emphasized, and I can carry that learning forward to the next book to make it clearer what my intent was there.
 
I think there's a tendency for an author to want to say, "Oh, no, no, that's not what I meant. I want you to redo it," but they need to recognize that the narrator is also a creative professional and you need to give them some latitude in how they depict it. And I think it might be even more extreme when someone's seeing an animation of their work. Can you describe a little bit—do the writers have any input, little input, a lot of input into the animation? And can you provide any guidance on how people should absorb the animated rendition of their story when they finally see it if they are accepted as a story?
 
[00:24:36] Todd: I think coming into this with an open mind is probably going to be the most successful because like I said, we are all kind of learning and collaborating on the fly on this work. And also want to be respectful of both sides, the writer's work and the writer's voice, but also the animator's creative freedom and creativity and their style, etc.
 
So to date, we are pretty much the middleman between the writer and the animator. As we grow and expand our tech platform, there will be opportunities for our more established writers and animators on Storia to potentially collaborate, but right now, we are managing that process, to be fair. What we do always encourage is if a writer has any thoughts, notes, etc.
 
From an animation perspective, including the mood, colors, and style, we're certainly open to receiving feedback. However, what we do is pull out the animation notes, with our editor having the final say in creating the vision shared with the animator. As our team expands, dedicated art teams will handle this process. We take your writing as is and create a visual representation, providing the animator with creative freedom based on those notes.
 
There is collaboration in the process, and when we return to the writer, most edits focus on format rather than content. Occasionally, we may suggest trimming the conversation for a smoother reading experience or making structural changes to enhance the animation flow. The goal is to streamline the reading experience once the animations are incorporated.
 
Expect some back and forth in the editing process. While we may accept the story as is, there could be tweaks after animations are added. We act as intermediaries in these conversations and appreciate the writers' efforts. We credit the writers and aim to maintain the story in their voice, making changes based on their notes.
 
Our interactions with writers have been positive, and we aim to be respectful of their time and effort. We strive to accomplish as much upfront as possible, reducing the need for extensive edits later in the process. Our goal is to streamline the overall process and create the best possible product.
 
Reactions and Early Days 
While there haven't been many animations released on our social platforms yet, writers have expressed excitement. Seeing their stories garner over a million views on TikTok is thrilling, and we understand that there may be different interpretations. We hope writers are happy and excited about the outcomes, recognizing that this is an exploration with some expected variations from their initial visions.
 
I mean, you're basically giving your story, but in a way, that's kind of cool, right? Because that's how readers interpret. When you get, when you put your story out there, every reader envisions a character in their own mind, in a very different way. And this is basically what's happening here—our artists are reading your story, and our editor is reading your story totally objectively, bringing to life what they envisioned it to be based on your description.
 
So, I think it'll be a very cool exercise, and my estimation is that writers will be really excited once they see people providing feedback on a story that they might not otherwise have read or been exposed to. So, I think it's, most of the writers are very excited to see what comes out of it.
 
Involving the reader/viewer in the creative process 
[00:29:15] Matty: A past podcast guest, Robert Blake Whitehill, I remember him mentioning that he has a relationship with an art school, and he often has art school students who are interning for him. But one of the things they do is they illustrate scenes from his books, and he'll use those on social media. It's very interesting because they're freakishly different. Some are quite realistic, and some are very cartoonish in a stylistic way, or, you know, it's just all over the place. And I've never seen any pushback from people saying, "That's not how I saw it." It's an interesting analogy—the still picture, you know, it's a still picture, not an animation, but still seeing different people's interpretation of it. And I think it draws the reader, viewer, listener into the creative process in a way that can be very appealing.
 
[00:30:06] Todd: Yeah, and again, as we explore the visual medium of it, there are so many ways. You know, when you think about fan art as an entire category of creative content, right? People create their own interpretation of video games or movies, etc. Cosplay, all these different mediums where people are just providing their own interpretation of someone else's creative content.
 
So, we expect worlds of that, right? From our interpretation of someone's writing, someone will then reinterpret our interpretation into a cosplay or into fan art, and then we encourage that. That's kind of part of this whole medium—it's just to drive more interest in the characters, the world, etc.
 
Accommodating different preferences in consuming content
 
[00:30:47] Matty: I had a question that's, I'll probably just clip this out and use it as a standalone thing on social media and YouTube, but can you just describe how people listen to podcasts on YouTube? Because I have my podcast on YouTube, but I honestly don't understand the mechanics of how people are doing that.
 
[00:31:06] Todd: You know, it's funny, having worked at YouTube and then, you know, working on my own podcast company, I only consume podcasts on YouTube. So I guess maybe I'm most appropriate to answer this. You know, for me, it's all behavior-driven, right? Before becoming a quote-unquote podcast listener, I was a heavy YouTube consumer.
 
So whatever the content was, I, that's part of my behavior, to go to YouTube at certain times of the day and just watch stuff. Even with music, I listen to music on YouTube. So much of that is behavior. I do find myself liking the visual component. If I were to watch this interview, I liked seeing people and, you know, talking and seeing their facial expressions, etc.
 
And that's when I consume podcasts. I like the visual version. I guess it draws me in. I guess that's part of our business model—is that the visual draws people in, beyond the single medium, right? Just the audio. I think the visual is another layer of kind of engagement that draws people in. Also, really kind of focuses the attention a little bit more, right?
 
On YouTube, you have to kind of sit and watch it. Many times, people aren't running or doing the dishes or whatever they're doing. With a podcast, you could put it in your pocket, or if you're in the car, you could do something else. That's a positive aspect of podcasting, but it also splits the attention.
 
I actually find on YouTube that you have to be a little more focused because most people consuming it are sitting and watching and listening. So, my assumption is that they're a little more engaged. Also, when you look at the numbers, the engagement numbers on YouTube for podcasts are crushing it.
 
I mean, they also have a very large audience, right? So, the algorithm and the audience base on YouTube help build podcasts faster than on an audio platform just because of the algorithm and the discovery. YouTube is so massive in that way. So, I don't know if that answered your question, but that seems to be my behavior.
 
And even when I was working in advertising on podcasts, the visual component is certainly a positive. I mean, the content itself being the same, the engagement on the YouTube side seems to be really valuable.
 
[00:33:13] Matty: Yeah, well, it's interesting because I was applying too much of my own preference to my misunderstanding of what was going on. To me, podcasts are by definition what I do when I'm multitasking, when I'm walking the dog or driving somewhere. So, I was thinking, well, people must be somehow downloading the audio. I wasn't making that leap to say, no, they actually are sitting and watching it.
 
[00:33:37] Todd: Yeah, no, exactly. It's funny; whenever I hear, and my wife says it often, that when she listens to an audiobook, she considers it reading. It kind of draws that same analogy. A podcast doesn't necessarily have to be audio. That's how it started, right? But it could be multi-dimensional. So, you could be watching a podcast on YouTube. It's all about the content and how you're consuming it and engaging with it. There's a social element to these platforms.
 
It would be the same thing as you chopping up your podcast; you just said you'd chop this up and put it on social—on TikTok, on Facebook, on Instagram. People would be able to engage with it in a social component that on a podcast platform, they wouldn't be able to as much. Depending on where they're consuming their podcasts.
 
On Apple Podcasts, there really isn't much of a social element to it. You could write a review, but there isn't much social sharing, discussing, commenting. But if you chopped it up and put it on social, there is that for the same content. So, there are definitely pros and cons to leveraging all these different platforms for one single interview. We need a better phrase than "consuming content."
 
[00:34:41] Matty: I think that there's definitely a language lacking to cover the fact that the only way to describe what you were talking about—absorbing different content in different media—is consuming content, which sounds horrible. It sounds very medical and kind of like a problem. I think people do stumble over if I'm listening to an audiobook, am I really reading? And I wish that there were a better way to say consuming content in a way that sounded more appealing than consuming content because it does get awkward to say, "So, readers, listeners, and viewers," and stumble through all that, the lack of the appropriate language to use.
 
The opportunity to interact with those who are enjoying your content 
[00:35:20] Todd: Yeah, I mean, that's part of our exploration of this new medium. What draws people in? Is it the reading, the animation, or the audio? What do people respond to throughout the story? This is that part of it, right? And like, how do you draw them in? Is it promoting it to readers or animators? We're very excited to see, you know, like you said, what drives the engagement. At the end of the day, we just want content creators to be able to share their content, you know, whatever that content is, if it's long form, movies, or books. Whatever you want people to consume, you want people to enjoy it. Let's change "consume" to "enjoy." That's, you know, you said, well, let's change the language. We want people to enjoy it. And if you can't get people to enjoy it, then it's unfortunate, right? There are so many great stories to be told, but people have to, you know, find it and engage with it for it to find, you know, to find that audience. So, you know, that's our goal here is to see where we can expand that into.
 
[00:36:24] Matty: That's great. I can see there are two sets of... two different kinds of work for an author to do. One is to write the story and submit it and see what happens. And then if it's accepted, whether it's on Storia or they're finding some other way to expand beyond words on the page, audio or video or animation or whatever that might be, then there's the opportunity to interact with people on social media just as you're describing. And I can imagine that could be a huge time suck. I can totally see how this kind of thing would be very popular on TikTok, but I really have no desire to spend any time on TikTok. So, do you set expectations, or do you have hopes about the extent to which the story authors will interact with their fans on the different social media platforms that you would post the animations on?
 
[00:37:09] Todd: To say we have an expectation? No, not currently. I mean, it's really up to the writers, and again, we probably will, as we grow and evolve, have opportunities to help maybe writers that aren't kind of heavy on some of these social platforms so they can maximize that opportunity, but we don't currently or we haven't currently kind of leaned in to provide any insight there. Again, as I mentioned, I think the animators are probably a little more involved on social. Many of them have kind of social presences or posting their content there, their portfolio. So those probably a little more. A lot of the writers to date aren't on, let's say, TikTok, but might be on Facebook and Instagram or they don't have a huge following there.
 
So I think it'll be part of that evolution is to see how they can tap into some of that and leverage it. I think part of the exciting conversations I've had is with writers that are excited about reaching a new demographic, right? And then part of this whole experience is writers across genres that, you know, they don't think their fan base is 18 to 24 gamers, right? That's not an audience base that they thought that they'd be reaching. But we have a story that has 1.4 million views on TikTok that is a younger demographic audience. Our audience on TikTok is, you know, 18 to 24 US, you know, male-female split. So I think there is this exciting kind of evolution that will happen with a lot of these writers to find... And hopefully engage with, I mean, again, as part of that exploration is how do they engage with those new audiences? Because as they continue to put out new work, you know, my hope is that they will be able to leverage that.
 
Tapping into cross-promotional opportunities with your co-creators
 
[00:38:46] Matty: Well, one thing I think is really positive in what I'm hearing is that it seems like there's an opportunity for cross-promotion between the authors and the animators in a way that I don't see a lot in the audiobook world. I love my audiobook narrators, but I have to say, they've never been a promotional channel for me. Like, I thought, oh, well, you know, once, if I post about the audiobook and I flag them and I mention their name, then obviously they're going to be sharing, and it may just be, you know, coincidental to the audiobook narrators I have, but, The animators, I would think this would apply to audiobook narrators too, but the animators have a clear incentive to also be sharing this work, you know, both a creative pride incentive, but also probably a financial incentive because it would no doubt lead to more work for them, but I think any of those areas where you can collaborate with another creator and not only get the satisfaction of the new creation, but also The cross-promotional opportunities is really valuable.
 
[00:39:39] Todd: Yes, absolutely.
 
[00:39:41] Matty: Well, Todd, thank you so much. This has been so interesting, and please let the listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online, including Storia.
 
[00:39:50] Todd: Absolutely, so our website is Storia.io. There you can find submission forms for writers and or animators, and also examples of our work, etc. You can also go on all social platforms, Storia Originals, on TikTok, on Instagram. There, as I mentioned, we're posting behind-the-scenes animations, we're posting excerpts from our stories and trailers, and it's a great place to kind of keep track of some of the work that we're putting out as we head towards our launch and also on our website if you want you can sign up for early access on our waitlist so we will be giving people access to kind of check out the early stories and give feedback and we're excited to start getting that feedback as we kind of get closer to our more formal launch so hopefully we'll have an opportunity to work with and speak to all of your listeners at some point along the way.
 
[00:40:40] Matty: That was great. Thank you so much.
 
[00:40:41] Todd: My pleasure, we'll talk soon.

Episode 212 - What Writers Can Learn from The First Two Pages with Art Taylor

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Art Taylor discusses WHAT WRITERS CAN LEARN FROM THE FIRST TWO PAGES, including the backstory of why "two pages"; the power of being a percolator (in addition to a plotter or pantser); how research can engender a story; waiting as a mechanism of conflict and suspense; short fiction as an experimental platform; the importance of thinking consciously about the craft issues and studying what gets scrapped; considering advise from veteran and first-time writers; and the power of starting with a bang ... or not.

Art Taylor is the Edgar Award-winning author of two collections: THE ADVENTURE OF THE CASTLE THIEF AND OTHER EXPEDITIONS AND INDISCRETIONS and THE BOY DETECTIVE & THE SUMMER OF ’74 AND OTHER TALES OF SUSPENSE. His debut book, ON THE ROAD WITH DEL & LOUISE: A NOVEL IN STORIES, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. His short fiction has also won the Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Macavity Awards. He is an associate professor of English at George Mason University.

Episode Links

Author website: www.arttaylorwriter.com
Facebook profile: facebook.com/artTaylorShortStories
Instagram profile: www.instagram.com/arttaylorwriter/
LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/arttaylorwriter/

Transcript

The following is created by entering the Descript AI-generated transcript into ChatGPT with the prompt Correct spelling and grammatical mistakes in this transcript.

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Art Taylor. Hey Art, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Art: Good, how are you? Thanks for having me.
 
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you here.
 
Meet Art Taylor
 
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Art Taylor is the Edgar Award-winning author of two collections, "The Adventure of The Castle Thief and Other Expeditions and Indiscretions," and "The Boy Detective in the Summer of '74, and Other Tales of Suspense." His debut book, "On the Road with Del and Louise," a novel in stories, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel.
 
His short fiction has also won the Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Macavity awards, and he is an associate professor of English at George Mason University. I met Art when I think we were both at Malice Domestic, and I attended one of your panel discussions, and I just thought it was so great. I did a little research on you after that, and I came across The First Two Pages.
 
So, before we dive into the focus of our conversation, I just wanted to ask you about what The First Two Pages are and what is the story behind that concept.
 
What is The First Two Pages?
 
[00:01:00] Art: Oh, sure. Thanks so much.
 
Um, you know, I'm very fortunate to be curating, and I use that word, The First Two Pages blog series. It was actually started by another short story writer in April of 2015, so it's been running for a while.
 
B. K. Stevens, Bonnie Stevens, was a terrific short story writer who came up with the idea of starting a blog. I'm going to read to you what she wrote to the folks who she recruited to participate. I hope the post on this blog will offer both writers and readers insights into how some successful opening pages were written.
 
What kinds of issues and approaches did the writers consider? What sort of decisions did they make? How did they create opening pages that made agents or editors keep reading? Why did these first pages work? I think your post will interest other readers if it offers them ideas they can use in their works.
 
I think it will interest your readers if it helps them understand why they've enjoyed your work so much. You know, there's the idea Noah Lukman wrote the first five pages. If you can't capture an agent's attention, an editor's attention in the first five pages, you've lost them.
 
[00:02:04] Matty: Or readers.
 
[00:02:05] Art: Stories, your readers, exactly. And if in a short story, is it the first five paragraphs? There's some shortness there. So a lot of that is how do you capture readers' attention?
 
Bonnie passed away in August of 2017, kind of abruptly right on the, in fact, as we were going to the Suffolk Mystery Authors Festival in Suffolk, Virginia, and she did not attend and passed away soon after that.
 
Her family asked me to continue the series; I had been a contributor there. Bonnie and I were terrific friends, and our thoughts about the short stories were very similar in many ways, as we found on panels at Malice and in other places. So I've been pleased to carry it on since then. It's hard to believe that I have carried it on longer than she did it because I still feel like it's her blog, in many ways, but I'm grateful to be able to curate it.
 
So that's some background on The First Two Pages.
 
[00:02:57] Matty: That's great. And I think that even for a longer work, first two pages is a great target because you were talking about the first five pages concept and certainly you want to grab a reader in the first five pages. But I think that as time goes on, even with a long work, maybe The First Two Pages are, you know. The key pages, writers should be looking at anyway.
 
[00:03:15] Art: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's so much that can be done there. I mean, it's, and it has to do with so many things. You know, are we laying the first clues of the plot? Are we introducing our characters? We're trying to... Get some conflict and tension introduced, but also give some—I hate to use this word—but backstory, you know, fold some backstory in. So there's a lot that has to be done, and so I do think it's a good place to focus this kind of attention.
 
[00:03:41] Matty: Yeah, perfect. So I had asked you to just go through your experience with The First Two Pages blog and pull out some best practices, the top lessons that you and your readers have learned from The First Two Pages. And so I'm just going to work through some of these.
 
[00:03:56] Matty: And the first one is everyone works differently. What did you learn about everyone works differently?
 
[00:04:01] Art: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think there's a sense in which if we can just get the magic formula, you know, then we'll know what to do, and it's the same way that people ask the question, how do you write if you're a writer? As if we could just figure it out.
 
What time to write and that sort of thing. I think the same thing is true with The First Two Pages, and what I found was how very different everybody is, how very different people come to stories. Number one, where the ideas come from, and then also the way they start the story itself. But then also the way that their process is about writing in general.
 
We hear about pantsers and plotters. There are people that I've hosted on the blog who have mapped out everything about a story before they've put down word one. And other folks who are like, well, I've got this idea, and it's about a paragraph long, and then let me see what happens next. So there's that range.
 
And of course, many of the writers talk about the genesis of a short story. Whether it's like, I read this book, or this story, and this prompted me in this direction, or I had a dream, or I was taking a trip and something about the setting, or here's an idea situation I conjured up. So I think it's interesting to see every stage of the process there.
 
Where an idea comes from, how it propels a writer toward the page, and then how they think about those blank pages and how they're going to approach them. Another thing I think is interesting is how many writers discover something about their own craft as they begin writing the essay. I've had so many people write to me as they've turned in their essay and say, you know what, I didn't realize what I'd done here until I started trying to articulate what I'd done.
 
In some cases, there is a sense in which a veteran writer, particularly, may have absorbed a lot of these craft techniques where they're not thinking about it. The same way a golfer, you know, when I've tried to play golf, it's like, put this finger here, put this hand here, make sure it interlocks there, and I joke with my students, like, well, Tiger Woods doesn't do that whenever he grabs a golf club because it becomes natural.
 
When they're forced to articulate it, though, that's where some of those craft choices come to mind. I will say, if I'm not going on too long, this is something that I've done myself. When I wrote an essay for Bonnie, Bonnie asked me to write about a story called "Parallel Play." And when she asked me about it, I realized that I knew where I wanted to talk about.
 
There's a scene in this story. It's about a young mother at one of these kind of Gymboree places with her son who finds herself getting into some trouble as they're leaving, and there's a scene in which one of the men in the story kind of forces his way through a door, and I thought, that is something I can talk about.
 
That wasn't until 40 percent of the story when I looked back, and suddenly, I was trying to realize, well, what had I done in The First Two Pages that laid the groundwork for everything ahead? So I think there's a process in which not only the readers and the writers can learn something, but the writers themselves will learn something about their own craft just by articulating some of those craft choices.
 
Being a percolator
 
[00:07:11] Matty: Well, one of the things that I think you said at Mouse Domestic, and I wrote this down immediately, is that everybody knows about plotters and pantsers, but you talked about being a percolator. Was that you?
 
[00:07:22] Art: Yes, that was me, and
 
[00:07:24] Matty: Tell me about that. I just love that.
 
[00:07:27] Art: Coming back to it, you know, I mean, you hear about plotters, and I know novelists — I can mention two of them, James Ellroy and Jeffrey Deaver, who plot out every step of the book before they ever write anything. In fact, outlines that are going to run almost as long as the book.
 
I think people with short stories do the same thing. And then folks, as I said, who start out in the middle. You know, I get an idea, and a lot of times, before I write about it, I just take walks, ride around in the car, or if I've got part of it done, then I step away from it, and then, again, to use that word, percolate.
 
I just let stuff bubble up inside. What are the possibilities for this story? And I'm going to come back to The First Two Pages with this. What have I laid down, maybe in the opening that I've written, that provides some of the threads that I want to follow up on without my maybe knowing it?
 
I'm going to come up with this idea that, you know, there's a great book I'd recommend called "Narrative Design" by Madison Smart Bell, if only because of the essay in the beginning about the unconscious art. We do a lot of stuff creatively without thinking about what it is, and so I try to turn around and listen to whatever I've done creatively to see what I've laid down that might have some longer resonance with the plot. And a lot of times, that just takes thinking about it, getting away from the computer and letting it percolate a little bit to see what brews.
 
[00:09:00] Matty: Yeah, that's why word count has never worked for me because I'm writing not only when I'm sitting at the keyboard, and a lot of times I'm folding the laundry or walking the dog or, you know, driving to the grocery store or whatever, and I'm writing, percolating away. And so by the time I sit down, I have a clear idea of what I want to capture.
 
I'm just having this interesting experience with the book I'm working on now, which is my fourth Lizzy Ballard thriller. And there are two poker scenes. I'm not a poker player. The first poker scene is the first scene in the book.
 
And then there's one about halfway through. So I was trying to learn about poker while I was writing the book. And so in the first chapter, even the first chapter that I gave my editor, I had to put in a thing that said, "And then she plays poker" because I was really struggling with how to present it.
 
Spoiler alert, but it's not standard poker because she's reading the minds of the other people who are playing the game. And so it's not like I can kind of do standard poker research. It's different. And I am going to 20 Books Vegas in November. So I thought, okay, I'm just going to wait until I get to 20 Books Vegas to write this scene.
 
Or, I should say, I'm just going to wait until I get to Las Vegas to write this scene, kind of independent of 20 Books, but finally, thanks to friends, poker-playing friends, and YouTube, I finally got to write this scene. I got my brain around what I needed to have this poker scene be. However, there's a long way of setting up the fact that it's the first time I've given my editor what I felt was an editor-ready copy that still had the first chapter that was very, very sketchy. So once I got my brain around it, I've been working on that first chapter, and I realized that there's a risk. Because I'm kind of working on it out of order, the tone of the first chapter is starting to feel very different, almost like more of a short story. Because I know I have like 2,200 words, and I'm polishing them and polishing them and polishing them, which is important for the first chapter. But I almost feel like there's a risk I'm going to polish them too much, and now it's going to go from kind of like a short story vibe to a novel vibe, which is like, less fussy about exactly weird descriptive words, like, I don't know that I would have called something Azure before.
 
After the first chapter, is what I'm describing sounding familiar to you, either as a writer or as a teacher?
 
[00:11:24] Art: Yeah, I think it's interesting, you know, the way that something comes together and the way you're trying to get it as a whole there. We think about the opening; I understand what you're saying as setting the foundation, not just for plot and character and all that, but for tone and style and everything. And when you go back and try to maybe retrofit something, you know, there are some challenges into making it seamless. Is that kind of what you're talking about?
 
[00:11:50] Matty: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's more of a change in tone, just as you're saying.
 
[00:11:55] Art: Yeah. And, you know, I'm a writer who doesn't necessarily, to be honest, always start with The First Two Pages. You know, sometimes I'll write something that's going to show up later in a short story and a primary, like short stories, something that'll show up later in a short story, even the end of a short story, and then it's a matter of how am I going to get a piece that I'm writing later that actually is earlier to work together.
 
And I think that's a challenge. This goes back to reinforce that there are a lot of different ways that a process can work, a lot of different ways that writers approach this. But I'm going to echo another point that you said as well about folding the laundry. You know, I've had people talk about they have to write 500 words a day or 1,000 words a day.
 
My advice is always don't focus on that, but just focus on steady steps forward. Whatever those steps are and wherever you're adding something to a manuscript, there are a lot of times when I'll write a lot during the day and other times when it's just. Use that word again, percolating in my head. That still counts as writing to me. And it is a matter of then fitting all the pieces together.
 
[00:13:00] Matty: Yeah, I think we're all doing all three of those things, plotting, pantsing, and percolating. It's just that one is more based at home, that we feel most comfortable with, and the other ones are maybe more of a stretch because everybody's got to plot at some point, and everybody pantses at some point, and everybody's percolating too. But sometimes they do it with their fingers on the keyboard, and sometimes they don't.
 
[00:13:17] Art: Yeah, I will say as well, you talked about kind of doing research and having to do the research. I'll fill in this scene later. You know, it's interesting the way that, looking at The First Two Pages that I've read, research can engender a story, can help to bring it along. I host the Edgar Award finalists each year, and I've hosted the Agatha Award finalists before as well.
 
I invited him to do an essay. James Ziskin did one, gosh, I guess it was a year and a half ago. I think it was, or maybe it was two years ago. I mean, post-COVID, all time is weird. But James Ziskin did a piece where he had written a Sherlock pastiche, and he was nominated for the Edgar for it.
 
It was interesting; the research he did, he looked at the concordance, read the Sherlock Holmes stories (he said he hadn't read them in a long time), and then looked at the concordance. See, what are the words that keep coming up in the Sherlock Holmes stories? And then looked at, and I'm going to check this out and make sure I have it right, the Ngram viewer on Google to look at word frequency, at the era in which he was writing.
 
So a lot of this was at the level of language. Let me do research about what was the vocabulary used at the time and let that contribute to things. In the same way you're talking about, let me go and see how poker is done. Let me immerse myself in some way in that world. What's going to come out of that?
 
And then the hope is that's going to lay a foundation for what's coming next, even though you're laying some of that foundation later. So yes, it's a challenge, I think.
 
[00:14:45] Matty: Yeah, and I think that idea of balancing the careful research with what you want to actually use in the story because I got to the point where I understood the poker terminology, and I have a friend who has actually played competitive poker, tournament poker, and she had given me a proposal for the game that this woman could play, but I realized that it was so heavy with poker terminology that would be unfamiliar to the reader, that I almost had to understand what she was saying at a more complex level, and then I had to dumb it down because this is not a book that's intended for poker players primarily, and so I have to create the excitement of the game without diving into too much detail, and I'm actually having fun watching, you know, what poker players consider the best movie poker scenes because that's, I think, a good example where the moviemakers have had to dumb it down a bit and yet still capture the emotion of the game.
 
[00:15:42] Art: Yep. Absolutely. I teach at Mason, as we said, I taught a course in spy novels and I taught an Ian Fleming book, "Casino Royale." It's amazing how much card playing is in the James Bond. We watch the movies, and you don't think about how much card playing. There's lots of card playing in the James Bond novel. So I would recommend you look in that direction, see how he manages that too. He does a good job of it, I think.
 
[00:16:03] Matty: Yeah, I just yesterday watched one where they're betting like 150 million dollars or something like that. That was super fun. And what I liked about that was there is a point where James Bond is looking at the guy he's finally betting against. It's just down to the two of them.
 
And there's a long period where he's just looking at him. I mean, it's probably only a few seconds, but in movie time, it feels very long. And you can tell he's kind of waiting to see if his opponent is going to have a tell. Super fun.
 
Waiting as a Mechanism of Conflict and Suspense
 
[00:16:36] Art: Yeah, I would say that's kind of a transition to another point. Something I've learned from The First Two Pages, and it brings us back to Bonnie as well, is about this idea of what conflict is, where tension is. You talk about the idea of just looking and waiting, and we don't think of that as action, you know, and yet it can be very suspenseful or a transition a little bit.
 
One of the things that I've learned from The First Two Pages is counterintuitive about what you can do, could do in the first two pages to capture the reader's attention without starting out at high conflict, without doing everything with a bang, I guess I should say. Bonnie, in addition to starting the blog, also contributed a couple of essays to it.
 
The last essay she did was on her story, "The Last Blue Glass." And I'm going to read what she said there. Conflict, we know, lies at the heart of fiction. That seems especially true of mystery fiction, where conflict leads to a crime. But it's not always possible or appropriate to open a mystery with a moment of intense conflict.
 
Sometimes I think it's more effective to begin with a quiet scene that drops hints about conflicts to come. If our characters are engaging, so engaging that readers both expect and dread the conflict, that can be a good way to keep them turning pages. And I thought about that a little bit, what you're talking about with a card scene, where not a lot is happening, and yet there's so much happening in terms of the way somebody's watching this, what the stakes are, how things are going to play.
 
It can be very quiet and yet very suspenseful. The conventional wisdom is to start with a body, start with something active, start with, and yet a lot of times I find that what works best is to lay these, what Patricia Highsmith called these lines of action or lines of tension between people, even if it's kind of quiet. If people can sense some tension and get to know the characters, they're going to invest in a different way than you.
 
Thank you. Then, if you just try to start with a body, with action, with movement, with a chase.
 
Studying What Gets Scrapped
 
[00:18:41] Art: One of the other essays I come back to again and again from The First Two Pages archive is Nick Kolakowski on "A Nice Pair of Guns." He started out writing this story, as he said, in medias res, you know, with action and with this happening. He said he kept thinking, got that gut feeling as a writer that something wasn't right there.
 
And he said he scrapped it. These are actually the most fascinating essays for me, where a writer says, here's what I did, here's what I scrapped, here's what I revised, here's why I changed it. Because I think it gives insight not only into the first draft but that revised draft, that final draft.
 
I'm going to read what he says as well. As any writer will tell you, there are times when you'll finish a draft and know there's something fundamentally wrong with it, but you can't figure out why. In the case of "A Nice Pair of Guns," I eventually decided that opening mid-story with a lot of action forced me to push way too much plot into the middle and end of the tale.
 
I might have succeeded in grabbing the reader's attention at the outset, but the story as a whole felt profoundly unbalanced. So when it came time to write the second draft, I decided to discard my fears about the hypothetical reader's attention span and begin at the beginning. I've got to tell you, I love that.
 
Follow your gut, follow your instinct, think through, and also write different versions of the same story to see where I'm going to introduce the tension that serves the reader. My story best rather than follow the conventional wisdom. So that made me, you're talking about the card scene, made me think about all that. How much can be invested in a quiet scene?
 
Short fiction as an experimental platform
 
[00:20:19] Matty: Well, the nice thing about short fiction is that you wouldn't want to do this with a novel, but you could write three or four, 12 or however many it takes, versions of the same story in a way that you would never want to do. You know, it would become a lifetime effort if you were to try to do that with a novel, but if you're writing three or four or five thousand words, you can keep putting the pieces together in different ways and see what the reaction is for you and maybe for early readers as well.
 
[00:20:44] Art: Yeah. It takes a lot of bravery to scrap something and start over to try something different with a short story. I think there's the possibility for that, as you said, often go to my son. I've told this before, when my son was little, you know, he was trying to walk and he took his first steps and it's like, well, you took a step and fell and took two steps and fell, but eventually got where he's going. Talk about the process, one step, two steps, you'll eventually get there if you just keep taking the steps. The other one is about the kind of willingness to tear something apart. If he's putting together a Lego. Something. Kids would be like, all right, I see a new idea. Let me rip this apart and start over. Whereas as writers, a lot of times we're like, gosh, I've put so much work into that. I can't, I have to, you know, and there is something, which I think is, you know, it takes a leap of faith to be like, tear it up. Let me start over or let me try something else as an alternative. So that's another thing from The First Two Pages that I've learned is writers who are willing to take those steps often get something much better out of it at the end.
 
[00:21:50] Matty: Yeah, I think the interesting thing about the Lego analogy is that the nice thing writers have is that they can keep the original construction and make a new one. You know, with Legos, unless you have an endless supply of Legos, you have to take the first one apart to make the second one. With writers, you can just set the first one aside and say, maybe I'll come back to that or maybe I won't.
 
[00:22:09] Art: Yep. Absolutely. Always an extra file. A new version. That's the perfect way to do it. Nothing's lost. Nothing's lost. 

Thinking consciously about the craft issues
 
[00:22:15] Matty: Yep. Exactly. So I feel like we're probably kind of hitting some of the topics you brought up as learnings you had from The First Two Pages. But another one was, many people don't think consciously about the craft issues. I feel like we've hit that a little bit, but other learnings you've had along those lines?
 
[00:22:33] Art: Yeah. You know, it's interesting to see writers who are forced to look back at what they've done and try to think through as readers. What they did? Why here instead of someplace else? Why introduce this bit of dialogue there? And so, I think that's an interesting move, both in terms of what I said about accepting the first draft as maybe something unconscious that you're doing, and then turning consciousness to it. It's also part of, in terms of recommending process for writers, something that I recommend to my students at Mason. We don't always have the option to do this because of the shortness of the semester, but a lot of times I'll say, write something, and then put it aside for a while so that you're coming back to it with greater objectivity, with a reader's eyes, with seeing it. I think as we write more often, we hopefully develop the capacity to not need six months to put something aside to be able to see what's there and come back to it the next day or a week later, or obviously rely on beta readers for some feedback there. But I think trying to get that step from creator to reader.

Of your own work, it's an important part of the process, not just for a specific product, but also for your writing process generally. What is working best for me? How do I get to that point of reading objectively to revise? I'm going to go back to Bonnie Stevens again. Bonnie used to try to read some of her pages backward, as I recall. Once she had a full draft, she'd be like, "Alright, let me read this page and then move back to this," because she was reading it with a different eye.
 
Change the font. These are not things from The First Two Pages, but change the font. It forces you to see things differently. Read just a couple of pages and then stop and come back and read a couple more. Some of that will force you to not get lost in what you're doing, but rather to keep that, I come back to this phrase, that objective eye on your own work, your own craft choices.
 
So, I do think most people, a lot of times, don't think about it, whatever stage they're at, in terms of beginning writer, veteran writer, and yet it's worthwhile to stop, pause, and actually think through your choices.
 
[00:24:52] Matty: Perfect. Another lesson you had mentioned from the first few pages is ideas come from a lot of places.
 
[00:24:59] Art: Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely. I think I mentioned, you know, we have people who say, "I had a dream about something," or, "This is a memory from my childhood." I just hosted Kate Ellis. I'm starting a series right now, as we're recording this, on the anthology, "Happiness is a Warm Gun." And that was prime fiction inspired by the Beatles. Editor Josh Pachter does a series of these anthologies. Kate Ellis wrote an essay where she said, "Here's something that happened in my childhood," and she had grown up in Liverpool in the same area where the Beatles, two of them, grew up, and she said, "I went back to that as the starting point for the story."
 
That's terrific. We talked about the idea of song lyrics or songs inspiring things. I've had a lot of times where songs or something I've read have inspired me to think about, "Here's a what if story just going on." And you talk about research as well. I always host the Black Orchid, award winner. This is a novella award hosted by the Nero Wolf Society, Rex Stout. Jacqueline Freimor wrote last year about the case of the bogus Cinderellas. Bogus Cinderellas are stamps, and she said she'd read something on Atlas Obscura, just reading about this on stamps, and it prompted this idea. She went through a fascinating essay, went through a couple of ways to try to write this. I think she thought about it as a novel at one point, and then a short story, and then ultimately found the inspiration for what the story should be and then went on to win an award for it.
 
So, you never know where ideas are going to come from or what's going to spark things. Again, this goes back to different writers, different inspirations and influences, different processes, all that. There's no one way to do this, and that's one thing that keeps coming back to me. If there are a lot of ways to do it, you find your best way, or hopefully be inspired by some of these essays to be like, "Oh, I could do that. Here's another opening for me." I think that's moving us all in good directions.
 
Capturing your ideas
 
[00:26:59] Matty: Well, this might take us, such a tangent that we spend the entire rest of the time talking about it, but that idea of the bogus Cinderella's, right, is that what the phrase was. It brings to mind a conversation I was having online with some folks recently about where you store your ideas.
 
And so the dilemma I was finding myself in is that there were kind of three categories of ideas. One was, there's this concept of the Boca Cinderella stamps that would be super cool to include in a story. Another flavor is I really wanted to explore, like, the almost unhealthy tendency people have that is represented by collectors and what is really behind the whole concept of collecting and why would people care about having an unusual stamp or whatever.
 
And then there's like, "Oh, I really like that word. I'm sure I'm going to use that somewhere." And I'm just wondering if you have a system that you use that handles all three of those kinds of concepts because just as you have the, "I wrote this and I'm not going to use it now, but I'm going to put it in the file." I think there's the, "Here's the file of things that I might want to use in the future." But they're so different sometimes that I think it's hard to manage them. Any thoughts about that?
 
[00:28:10] Art: I am, um, you know, I try to be systematized about so many things in my life, but I always fall short in some ways it seems like. I do keep a notebook handy where I can write down a quick idea for something. I do keep a file on my computer where I'll write, you know, here's, talk about writing the first paragraph of something, or a paragraph that might end up somewhere.
 
Here's an idea I had and I wrote it down. Or again, like you said, here's a word, or, I mean, just the smallest thing. It's all over the place, though, and I've had the time, unfortunately, where I've gone back through my computer trying to clean up some stuff, and I opened a document, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I forgot completely about this. Where did that come from?" It ended up being not an idea I pursued, but the point is I wish I were more systematized so I could go back to the right place.
 
John Curran wrote about Agatha Christie's secret notebooks. I love these books in terms of what they tell us about the creative process. And she kept, I want to say it was like, there were 18 or 19 different notebooks, I've got the number wrong, but she didn't use them in order apparently, and so you'll find notes for a certain book in Notebook 16, as well as in Notebook 9, and in the midst of it, you might find a grocery list or something like that, so it's all over the place.
 
She seemed to do well with the unsystematized approach. The point is, write something down, get it somewhere, because it will stay there better. Then it does just in your mind. So I do try to get stuff down on paper in some place, even if I end up losing it.
 
[00:29:44] Matty: Well, I do kind of like the idea of the power of the physical page. And I can imagine having, you know, like three baskets in your office, one of which would be big ideas, one of which would be medium ideas, one of which would be small ideas. Maybe the small idea basket is tiny, and the big idea basket is big because one might be several pages of your written out or typed out notes, and one might be just little tiny pieces of paper where you're dropping in. And if you ever find yourself, like, at a loss, you could just take out a basket and start going through it and say, "Oh, cool. I haven't used the word azure forever!"
 
[00:30:14] Art: Yeah, and I think that's made me think about the ideas, not just the big ideas, it's the small ones. My notebook, as much as it might be filled with, "Here's an idea for a story," or "Here is a paragraph that's going to go in there," a lot of times it'll be like just some little stuff.
 
Yeah, phrase or little detail that I want to add to a scene I've been working on. And I don't have the time to go ahead and add it, so I just jot it down real quick so I can go back to it and remember. And that will a lot of times spark something, something bigger. So I think in terms of creativity, it's like, you know, obviously do whatever you need to keep that forward momentum, keep those ideas flowing, or keep those things percolating and come back to that word as well, and trust that it's going to go, hopefully where it needs to go.
 
Start with a bang... or not
 
[00:31:02] Matty: Another lesson that you would learn from The First Two Pages, which I think we've discussed, but you may have some things to add, is start with a bang or not. Were there any other thoughts you had about that?
 
[00:31:12] Art: Sure, yeah, that's kind of what I was talking about a little bit with Bonnie and with Nick Kolakowski, the idea of starting with something quiet. But I'm going to take this a little further. There are so many ways to start a story. Patricia Highsmith, whom I've come back to again and again, she has a great craft book.
 
Well, no, it's an awful craft book. It is very inspiring, but it is not the kind of craft book that people read to be like, "Here is step by step how to do something." It is more like, "Here's some ideas." But Patricia Highsmith would start a story with setting, you know, this thing we're not supposed to do, but she would start with this long description of setting in a story like "The Black House." Then in a story like "The Terrapin," she starts with this moment of great conflict, or small conflict, that leads to great conflict between a mother and her son, a little bit of dialogue, and a little bit of action, real short paragraph. I think this goes to the idea again that you don't have to start with action.
 
In the beginning, there's a lot of opportunity to begin in many places and still engage a reader, whether that's with—and I keep throwing out craft books—Michael Kardos has a great book, "The Art and Craft of Fiction," where he talks about the five elements of scene building: dialogue, narration (by which he means not just narrating things, but actual action, like stage directions), description, interiority, or exposition (by which he doesn't mean just backstory, but just like a little sentence of information).
 
You could start with dialogue. Start quickly with dialogue. Let us learn later who the people are that are talking. Other folks might argue, "Well, let's not start with dialogue. We want to know who people are talking to first. Give a little bit of description, then jump into the dialogue." Or as Patricia Highsmith did in "The Black House," start with this long paragraph about the city where "The Black House" is and the history of the city.
 
So, there's not one way of doing things. As long as you are finding a way, either through the prose, or through—I'm going to come back to this idea of lines of action, Trisha Heisman's lines of action—to begin to give a hint of conflict, a hint of tension, and I think your reader can pick up on even the small things, and then you can keep building on it. But again, there's not just one way of doing it. And that's one of the things that comes back again and again. Needless to say, I would encourage folks to look at the blog, first few pages, read some essays in order to see the wide range of approaches that writers can take and find possibilities of your own, experiment with things, see what's going to happen.
 
[00:33:51] Matty: I think that's always interesting, also, to listen to beta readers or read reviews or whatever to hear what other people's reactions are to, like starting a story with a long scene description, which as you're saying goes against most of the advice, but you might find that people are commenting that they're gripped by that, and that would be good input to have.
 
[00:34:11] Art: I had a time; this is my own kind of—this is not a first few pages essay but a story. I'd written a story, which was eventually published, called "Mrs. Marple and the Hit and Run." And I remember writing it for a reading. I'd written it originally for a reading, and it was long; it got long. It was 10,000 words long.
 
I was just going to read the first portion of it. And I read it to my then-girlfriend at the time, and my brother, and I could tell they were falling asleep. It was bad. I eventually cut the story, rearranged where the opening was, and cut the story from 10,000 words to about 2,500 words. So, I cut 75 percent of it out, and it was published in that way, but much stronger from having gone through that process of, "Let me try it first of all with some description, with some narration," and then it's like, "No, no, no, I got to start someplace else." I got to start someplace else. So, tinkering.
 
[00:35:00] Matty: Yeah, and I think that's the kind of thing that people who are writing novels have some leeway that people who are writing short stories don't because every once in a while, I'll kind of indulge myself by putting in a scene that tickles me and I think will tickle my readers too. And sometimes I actually get feedback that it's true, that I would never keep in, like, it's probably a darling I should kill, but I'm having so much fun with it, and then it turns out my readers do too. And I think you can do a little bit of that in longer work, whereas you probably can't do it in shorter work.
 
[00:35:29] Art: Yeah. Yep. Yep. Absolutely.
 
Advice from veteran versus first-time writers
 
[00:35:32] Matty: So, I think this takes us to the last tip, which I love, which is veteran writers versus first-time writers offering advice. What have you learned from The First Two Pages in that area?
 
[00:35:42] Art: Sure. You know, I mentioned Kate Ellis having a recent essay about her story, and actually, the story is "Happiness is a Warm Gun." But I'm also running an essay from the same anthology, by Kristopher Zgorski and Dru Ann Love, two bloggers whom many of us know and love, who are writing together their first piece of published fiction.
 
And so I've got their essay, and in the essay, Kristopher says, "We realize that we're new. We don't need to be offering advice to anybody on this," and yet, the insights they had into the creative process were terrific. My point: veteran writers obviously have a ton of experience, and we look at them for authority.
 
And I've been very fortunate that writers who are big-time established writers have been generous with their time, contributing an essay to the blog. I've had Martin Edwards and Peter Lovesy and Andrew Taylor, to mention three people who've won the CWA Diamond Dagger award for lifetime achievement who have contributed essays to the blog.
 
I've been generous with their experience, but I also find myself learning something from those folks, like Chris and Drew Ann, or like Sarah Cotter, or like Lisa Matthews, Lisa Q. Matthews, who are first-time writers who are being like, "Here's what I discovered, here's what I thought about." They're bringing a lot of enthusiasm about new perspectives, a lot of discovery.
 
And the excitement of discovery to kind of what they're doing with short fiction, and I think that we other writers and we readers can learn from that, as well as we can learn from the professional veteran writer, so to speak, and so there's excitement to have that range. It's like in the classroom as well.
 
I learn from my students. Some of the things they do will oftentimes excite me in new directions, whether it's process or product or a detail or something like that. So always know that you can learn from many directions.

[00:37:34] Matty: Well, one of my bucket list interviews is going to be Stephen King, and the question I'm going to ask him is, what advice have you published that you now wish people hadn't taken so much to heart because they think that if they follow it, they're going to enjoy your success? Like, are adverbs really that bad?
 
And the thing that always makes me think about it when I'm reading one of his books is that I've got to believe that Stephen King's editor pretty much lets Stephen get away with whatever he wants to. And, that he'll go on these long, tangential stories about, and then we put on a play, kind of things.
 
And I love that kind of stuff. And he gets to do it because... You know, the book would be only 300 pages if he didn't, but now it's 450 pages, but he's Stephen King, so he can do it. But I don't think he would say, "Feel free to write these completely tangential subplots." And, I just sometimes wonder if he thinks, "What have I created?"
 
Because there are all these people who are like following the Stephen King way, but he was known as Stephen King, and I don't think he would have given the early Stephen King that advice.
 
[00:38:40] Art: Yeah, you know, that is so true in many ways, and there's a couple of directions I could go in with that. I think I'm not going to.
 
[00:38:48] Matty: No? Please feel free if you'd like.
 
[00:38:51] Art: Well, I mean, it's a matter of, you know, practice what you preach to some degree. But also, I mean, Stephen King is brilliant in so many ways, and we go with this idea of how you think about craft and what you might advise somebody who is struggling to get a story right is different from what somebody might be able to do once they learn the craft. I'm a take it out of writing, you know, Pablo Picasso can draw a few lines and they look really, really good.
 
And somebody out there is going to say like, "Well, my four-year-old could do that," but the four year old doesn't have the background and the learning to understand why this line, why that line, what this line does. And there's something that is sort of magical about, you know, about an artist in whatever field who has learned so much and then can do something different with it.
 
David Foster Wallace is, this is where I was hesitating to go. David Foster Wallace was, you know, obviously a brilliant writer, and he's got these long sentences and digressions and he's got footnotes and he's got asides and he's indulgent in so many ways and yet if you take a look at it, it works. When I've had students in the past, increasingly less these days, when I first started teaching, I had students who were just enamored of David Foster Wallace, and they tried to do that in their own work, and it didn't work.
 
[00:40:23] Matty: But if you listen to Wallace, as I did just the other day, talk about here are some suggestions for writers to follow. He's not just glibly filling the page with junk and free writes. He's really carefully constructing all this stuff, and I think that's something that writers will skip. Practice what you preach, yes, and it's not always about don't use the adverb, but use the adverb well, or use the adverb when you need to, and there comes a point where Stephen King can use an adverb, and I apologize, but it's, I love that. I'll have to percolate on that.
 
[00:41:02] Art: Yeah, there you go, there you go, bring it back, percolate it.
 
[00:41:05] Matty: Yes. Well, Art, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for sharing your best lessons from The First Two Pages, and please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and The First Two Pages and everything else you do online. Great.
 
[00:41:18] Art: Sure, my website is arttaylorwriter.com. The First Two Pages is a page on that website, part of the blog on that website, so if you go to arttaylorwriter.com, you'll actually just scroll down and you'll see The First Two Pages down there. It also has links to BK Stevens' website, which is still available; again, she passed away in 2017. But the archive of those original first two pages is at her website that's linked from mine on each and every first two pages essay. Check it out.
 
[00:41:51] Matty: Thank you so much.

Episode 211 - Creating a Refuge: Creative Planning for Authors and Poets with Orna Ross

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Orna Ross discusses CREATING A REFUGE: CREATIVE PLANNING FOR AUTHORS AND POETS, including what Orna saw that convinced her that writers needed a more holistic approach to planning; the power of linking between your values as an author and the value you offer your readers; drawing deeply on your creative passion and mission as an author and as a publisher; recognize that self-publishing authors must wear three very different hats: that of maker, manager, and marketeer; the importance of incorporating creative rest and play into your weekly plans; encouraging a growth mindset and instituting a pay-yourself-first policy; and the Kickstarter where she pulls all this together for her fellow indie authors.

Orna Ross is a novelist, poet and founder of The Alliance of Independent authors, also known as ALLi. She was also my guest for one of the foundational set of episodes of the podcast—The Seven Processes of Publishing—which, conveniently enough, are episodes 101-107.

Episode Links

Kickstarter at SelfPublishingAdvice.org/planners24 

Previous podcast episodes:
​Episode 101 - The First Process of Publishing: Editorial with Orna Ross
Episode 102 - The Second Process of Publishing: Design with Orna Ross
Episode 103 - The Third Process of Publishing: Production with Orna Ross
Episode 104 - The Fourth Process of Publishing: Distribution with Orna Ross
Episode 105 - The Fifth Process of Publishing: Marketing with Orna Ross
Episode 106 - The Sixth Process of Publishing: Promotion with Orna Ross
Episode 107 - The Seventh Process of Publishing: Selective Rights Licensing with Orna Ross

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Orna Ross. Hey, Orna, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:05] Orna: Hello, Matty. I'm doing extremely well. How are you?
 
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you.
 
Meet Orna Ross
 
[00:00:10] Matty: Just to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Orna Ross is a novelist, poet, and the founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors, also known as ALLi. And she was also my guest for one of the foundational sets of episodes of the podcast, which were the seven processes of publishing, and those are conveniently episodes 101 through 107. And we're going to be talking today about what I think is a perfect follow-on to that set of episodes. Today, we're going to be talking about creative planning for authors and poets. I think this is a great time of year because this will be going out in November of 2023. It's perfect timing because I know a lot of people like to regroup at the end of the year, plan for the following year, and we'll be able to give them some good tips on that. The way I wanted to approach this is that I was poking around on the ALLi website, self-publishingadvice.org, and I found a description of Orna's philosophy about holistic planning. So, we're going to be diving into that ...
 
What did Orna see that convinced her that writers needed a more holistic approach to planning?
 
[00:01:06] Matty: But before we do that, Orna, I always like to ask people, what did you see either in your own writing life or your colleagues or your clients that made you think, "Oh, you know what, we really need a more holistic approach to planning."
 
[00:01:20] Orna: What I saw, not to put it too dramatically (I do love to be dramatic every now and again), was a lot of suffering, to be perfectly honest. I saw people doing amazing things, and this is in my role in ALLi and also as a writer. So, as a writer who became a self-publisher, I saw the difference that was needed, the need to move from being somebody who thinks about producing words to somebody who thinks about producing books and finding readers for them, and bringing readers to them.
 
So when I became a self-publisher myself, I adapted to that. The only planning system I ever had was a to-do list. I never needed any more than that. I knew what I needed to do, and I would tick it off as I did it and have an occasional flurry, and that was all fine. When I came to becoming a self-publisher, not long after that, I also founded ALLi. So, not only was I now a writer, I was also a publisher, and I was also running a nonprofit for other author-publishers. As Prince Harry said, it was a lot. So, I found that my to-do list was not equal to the task, and I was constantly feeling like I was having a great time, so suffering might sound very dramatic, but at the same time, there was this constant feeling of being harried and harassed. I was running after myself, never quite feeling like I had done anything, despite the fact that I had done oodles of things. There was always this mountainous to-do list ahead of me, and the to-do list never got shorter; it was always getting longer. I ticked something off, and the next thing came on. That was disheartening in some kind of important way.
 
Other things I was seeing in the community were people who were, even though they had achieved wonderful things, not feeling any pride in that, or not feeling always conscious of what hadn't been done, looking at other people with comparisonitis. All these things that we're all very familiar with in the community, and some people then became dangerously burnt out, really not doing well, finding that they wound up in a place where they just could not write because it had all kind of fallen apart.
 
And so, between my own experiences and theirs, I started to realize that the to-do list wasn't enough. I started to use planning programs. You know, I think I purchased every kind of program available, but they were very mechanistic, very much like you were a machine. Tick, tick. Fill that box, do that thing. You know, they didn't allow for the messiness of the creative process for today. You say you're going to do something, and actually, you wind up doing something else, but that other thing eventually turns out to be better than the thing you thought you were going to do. You know, that kind of thing that happens. And all the vagaries of being a creative. So I think, you know, really importantly, rest and creative play. No sign of anything like that. It was all work, work, work, produce, produce, produce, or else they were just fancy calendars. They weren't planning systems. They didn't have an outcome in mind.
 
What I needed was something that actually created a system that, you know what you want at the end, and then you work back from there, and your system provides the things you need to create. Sometimes, yes, that's work, but sometimes it is play, and sometimes it's rest. So that's where the holistic bit came in.
 
The other aspect of the holistic bit was time and money. You know, I think of time as having three kinds of dimensions. There's our clock time, which is what planners work on in terms of calendar time, you know, the chunks of actual 90 minutes or a month or a quarter or whatever. But there's also creative time, which is when you are in the zone, and time just loses all meaning, and you are connected with what you're doing. We all know as creatives that when we're in there, time becomes quite irrelevant, and productivity and everything just come together in a really great way. So that's the whole concept of how you get into creative flow and how your practices and your processes and your planning actually come together in order for you to be in that flow state as often as you possibly can be.
 
So that's what I wanted for myself. I started to try and put that together for myself, which I did, and things really improved as I did that. Then I started to share it with other people because people would often say to me, "How do you do everything you do?" That's the question. Probably the question I get asked most often, actually, "How do you do all the different things?" and I always say creative planning, and they say, "What do you mean?" And then I tell them what I was saying. They say, "Oh, I want to have a go at that."
 
So it went from that to handing it on organically, and then after a couple of years, I decided, "Yeah, you know what? I'm going to formalize this because I really do think it's, at first, I just thought of it as something that's just my kooky way of doing things. But then I thought, you know, there is something actually in this because I did see it kind of working. So I started a small Patreon group, and we've been working together for some years now. And now I'm kind of taking it out, if you like, with a Kickstarter, in November, which will take it out into the wider world.
 
[00:07:08] Matty: There are a couple of things that what you were saying made me think of. One is that the idea that task management falls short of planning because there's usually not much prioritization. You know, it results in busyness but not necessarily productivity. And the other thing that I really liked is the idea of a separate kind of time when you're in the creative zone.
 
And I find that for myself, and it's both a good thing. If I start, you know, I get through my task list, and I start working on my writing, and then sometimes, you know, eight hours go by, and then I suddenly realize it's time for dinner. But then I look back at those eight hours, and I think, you know, could I have achieved what I did creatively in less time and left time for a different kind of creative work or other kinds of work? So I think, you know, these are all things we'll be able to get into as we talk through the five points that are the characteristics that you lay out for holistic planning.
 
Emphasize the links between your values as an author and the value you offer your readers
 
[00:08:01] Matty: So I am just going to dive into the first one and ask you to sort of expand on it. And the first one is that planning should be a holistic effort that emphasizes the links between your values as an author and the value you offer your readers.
 
[00:08:15] Orna: Yeah, so this seems to me to be very important. So a lot of authors come into this space, and they hear other authors who have done well talking about what they did and how they did it. And I think that's completely the wrong place to start. Many authors spend years chasing around, listening to every piece of advice they get, trying out something that was never going to work for them because they weren't the same kind of writer or the same kind of publisher. Because, you know, we have different styles, depending on our genre and our writing style, and everything. There are certain things that will never work for you as the author you are. There are certain things that will never work for you as the publisher you are, and you trying to do them and then feeling a sense of failure because you didn't succeed at them when you never should have tried them in the first place.
 
So I think you've got to start with yourself. You've got to start with your own values. And so the workbook in this planning program begins there. It begins with your passion, what you love to do, and what aspects. We dig deeply into what aspects of writing you love, and also what kind of publisher you are. Are you a volume publisher, an engagement publisher, or a craft publisher? And then as a writer, you know, are you somebody who's looking to entertain, to inform, or to inspire and other levels of both of those things and your sense of purpose as a writer.
 
Some authors know this straight away. They know exactly where their mission and their passion come together into a sense of purpose. Others say, "I don't have a purpose, I just want to write because I like writing," but actually, there always is. There always is if you dig down a little bit deeper, and the more you can find out about your personal values and what's important to you, and then connect and see those values up and running in your writing, and then see, "Oh, they're up and running in how I approach my publishing as well," and if you bring that together into an integrated kind of system, now you know what your values are and you know what you're offering. You know what your gift looks like, and then...
 
In there is embedded so much of what you can then offer as value to your reader, and then you attract the kinds of readers who like the same kind of stuff that you like, who have the same sort of values that you have, who like the language that you use, who like the way you talk about things, the way you feel things, the way you express things. It's all embedded in your book descriptions and in your imagery. Everything becomes easier when you know all that stuff. And you never know it completely, and it's always in a state of flux. This is one of the things that makes our work challenging, is that it never just sits there.
 
It's never just, you know; it's always kind of getting away from us. It's always changing. The world is changing. The readers are changing. How publishing happens is changing. Everything is in a state of flux. That's the nature of life actually, and not just publishing, but... It's always in a state of flux, but the more you can kind of get to an understanding of yourself as an author and as a publisher and the values that you have, and then the value that you're offering the reader, everything really becomes quite lovely. It's a very enjoyable sort of experience, and when you realize that's what you're doing.
 
Because we don't want to be writers, in the main, you know, we don't want to be writers to make money. Of course, we want to make a living from our writing, and of course, we want to be paid properly, and anyone who knows me knows how passionately I believe that creatives deserve a living as much as anybody else. Of course, that's really important, but there's something else going on there too. If you've decided you want to be a writer and finding out your why and what's driving you is immensely enriching, so this planning program starts there.
 
[00:12:08] Matty: And when someone is coming up with their why, is it a statement like, you know, a company might have a mission statement? And if it is, can you share an example of the sort of idea a writer should have about what their mission is, what their why is?
 
[00:12:22] Orna: Yeah, so it might be different, you know, for different genres. So I'll just take myself as the example. But when it comes to my poetry books, for example, what I'm actually trying to do is cultivate the creative state in the person who's reading the work. So, not just to talk about it, inspire, but to make them feel inspired, if you like.
 
When I'm writing nonfiction ALLi books, the why I'm very much driven by is the empowerment, the self-empowerment that I get from creative writing, the enjoyment of the creative freedom, and the creative control that gives me. It's very much about empowering other authors to experience that and to have that. So, you know, that's just kind of two examples.
 
When it comes to my fiction, it's about bringing alive times and places that still have resonance and have caused us to have certain experiences in our time, that have historical tales on them. I want to tell those stories so that we understand the connection between the past and the present.
 
So these are just some examples, but it's very unique, and there may be more than one aspect to it. So each person delves into it. You're brought through a process. There are boxes to fill and lines to write, and then at the end of it, you kind of know what's going on more than you did, and you revisit it periodically as you go through.
 
[00:13:55] Matty: You had said early on that you saw writers who would hear about an approach that worked for someone else and try it, even though another person might be able to tell them that it was not going to be a good match. Are there red flags that people should watch out for, or I guess green lights they should watch out for, that would indicate to them, before they really dive into an approach, whether it is more or less suitable for them?
 
[00:14:19] Orna: Yes, I think so. You know, if you are the kind of person who loathes social media, you're probably not going to be an engagement publisher, or vice versa. If you are that kind of person, maybe volume publishing is what you should do. If you're somebody that loves getting in there and the texture of the words or the texture of the page or the texture, you know, the look of the cover, the crafty kind of stuff, then, you know, don't try to be a volume publisher.
 
Pick the one you know, sell directly and set up a whole different sort of thing around yourself. But if you want to write a lot of books, and the stories keep coming, and they're in one genre, and that genre is really popular, and it's got loads of loyal readers, then you are a volume publisher.
 
The problem is, volume publishing has been the dominant story in Indy because that's what happens on Amazon, and Amazon is the dominant story in Indy, and that big blanket over the Indy publishing sector, author publishing sector, is stifling many other ways of making a living, making income, and approaching publishing.
 
Now, I think that's beginning to shift as the community becomes more mature and as authors are developing the confidence to believe in themselves and start with their own values and so on, the very sorts of things we've been talking about already. We're seeing that more. And as the tools and technology, which allow these things to happen, are improving, and also as readers get used to the idea of buying directly from an author rather than buying from Amazon.
 
There is a shift that's happening, and we saw that with our indie author income survey earlier this year. We saw that there is a small but growing and significant sector of people who are doing things differently, who are making a living or better. Some of them are doing extraordinarily well with, say, direct sales or crowdfunding or different models from the Amazon model.
 
[00:16:32] Matty: Yeah, I think that differentiation between volume, engagement, and craft, I would put myself in the craft category. But early on in my author career, I found myself in a lot of virtual communities that were volume-based and was alarmed by the expectations it set. And I like that idea of needing to match the community you're tapping into for advice to the goals that you have.
 
[00:17:03] Orna: I think that's very important, and sometimes it can be hard to find that because you don't know what you're looking for. I think that's also what the planning process helps you to see. It can be very difficult to see yourself, especially on your first few books, as a writer. You're just following something blindly, and we're all "pantsers" in our publishing life at first because it's very hard for anyone to plot it out fully. It's the kind of thing you have to learn by doing. So seeing yourself, a lot of what the planning process does is try to help you see more clearly what's actually going on for you and to read the signs, as you put it.
 
[00:17:48] Matty: Yeah, I think, not a definitive marker, but an important marker is if you're reading advice or participating in a group, are you feeling energized or alarmed? And if you're feeling alarmed, you probably need to look for a different community or a different source for that.
 
[00:18:03] Orna: I'm really glad you mentioned feelings because we don't talk about them enough. One of the things that's one of the measures, there are four kinds of measures that the planning system uses, and one of them is actually creative, CHQ, your Creative Happiness Quotient. It's basically the pleasure you're taking in what you're doing. As you say, if you're not feeling good, that's a sign. That's not something you need to get over so you can drive yourself and push yourself to be something that you think you have to be. That's actually a sign to you that possibly you're going in the wrong direction.
 
Probably, I mean, there is such a thing as creative discomfort, which we do need to get over because whenever we're putting ourselves out there, we're going to have that scary kind of feeling. That's a different thing.
 
The point being that you need the tools that allow you to do that kind of self-examination. So you understand what your feelings are telling you. So you're listening to yourself. In fact, listening to yourself means listening to lots of different people. You're not just one person as an indie author. You're wearing three hats, for starters. You're a maker, you're a manager, and you're a marketeer. But then there's also all the stuff that comes up when you're writing and digging around in your psyche and bringing out these words. And then there's also the process of putting yourself out there through marketing and publishing and all the stuff that it brings up. So you're going to have different parts of you that are, maybe one part of you is energized, and a different part of you is alarmed, and you need to get them talking to each other.
 
So that's another thing that happens in the workbook, which is what I call the 'finding flow' process, where you don't stifle parts of yourself that want to tell you something; you actually get them engaged with each other. The whole program is about integration, about integrating your writing with your publishing. It's about integrating the commercial with the creative. It's about integrating the different parts of yourself and understanding what's going on there.
 
[00:20:02] Matty: Yeah, the image that sprang to my mind as you were saying that is deciding to dive off the high diving board. And that's going to be a scary experience, but for a lot of people, it would be an exhilarating experience. You know, if you think about getting past the creative discomfort, that could be an analogy, as opposed to climbing the rock wall, which would just be... I'm obviously using personal examples, because I remember that feeling of excitement and exhilaration, but still, some fear when I was young and went off the high dive the first time. But climbing a rock wall, I would have a completely different response to, that would be my sense of dread and discomfort. So, there are negatives in either one. The negatives are taking very different forms. One is excitement, and the other one is just discomfort. I think there are analogies to that as you're trying to find your path among the many that you're describing.
 
[00:20:59] Orna: Perfect. And then the thing is that for somebody else, the rock wall might be the exhilarating, fabulous thing, and the high dive might be pure torture. So it's totally about... nobody knows, you're the expert in your own life, you're the expert in your own publishing business, and you're the expert in your own writing. So, you know, really, I think this is one of the reasons why so many indie authors fall away, defeated, discouraged, is due to a lack of self-engagement in the process and the realization that writing is a creative process, but so is publishing. But it's a different one. It's completely different and it's going to call for completely different sets of skills and ways of doing things. But it is a creative process, and so you engage with it in the same way. Just as you wouldn't expect to sit down at the desk and be a perfect writer on the first day you sat down. Yet it's just amazing how many people expect to get the publishing right the first time. And if they don't get it right the first time, then, you know, 'I'm not selling. It's over, self-publishing didn't work for me. I didn't sell my first book.' And that kind of approach is still extraordinarily common.
 
[00:22:13] Matty: So, I wanted to dive into the second of the characteristics of a holistic planning effort that you outlined, which is to draw deeply on your creative passion and mission as an author and a publisher. And I think that some of what we've talked about already touches on this, but the idea of passion is something that we maybe haven't delved into completely. Any thoughts on that?
 
[00:22:33] Orna: Yeah, so your passion is what you love to do, and your mission is what you'd like to change, what you'd like to see changing in the world. What makes you angry is often your mission, and what makes you excited is often your passion, and it's when you bring those two together, as I said, that you get your purpose.
 
So your creative passion is a tremendous source, as well as your mission. Your mission operates almost like the bedrock, giving you the longevity and resilience to keep going when things don't go well. Passion is more immediate and can be cultivated. When you remind yourself of what you love about this work, suddenly things that seem impossible become very possible. When you're feeling that level of passion, and when you meet other authors who are in the same genre or do things in similar ways, the energy just rises up, and in that moment, they can do anything.
 
So, tapping into that passion, understanding it, and then coming back to it when things get difficult, which they will because writing and publishing are two high-level skills, they will be difficult. Personal development for a writer and a publisher is professional development and personal development; they're the same thing, so there are going to be growing pains, and you're going to feel it. When those things come on board, being able to remind yourself of your creative passion, what it is, why you are here, and also of your mission, why you're here, what you want to achieve, what you want to change, what you want to see happen, the kind of impact you want to have, the influence you want to have on your readers, and so on. Being able to tap back into those, knowing what they are, is the first point, and then returning to them and constantly cultivating them in the proper way. It gives you all this energy.
 
What generally happens instead with a lot of people is a lot of negative feelings about what they're doing. They don't see it as a growth thing and forget the passion and mission, getting bogged down in the work. I think that's where our creative capacity shrinks. So, in fear, there's a lot of leeching of creative energy. When we get into a worry cycle, fear cycle, anger cycle, or jealousy cycle, all of these things just drain creative energy away, and passion and mission are the antidote to those.
 
[00:25:25] Matty: Mission is certainly something I can imagine somebody crafting and writing down as a reference point. When you're thinking about passion, is that something that is more like a barometer that people should be keeping an eye on? Or do you see a benefit to people actually assessing, through writing, what their passions are?
 
[00:25:44] Orna: Accessing passion is done in a certain way by answering specific questions about what you love and tapping back into your past. Very often, we become disconnected from our creative joy, even though we're doing what is our creative joy; we can still become disconnected from it. If your passion is alive and well and functioning for you, you'll know it.
 
 
"You'll feel it. You'll be saying, it doesn't matter what comes up. I'm enjoying this. So, you know, I'm not going to burn out because I'm happy. But if you're not happy, then it's a sign that you're disconnected from the passion in some way. And then there is a way back to pick it up again. And that is, there's a process that you have to go through that time doesn't permit me to bring us through, but it is very much about identifying when you last felt happy about it and also tapping back into earlier years when you knew you wanted to be a writer and what was going on at that time and what you thought being a writer would do for you. You know what you thought the outcome would be, so passion is very much about how you will become self-fulfilled and self-actualized, whereas Mission is more about what you want to change in the world.
 
Recognize that self-publishing authors must wear three very different hats: that of maker, manager, and marketeer
 
[00:27:00] Matty: I'm going to move on to the third characteristic of holistic planning, which is recognizing that self-publishing authors must wear three very different hats: maker, manager, and marketeer. And I have to say that loving the nautical metaphor, I made a play on this in my own private group, which was, the voyager, the 'I'm voyaging, I'm filling the sails.' S A I L, or S A L E, or Swabbing the Decks, he's swabbing the decks as the manager, but talk a little bit
 
[00:27:31] Orna: I love this. Sales and sails. Excellent.
 
[00:27:38] Matty: So talk a little bit about why you think it's so important to separate those out and to understand what you're doing in each of those areas.
 
[00:27:44] Orna: Yeah, it's that, again, back to creative energy. So, and it's also about realizing that publishing is creative as well. So very often, we split in our minds, and we say writing is the creative bit, and publishing and marketing is the, we think of it as admin, and that's not true. So when we separate out into maker, manager, and marketeer, we begin to see how those different things are happening in different places.
 
So making, for example, doesn't just happen when you're working on your book. You have to make blog posts. If you're a blogger, you have to make social media updates, and you have to make email newsletters to your readers and so on and so forth. You have to, if you are that way inclined, you will be making maybe some of your illustrations for your marketing and so on. They're all making tasks, and you make a podcast, you know, the actual deciding what's going to be in the content and the making of it.
 
Then there is the managing part, which happens in writing as much as it happens in publishing, but we think it doesn't, but it does, you know. So there's, you have to be organizing and, you know, even if you're a complete pantser, you still have to do some outlining. That's a kind of a management task, but much more than that, the processes which allow the writing to happen, time and energy and the space even in which you sit down to write and what that looks like, all of those kinds of things fall under the manager's remit. And the manager's job essentially is to make sure that the maker and the marketeer have what they need to do their jobs and enjoy them in a sustainable way. So when we begin to think about the manager like that person who heads up the pace and the processes of the whole endeavor, then it begins to feel different than if we just see it as pure admin. It's much more than admin. It's in the managerial tasks and how we manage them that we become the creative director, not just of our writing, but of our publishing as well, and of how they integrate together.
 
And then the marketeer, I call it a marketeer, not just a marketer, because it's not just about marketing the books, but it's about selling them. It's about actually making sales, and so it's both marketing and promotion, and how we speak. You know, what promise we make to the reader, how we get across to them what the books are about, how we convey all that stuff that we were talking about earlier - the values, the passion, and the mission. How that gets transmitted all falls into the marketeer's role.
 
And the other thing that a manager is very key in is money. And this is another place where people, you know, the holistic thing falls apart when it comes to money. The whole mindset changes, and we go from being growth-oriented people and creative people, and expansive people to being tired, scared, and, you know, pulling in and afraid to spend a penny kind of thing. It's a very common dynamic that we've set up. Writers and artists don't like money by definition.
 
You know, if you want to make a living, then the less of an artist you are. All those kinds of things. We talk about these things all the time, but when it comes to ourselves and recognizing our own dynamics and our own relationship with money and everything, the planning system is very much about putting yourself first, making sure you get paid as well as everybody else, and making sure that you allocate your money so that you realize the money that comes in has to be divided up into the tax people will be taking some of it, and the money that needs to go to your editor and everybody else. But making sure that you get paid as well is really important. So that's what I mean about the holistic aspect of it. Everything hinges on everything else.
 
[00:31:41] Matty: I like that idea of not categorizing a set of tasks like email, let's say. I think that was a great example as one of those, and I'm extrapolating that not only should you be considering this from a planning point of view, but if you go into an activity like, now I'm going to write my monthly email newsletter. There's the maker part where you're crafting the letter, there's the manager part that understands what you hope to get out of the email and what you want your readers to get out of the email. And then the marketeer is considering how what you're doing with the email factors into the rest of your business. Like, is this going to be a sales-focused email or a community-building email or whatever, and I like that. It feels much more comfortable than kind of going, "Ugh, now I have to write my email" because, It seems to somebody like a marketeer thing or a manager thing, and maybe they don't like those things, but if you look at each task, it's having components of all of them. Is that a legitimate interpretation of what you're saying?
 
[00:32:41] Orna: That's so well put. It's exactly right. And the email, I think the email is a great example because so many authors, and myself included, for a very long time, the email is really hard. And why is it so hard? And we all wonder about that. I think the reason why it's so hard is certainly the point of discovery for me about why it was so hard for me was because I was leaving out the maker, manager, and marketeer tasks. I did not see it as just a manager task and a marketeer task, and I didn't craft them.
 
As soon as I began to think of how it connects to the passion, the mission, but also, you know, in the same way to the books and realize that they, you know, you need to approach this email in a way that it isn't just about getting it done.
 
 
I'm getting back to my creative work. This is my creative work, and you know what is more creative than actually reaching out to the reader directly. I mean, this is what writers dreamed about back in the days when you were third-party published, that you actually got to connect with your reader. But how quickly things become chores when we approach them with certain ways of. So yeah, that's exactly right.
 
There is a creative dimension to absolutely everything, actually, if you can find it. And the second you find it, you've got far more energy, and also something else comes in, something that isn't your conscious mind, something that's coming from the unconscious that is far more perfect than anything you would consciously craft.
 
And certainly anything you'd consciously craft when you're just trying to get the job over, so you can go back to doing the thing that you think you want to do more than anything else.
 
Incorporate creative rest and play into your weekly plans as well as creative work
 
[00:34:31] Matty: I think that's a really nice entree to the next characteristic of holistic planning, which is it incorporates creative rest and play into your weekly plans as well as creative work. And, you know, as you were describing, a different approach to crafting an email, you could see how that could become creative play. But I think you're talking here about something separate from the creative work when you're talking about creative rest and play. And this is something that not only I'm going to be very interested in hearing, but my husband's going to be interested in hearing this and then recording it and playing it back for me periodically because I'm a work smarter and harder kind of person. So, talk about creative rest and play a little bit.
 
[00:35:08] Orna: Yeah. So, you know, I'm such a believer in both of these. And, you know, you talked about how email could be playful. It won't be unless you know how to cultivate creative play more widely. And then it comes in, and this is the thing that you do.
 
So something kind of counterintuitive happens. People, when you see play or rest as breaks from the process of whatever it is you're trying to make happen, that's wrong thinking. Actually, creative rest and creative play, when indulged in a certain way, are the process. So work, rest, and play become completely integrated. So it's very counterintuitive. And it's hard to do. Like you say, most of us are indie authors, we're not afraid of work. If you were afraid of work, you wouldn't come into this room, would you? It's just, you just don't. So, some of us are workaholics. We need that compulsive kind of hit that we get from work and achievement and success, however we define it.
 
And that's all good. There's nothing wrong. Hard work never killed anyone, as my mother said. But actually it has killed some people, but probably not writers, but it can kill your joy. And that's what we're coming back to again. You know, kind of where we started at the beginning. Creative play and creative rest. It feels counterintuitive to stop and to go off and do these things. And when I talk about creative rest and play, yes, I'm talking about very specific things. So creative rest is anything that stills the mind. So it might be meditation, it might be sleep, it might be, you know, different people have different sorts of techniques, and that, you know, there are both short and longer versions of these built into the planning program. So the program encourages a retreat once a year, and that means a retreat, not a, "I'm going away to write," retreat, but an actual retreat from everything and downtime, and some writers and some indie authors find that extraordinarily difficult. And then on the other side, play is, again, anything you absolutely love to do, and is often physical for authors, because we get away from the desk, and we need to, you know, dance, run, or climb. In your case, high dive, and in somebody else's case, climb the rock wall, and those kinds of uplifting activities. So holidays, vacations where you are doing, you know, whatever you think is your ideal fun would be, is creative play, whereas, you know, crashing out on the beach and just reading easy novels is more like creative rest.
 
It's different for everybody. What we like to do and how we like to do it is very different, and again, there's a process in finding out what is right for you, and also in seeing, am I resting when I think I'm resting? Or am I just doing more stuff in a different way? And am I playing when I think I'm off? Or am I just thinking, you know, have I just brought work home? And I'm just thinking about the next thing I have to do and so on.
 
So there's a whole process of self-recognition in there. And then there is a kind of dissolving of habits. And when this balance comes in, you know, when work is feeding play, play is feeding rest, rest is feeding work, and work is feeding play, you know, and you've got that benign circle, that holistic, to use the word, that you've been using for this entire episode.
 
When that comes in, now we're really feeling creative energy. Now we're really able to do things that, you know, you don't even know yourself how you did them. They just happened, and you still feel energized. You're not tired, you feel great, and it's all because you took a little bit of time for creative rest, and you took a little bit of time for creative play, and now your creative work just blossoms. And again, it's because this thing comes in that is bigger than us, bigger than our conscious minds. So when we're relying too much on the conscious mind, we're shrinking ourselves. We've got much more to draw on, but we're cutting it off when we don't allow ourselves creative rest or creative play.
 
[00:39:27] Matty: I like that you're dividing that into two things because I think people have gotten so used to thinking of work-life balance, and there are only two categories, you know, there's work or there's life. I like the idea of separating out the rest and the play and how you're defining them.
 
[00:39:40] Orna: Yeah, when people talk about work-life balance as well, they're often talking about family and other people, you know, or life in other sorts of ways, but these are very specific things to do, and they're not things to do in the sense of another thing to tick off your box. That isn't how it is. And if it is like that, there's something not right there in that dynamic. But they are very specific in the sense that you can be “off” and not off at all. You can be draining yourself and not giving yourself what you need for your work or indeed for yourself or for your life. So there are huge life benefits in this as well, but they are done by yourself.
 
One of the practices that's recommended is what I call a "create date," and those of you who have done "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron will recognize the artist's date. It's very similar, and I just find artist's date very heavy. The whole idea of having to be an artist is kind of intimidating, so just a creative date with yourself. Short, once a week, doing something away from everybody else. It's so nurturing. It's just incredibly nurturing. And then also, the creative rest practices, when they're done in a certain way, they just nurture you so much, and everything just becomes, yeah, that loveliness comes back in again.
 
[00:41:09] Matty: The way I'm seeing this play out or not play out in my own life is that I really have to consciously remind myself, if I get up after, you know, 8 hours of whatever I've been doing and take a dog for a walk, then sometimes I consciously remember to remind myself. Not to listen to a podcast, because my go-to activity is going out with the dogs, and now here's my opportunity to, you know, be catching up on the latest in the indie and self-publishing world, and sometimes I have to say to myself, "No, let's just not do anything like that for a little while. Let's just walk the dog. Let's just look around and see what's going on in the world. It's hard to remember to do sometimes."
 
[00:41:49] Orna: It is, 100 percent, and, you know, the more we love what we do, back to the passion again, the harder that can be, you know, because we love every bit of it, so we want to keep going. But there definitely comes a point where you're just, you know, you're just making yourself feel drained. It doesn't work, and being in the moment, as you're talking about with the dog, whatever is around you and feeling and experiencing your life.
 
Because when you're writing, you're taking yourself out of your own life in a way. Even, and obviously, that's very obvious in fiction writing where you're literally taking yourself out of your own life and into another character's life. But it's true in every aspect of writing. You have to be in your head to write. It's a mental cognitive experience, and therefore you're out of your senses, really. You're not aware of what you're, you are in that moment feeling, unless something comes in, I, oh, I realize I'm hungry, or I'm cold, or something like that. But generally speaking, you're not in the moment, you're in your head.
 
And so redressing the balance of getting back into where your senses are activated and you're smelling and seeing and tasting and touching and feeling, and you know, all of that, it's really important. The other thing that happens if we don't fill the well with new activities and feelings and sense impressions. And as we dry up, we don't have a lot to say because we haven't, yeah, we haven't filled the well, so the well's dry and there's no, we have nothing to give.
 Encourage a growth mindset and pay-yourself-first policy 
[00:43:16] Matty: So I'm going to move on now to the final characteristic that you called out about a holistic planning effort, which is it encourages a growth mindset and a pay-yourself-first policy. I mentioned this a little bit about the importance of being compensated for one's creative work, but, talk about that growth mindset and pay-yourself-first policy.
 
[00:43:34] Orna: Yeah. So those two are really important. So I think I've kind of touched on them, but essentially the growth mindset is, you know, growth is possible. And how do I grow here? Because if we are writing, we want to grow as people so that we are worthy of being read. And if we are publishing, we want to grow as a publisher and reach more readers and, you know, have more influence and have more impact in the world. So it is about growth. Creativity is expansive. Growth is what we're after. We're here. We want to be there. There's a gap in between, and growth is what takes us there. And I think I mentioned earlier, you know, the personal growth, professional growth, the profit growth, they're all very closely intertwined in all the creative industries, writing and publishing included.
 
"So it isn't about, 'I don't like this. I can't do that.' That is not a growth mindset. That is a limiting mindset. So it's. At the simplest level, it's about understanding that growth is what you're actually engaged in, and whenever you hear yourself going contrary to that, and instead of being expansive, being contractive, instead of being proactive, being reactive, all these are signs that we are not now in the place of growth. So that's one aspect of it.
 
And then the 'pay yourself first,' that's at every level. You know, as writers, we are offering a gift. We're mining our gift to give it out. Yes, we get paid back and so on, but that is essentially the dynamic, and so we can give ourselves away, and we do. And you can see that, not just writers, but creatives in general, are taking advantage of everywhere, all over the place. Why? Because we allow it. And we allow it as individuals, and we allow it as a group. And I mean, I really, really want to change that. And I don't know if we can, but I feel that we can. And I think that we should.
 
And I think what's happening here, in our time, is that the creative industries are catching up with the other industries in terms of realizing the kinds of things we're talking about doing and the kinds of ways in which we are now approaching publishing and realizing how we reach readers and... how we make sales, you know, how we, all of these things. We're kind of catching up with other industries and thinking about how these things operate for us in our industry because it's not the same, but lots of it is the same.
 
But at the core, what we have to do is value ourselves, so that's it's back to where we started with the values. Valuing the reader and the reader valuing us is contingent on us valuing ourselves and understanding. So we don't see so many writers ending up either in severe addiction or, you know, making money for a year or two and then in poverty for the rest of their lives. You know, all these kinds of things that we have built up around our industries are signs of things. So I often think that we turn to writing or any creative activity to heal and to grow. And so allowing that healing and that growing to happen means putting it first and recognizing what you as an individual need in order for you to heal and grow. That is the holistic, positive, expansive, growth, creative way.
 
But allowing your gift to leech you so that you are giving everything away and you end up with nothing and everybody else gets paid. Money is a good indicator here. Everybody else gets paid, but you don't get paid. That is a sign that something else is going on. That's not expansive. That's not growth. That's not creativity. And so digging in there a bit and finding out what's going on. You could spend 10 years, or you could spend your whole life and never get there. Or you could do some planning, exploration, and, you know, move mountains in days and just change and grow enormously because the whole creative flow comes in behind your efforts to understand and to draw things together and to go there, you know, to go there for yourself, put yourself first, pay yourself first.
 
The varying timeframes of planning
 
[00:47:57] Matty: So, I wanted to wrap up with a question about timeframes. I realized that as we were talking, I was seeing a way to think of planning as a strategic, perhaps quarterly effort. As we were talking, I was seeing many ways to apply these concepts down to individual tasks. We were discussing the email, and I'm realizing that over the last couple of weeks, on my task list, I have a reminder each week to check my plan and my quarterly plan. Each week, I remind myself to review and ensure it still makes sense. I realized that for the last several weeks, I haven't done that because I just wanted to move on to the next item on my list. It's kind of embarrassing, but could you talk a bit about whether people can apply what we've been discussing at both a granular and a strategic level? Also, if they're focused on the strategic level, do you have recommendations for how often this assessment should take place?
 
[00:49:00] Orna: Yes, it starts with the workbook, which covers the topics we've discussed up to this point. Then, you move into a quarterly plan, a monthly planner, and a weekly and daily breakdown of tasks. So, you can take it right down to the task level. The revisiting should happen at least weekly. It's not just about the workbook and planners; we have an online group for this. We used to be on Facebook, but now it's all on Patreon. Every Monday, we map our intentions for the week and jot down what we intend to do under the maker hat, manager hat, and marketeer hat. On Friday, we return to log our accomplishments, what we actually achieved.
 
Some weeks align with our intentions, some are better, and some don't get started at all. It's the logging and the accountability in the group that is powerful. It helps people see progress. Over the years, I've noticed that people come in with grand plans every Monday, with mountains of tasks for the maker, manager, and marketeer hats. But as time goes on, these intentions shrink until they become week-sized intentions instead of year or quarter-sized ones in a week. This connection with how one's creative process unfolds across the week, month, and quarter is enlightening.
 
The quarter, in particular, is effective. It draws on both creative psychology and business principles. A quarter is a quarter for a reason, and it works. You can manage 12 weeks effectively in your mind and make significant changes in that time.
 
It's a really good timeframe, and you could break it into three, which is really great. Months one, months two, months three, you know, and if you haven't caught up, you can catch up with yourself, and you know, all of those things go on a quarter. A quarter is a very manageable piece of time. And so.
 
Anything that I tried from any management system that I met, I kept anything that worked for me as a creative, and I let go of a lot of the big-stick stuff, and the hit-yourself-over-the-head stuff, and the squeeze-yourself-into-a-box stuff. So.
 
Time is very much a part of this, and coming back to the plans. Because one of the things the plan does, what makes it a planning system and not just a calendar, is the actual understanding of your top priority, your top task for that quarter, for that month, for that week, for that day. So, returning to the plan, you can start off the morning knowing this is my top intention, and by 11 o'clock it can be so fragmented, you've forgotten what you even wanted to do that day, but the plan is there. So, you can just return to that. You can take refuge in the plan. It's there. It will hold, it kind of holds you up at the different time levels. And that gives you the space then to breathe and to bring in the three dimensions into the different tasks.
 
[00:52:32] Matty: I can imagine calling this episode, 'Creating a Refuge: Creative Planning for Authors and Poets.' I really like that.
 
[00:52:39] Orna: Okay.
 
[00:52:40] Matty: I think it's not what people think of when they think of a plan. They think of a plan as, almost a restriction in some ways.
 
[00:52:45] Orna: I think so. I think so because so many plans are, they're trying to make a machine of you, you know? And that's the other thing about these, because they're creative plans. They can be messy, and they can be changed as you need to, you know, you scratch out and use them in your way. So all of that is very much a part of being built in again. It's not something that you've done wrong and have to start over. It's actually built in. We have to allow that to happen because the creative process is idiosyncratic. We're not machines, and we never will be. And as the machines become more and more prevalent in our creative field now, I think tapping into our humanity is ever more important, and, yeah, hopefully, they help people to do that.
 
Kickstarter: Creative Planning for Authors and Poets
 
[00:53:37] Matty: That's so great. Well, Orna, it is always interesting and inspirational to speak with you. And I know that people are going to be interested in the Kickstarter now, so please share a little bit of information about where they can find out more about that.
 
[00:53:49] Orna: Yeah, so the link to go to is selfpublishingadvice.org/planners24. The Kickstarter starts on the 5th of November, and it runs for about 15 days. Spiral bounds are coming, people! If any of you are the people who have been asking for the spiral bounds, that's part of what the Kickstarter is about, to actually make those. But there are lots of different things, and also accountability and, you know, there's a sort of a 'give it a try' pack and various different things in the Kickstarter.
 
 
So hopefully, there's something there for everyone, at different levels of both engagement and investment.
 
[00:54:36] Matty: It's going to be an interesting time because I'm going for the first time to 20 Books Vegas, and my planner will be available when I get back from that, loaded up with all sorts of ideas. Having a way to sort through that and saying, "Yes, it would be fun to do 27 things in the next month, but let's take a step back."
 
[00:54:54] Orna: Absolutely. It's a filter. You can filter all that in and know that it will happen, and it's there, but it's not going to happen. You can only do one thing at a time.
 
[00:55:08] Matty: Thank you so much, Orna.
 
[00:55:10] Orna: Matty, for the opportunity, and yeah, happy writing and publishing to you too.
 
[00:55:16] Matty: Happy writing and publishing.

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.