Episode 234 - The Pocket Guide to Pantsing with Michael La Ronn

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Michael La Ronn discusses THE POCKET GUIDE TO PANTSING, including honoring what your brain is trying to do; retrospective outlining for pantsers; cycling through your story; meeting the characters where they are; surprising the reader (and yourself); the challenge of writing into the dark across a series; using AI to create a story bible (but how spreadsheets still work better than AI); differentiating fear from anxiety; and giving yourself permission to trust yourself. You can also listen to me talk myself into the viability of using pantsing for mysteries.

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

www.authorlevelup.com
www.youtube.com/authorlevelup
www.facebook.com/authorlevelup
The audiobook of Michael's THE POCKET GUIDE TO PANTSING is on YouTube for free here! 

Summary

This conversation between Matty Dalrymple and Michael La Ronn about the pros and cons of "pantsing", also known as writing a novel without an outline. Michael is an advocate of pantsing, while Matty takes a more structured approach to novel writing.
 
Michael explains his pantsing process, which involves starting with just a basic idea for the first scene, then continuously writing 500-2,000 word chunks before going back to revise what was just written to check consistency and resonance. He essentially writes the novel in multiple passes while moving forward. This helps honor where his brain naturally wants to take the story. When he gets to around 75% done, he usually has a "glimmer" where he clearly sees how the story will end. 
 
They discuss how some genres like historical fiction or hard sci-fi are much harder to pants, since more research is required. Michael argues that pantsing helps him get deeper into his characters' heads and emotions. Matty counters that plotting lets you shape the character arc more. They agree both approaches are valid depending on personal preference and genre; sometimes a hybrid approach works too.
 
Michael emphasizes meeting the characters "where they are", while Matty focuses on shaping the arc from point A to B. Matty also uses a frame or outline to give a sense of the overarching plot across a whole series of books, while allowing room for exploration. She sees both strengths and weaknesses to each approach.
 
They explore Michael's strategy of creating a "retrospective outline" while pantsing, by writing down high level chapter summaries, descriptions, key details to remember later. This helps when referencing back, especially for consistency across a series. Matty also keeps notes but relies more on searchable PDFs of previous books.
 
They discuss using AI to create story bibles summarizing key facts across a series, but the technology does not work well yet due to hallucination issues and ingesting large amounts of text. Manual spreadsheets capture key details better for now.
 
Overall the discussion explores pantsing as a viable alternative to outlining for some authors, with its own pros and cons. Trusting oneself and overcoming fear/anxiety of the unknown are critical to succeed. It offers efficiency but requires continuously cycling back to keep consistency. The approach resonates most with authors who wish to follow their subconscious creative voice.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to "The Indie Author Podcast." Today my guest is Michael La Ronn. Hey Michael, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Michael: I'm great, Matty. It's always good to be back.
 
[00:00:08] Matty: Always lovely to have you here as, I believe, one of the most frequent guests on "The Indie Author Podcast." And since you've been on the podcast so many times, I can't imagine that I need to provide an introduction, but I'm just going to say that if our viewers or listeners haven't yet delved into all the resources you offer to your fellow indie authors, I highly recommend that they check out AuthorLevelUp.com and AuthorLevelUp on YouTube. And you can also look through all my past conversations with Michael to hear a more extensive intro if necessary. So I had invited Michael on the podcast to discuss "The Pocket Guide to Pantsing," because I saw his lovely article in "Writer's Digest" magazine, and I know Michael has written and spoken extensively on this topic.
 
And this could almost be one of our "two perspectives on" conversations because you and I have very different approaches to this, but I think that the listeners have heard me talk about the idea of framing up a story, which is a phrase that I like better than outlining, enough. But if they haven't, they can check out my article in "Writer's Digest" about creating a story frame, which is in the July-August 2022 issue, and I'll also mention that article is in the July-August 2023 issue of "Writers Digest" magazine. People can find my article, which is now available publicly, if they go to TheIndyAuthor.com — and that's Indy with a Y — and then click on creating your story frame. And so today, we are really just going to be exploring Michael's advice on pantsing.
 
[00:01:32] Matty: And so, I know that a lot of people sort of get up in arms a little bit about the term pantsing. How come you describe that as opposed to one of the other terms that people use for the approach you're describing?
 
[00:01:43] Michael: I purely use pantsing as a marketing ploy. So when you say pantsing, everybody knows what you mean. And so I wrote a book called "The Pocket Guide to Pantsing." It just alliteration; it just worked. But there are some people, particularly across the pond, that don't like that term because pants doesn't mean pants; it means underwear.
 
[00:02:03] Matty: That's true, I didn't actually think of that.
 
[00:02:06] Michael: Yeah. So, I've had a few people say that to me and, you know, what, I get it, I understand. It's just a term that everyone uses and everyone understands. You could also use the words discovery writing or exploratory writing. Dean Wesley Smith calls it writing into the dark. There are lots of different terms for it. But ultimately, it's the process of writing a novel without an outline, and with no or very little understanding of what is going to happen before you start writing and while you're writing.
 
Michael's experience with outlining
 
[00:02:39] Matty: And have you experimented with both approaches, the more writing-into-the-dark approach and a more structured approach? Have you experimented with a structured approach?
 
[00:02:49] Michael: Oh, I've done both. I started off as an outliner, so I wrote my first 10 novels with outlines, and I experimented with all sorts of different outlining methods. They're the plot point method, the hero's journey, the three-act structure, snowflake method. I mean, I was a student of all those methods, and I realized that, just me personally, there's nothing wrong with the methods, but I found myself in my mind wandering a lot when I started to write.
 
Honoring what your brain is trying to do
 
[00:03:18] Michael: So I started the question like, "If I'm spending all this time outlining, only for my brain to just completely throw it out the window when I start writing, why am I wasting all my time outlining?" And so for me, it became kind of an efficiency play, like, I'm not being efficient with my time or my resources.
 
And so that's when I started to explore writing into the dark and pantsing out, writing without an outline, as a way to help me become more efficient and also honor what my brain was trying to do when I was writing.
 
[00:03:48] Matty: I think it would be useful to have you just talk through the creation of a novel from the moment you get the idea, right through, so we can have some context for further conversation about pantsing.
 
Like, do you do multiple passes when you're done with your writing? How close are you to a final draft? Do you have to step away from it to come back to it later with a fresh perspective? Those kinds of things.
 
Michael's writing process
 
[00:04:12] Michael: Yeah, I'll hit it at a high level and then we can go deeper into the different elements if that works. So essentially, it begins with an idea. Every novel I write, I at least know what the first scene is going to be. And that's generally a hero in a setting with some sort of problem.
 
That's usually all I know. I might see a few scenes throughout the novel, but they're kind of hazy. So I'll sit down, and I'll start writing, and it's kind of like moving a boulder. You just have to start, and I just start writing. I write whatever's on my heart, whatever my subconscious tells me to, and I listen very much to the little voice in my head.
 
Now, practically, what that looks like is I will write a chapter, go for about 500 to 1,000 words, stop, and then I'll go back, and I'll reread what I wrote, and I'll fill in little details, and then I'll continue. And I'll go another 500 to 2,000 words, stop, go back. That's a process called cycling or looping, where essentially you're writing the novel in multiple drafts, but you're doing it at the same time.
 
So as I go through the novel, I'm constantly cycling and looping back and rereading what I wrote to make sure that one, it makes sense; two, it's consistent; and three, it's emotionally resonant and engaging. So as I'm writing the novel, I'm constantly going back. And so when I get to the end, I'm done.
 
Like I'm just finished. And that works because, essentially, energy-wise, it's probably the same as writing multiple drafts, but I'm doing it as I go.
 
Another thing that I do as I go is I outline my novel as I go. So outliners will outline their novel before they start as a way to help them stay structured.
 
[00:07:29] Matty:
 
I outline my novel as I go to help me remember what has happened previously. And then, when I write future books in a series, I can refer to the outline instead of having to reread the book. So my outlines are always 100 percent up to date. Writing without an outline is about just following wherever your brain leads you and sometimes that can take you to some crazy places. You just simply trust the process and trust that you can get the words down, revising as you go and doing it essentially in one draft, but it's not quite one draft. Then, outlining your story as you go as well.
 
And it is a masterclass in learning how to tame your fear because it is an intensely emotional and intensely intimate process. You're really trusting yourself and trusting yourself to understand the story. It's not for everyone. But for those people for whom it works, when they do it, they can never go back.
 
And so I've just been trying to be a proponent of that and try to help as many people who have the eyes and the ears to see the method, try it, and unlock their best selves.
 
[00:07:29] Matty: And I would say, and I invite you to share a different perspective on this if you think, that if someone is using a more structured approach and it's working for them, they should not feel required, as like an exercise, to necessarily try pantsing. Just as someone who's pantsing and having success should not feel morally obligated to try outlining. Do you agree with that or disagree?
 
Finding the writing approach that fits you like a glove
 
[00:07:52] Michael: Oh, I agree 100%. I have strong feelings about writing into the dark and outlining because it has done wonders in my life in terms of my own self-confidence, improving my craft, and it has had immeasurable benefits in every area of my writing life, but it's not for everybody. And even though I have strong opinions, I don't think that if you feel comfort in outlining and there's something about that which resonates with your personality, by all means, don't give it up. But there are a lot of people who have bought my book and who have subscribed to my YouTube channel who have felt over the years that they have to outline just because that is kind of the predominant way, and understanding that there is another way to do it has kind of set them free.
 
It has liberated them. It's helped them step into the truest, best versions of their writing selves. So I just want people to find the version of writing that fits them like a glove. Whether it's outlining, pantsing, or a hybrid, it doesn't matter. I've got a lot of people who reach out to me that do a hybrid of both. Some people switch between both methods when they write novels. It doesn't matter to me. I just want to help people become practitioners if they want to pursue this method.
 
[00:09:11] Matty: It's interesting that of all the people I've explicitly asked about the pantsing versus plotting question on the podcast, I think all of them have been pantsers. I'm thinking specifically of Hank Phillippi Ryan, Robert Dugoni; those are the only two that are popping into my head, but I just remember because many of them are in the suspense, thriller, mystery genre, and it always surprises me when someone who's writing a mystery doesn't have at least an inkling of who the bad guy is when they start. Now, that might change, but they have an idea.
 
Cycling through your story
 
[00:09:47] Matty: But I did want to circle back to cycling to make sure I understand that. So, if you write a thousand-word chapter, let's say, and then the next day, are you reading through the thousand-word chapter, and then you're writing the second thousand-word chapter? I'm making up the numbers, so the numbers aren't important. And then the third day, you're reading through the first two. Am I understanding that correctly?
 
[00:10:08] Michael: Well, let's just take it in chunks. So you write Chapter One, right? At the end of Chapter One, you go back, and you reread what you wrote and you make simple edits here and there. You might change some things more substantially, and then you move on to Chapter Two. And when you're done with Chapter Two, you go back to the beginning of Chapter Two and reread and revise it.
 
Now, there could be times when you come across a problem. Let's just say, for example, you introduce a character, and their eyes are blue in Chapter One, and you realize, "Oh, crap, I made them purple in Chapter Three." Well, you could be way further into the novel at that point. Fix problems as they come up. So, when you're done with Chapter One, I guarantee you that is not going to be the last time you go through Chapter One because there are going to be things that come up later in the novel that require you to jump back. And so, another thing that I do as well is when I'm almost done with the novel, I will loop the entire novel.
 
So, say the novel is going to be 35 chapters. When I'm getting to like Chapter 32, right around the end of the final battle, and I know that I'm about to write the resolution, what I'll do is I'll jump back and I'll reread the whole thing as a final master loop, so that when I get to the end, I really am at the end.
 
So, cycling, looping, whatever you want to call it, it's just basically you continuously going back into the novel to stay in touch with what you wrote. And you know, that's the thing about writing into the dark: when you start, you have no idea what's going to happen most of the time. Maybe you have a little bit, but it's not very much. As you progress through the novel, you slowly start to see more. It's kind of like shining a flashlight in the dark. Eventually, you can see the whole room, and once you're near the end of the novel, you generally kind of know how it's going to end.
 
There's usually a moment where, you know, I call it the glimmer. It usually happens sometime around the 75 percent mark where all the lights come on and you just know exactly what's going to happen. And that's a really cool moment because it lets you race toward the end, and it gives you a lot of energy.
 
[00:12:30] Matty: I think it would be interesting to poll people in different genres about the plotting versus pantsing question because, well, I'll precede this by saying I think everybody at some point does both. Like, I don't think anybody writes an outline and then marches through it and never deviates from it.
 
A challenge of writing into the dark across a series
 
[00:12:49] Matty: I don't think most people go into a free writing mindset and finish it, then say, "Oh, okay, I'm going to publish that." Those are too far off the end of the spectrum on either side. An experience I just had: I'm working on the fifth "Lizzie Ballard Thriller." I've had this happen before, and I'm actually not sure whether this is a pro or con on either the plotting or pantsing side, but there was a secondary character who I was concerned would not be appealing to the reader because this character could be seen as competing for the affections of another character against the protagonist. She had a strike against her to begin with, and she was a rule follower. In thrillers, rule followers are intrinsically unappealing because that's not what you go to a thriller for.
 
I had finished my frame, which was probably 15-20,000 words, and I knew this was a problem. I wasn't going to be able to get through the book with her as two-dimensional and unappealing as she was in the first draft. It was only as I started fleshing things out—after I had finished my frame and was adding more description, dialogue, and other elements—that I realized something she could do that would elevate her in the eyes of the audience and make her a more empathetic and sympathetic character.
 
I'm glad I didn't stick with the frame until I had answered that question because I don't think I could have without doing the writing, without writing into the dark about that one character. But I also think that with a book that has an overarching plot arc, not only within the book but across the series, I would never feel comfortable not knowing how things work out. To me, it's important that I can look at the arc across all the books and say, at the end of each book, the protagonist has achieved something, and everything in the book has to lead up to that achievement.
 
The achievement isn't necessarily going to change, but how they get there might. Again, this is not a pro or con; I'm not arguing one way or the other, I'm just describing my process. I do think that there are some things that are helpful to have at least a high-level sense of where you're going with, for me.
 
And then some things I'm never going to be able to figure out until I start writing into the dark. And I think that is a strength of outlining, is that you can plan out certain things like where you want your character to begin and where you want them to end. I've always thought about characters, and I really don't think about character arcs that much when I write.
 
Meeting the characters where they are
 
[00:15:27] Michael: And again, this is just me sharing my perspectives in response to what you said. I'm far more interested in what the character is doing at any given moment because I think that readers react to that more than they react to an arc. It's a different philosophy. Writing into the dark and pantsing is really about meeting the characters where they are, while outlining is about helping characters get from point A to point B. Both schools are valid, and you could mix and match from both to get better results.
 
That's one of the things I learned about pantsing when I switched because I've done both. I found that my characters went from point A to point B when I was outlining, but I didn't always do a good job of conveying their emotions or how they responded to things.
 
When I started writing without an outline, I felt like I got much better at getting into the character's head because it was me in the moment meeting the character where they are, and I think that worked really well. Now, there are some downsides to that because you don't have an arc, necessarily, or an arc that happens is just kind of spontaneous, not really planned out, but that's all I have to say about that.
 
I think it's an interesting philosophy, and there's no right or wrong way. It's just what works for you.
 
[00:17:03] Matty: Yeah. Well, I think if people are listening to our conversation and they're resonating with one or the other more, then that's a hint at how their mind works.
 
[00:17:14] Michael: You did mention the genres. It would be interesting. It's a lot harder to write into the dark with historical fiction or hard science fiction that requires more research. Those are the genres that would be a lot harder to write into the dark. But there are really very few genres where this doesn't work.
 
Matty talks herself into the viability of using pantsing for mysteries
 
[00:17:43] Matty: I think one nuance of mystery that makes multiple passes, or at least the second pass, important is that if you're writing into the dark to explore who the bad guy is, I can't imagine how people do this. I've interviewed some very successful mystery authors who pants and don't go back. But I can't imagine not doing it because when I'm writing a mystery, then I go back, once I've confirmed that the person I thought did it really did it, which hasn't always been the case. I've had one book where the bad guy turned out to be someone different than I thought. Then I have to go back and plant those clues for the reader that point them at least equally to the bad guy.
 
I have a theory about mystery that if you implicate everyone except the person who did it, then astute readers will know who did it because they'll just say, well, they haven't planted any clues about this person, so that must be the person who did it. I think you have to implicate everyone equally, so everyone is equally likely to be the bad guy.
 
And I think, I mean, I suppose on that theory, you just make sure you're planting clues equally and then you decide which switch you're going to hit at the end. Maybe that's how they go about that.
 
Surprising yourself ... and the reader
 
[00:19:03] Michael: Well, that's another core tenet of writing without an outline. Dean Wesley Smith talks a lot about this: if you don't know what's going to happen in your story, then the reader won't either. If you're entertaining yourself, that will be more entertaining and engaging for the readers.
 
There is a level of misdirection you have to employ when writing a mystery, particularly concerning who killed someone. There are many different techniques you can use without necessarily knowing who did it. I'm not sure whether David Baldacci outlines, but he's adept at incorporating more twists than pretzels in his books. He's a great person to study for techniques to keep you guessing about the killer, which I think could also apply to pantsing.
 
[00:20:04] Matty: So, it doesn't surprise me that there are mystery writers out there who can do it.
 
[00:20:09] Michael: Maybe they have an inkling as the story progresses, but perhaps they truly don't know who the killer is when they begin. And, then you can go back and plant the seeds if you need to.
 
[00:20:20] Matty: I sort of talked myself out of that because, following my theory, which I still believe is true, you have to implicate everyone equally. Then you're implicating everyone equally, and you don't need to know until the end which trail of implications is true and which are false.
 
[00:20:39] Matty: We'd have to ponder that now.
 
Retrospective outlining for pantsers
 
[00:20:41] Matty: I wanted to go back to what you were saying about outlining retrospectively, and could you describe some ways you implement that outline, either while you're writing or perhaps after you've written the book?
 
[00:20:54] Michael: Yeah, it's helpful at all stages of the process. It helps me concretize my thoughts when I'm writing. You're never going to remember your novel as much as when you're writing it. If you're writing in the moment, you'll know all the details of that chapter intimately, and the further you get from that moment, the harder it becomes to remember.
 
So, I think of it as an insurance policy. I write down what happens in the chapter at a high level, descriptions of the setting, any character descriptions, and other details I might need to remember later, like an artifact or a particular phrase the character uses.
 
I do that at the end of every chapter, so later in the book, when I need to refer back, I can just look at the outline and remember, "Okay, the barn was full of hay, there were horses, and there was a lantern on the wall," for whatever reason I need to know that.
 
Well, I can remember that when I'm in Chapter 35 because I can go back to the outline. What's more important, though, if you're writing a series, is how much you forget from book to book. It's astounding how much I forget, even when I write books back to back.
 
For instance, I'll finish a novel and then jump into the next one, and suddenly I have a character doing something completely different. Wait a minute, no, that's not right. It's really easy to do. And, you know, the more time that passes between your books, the more of a problem this becomes.
 
So to me, the outline is really an insurance policy for when you're writing future books. It's just not efficient to have to go back and reread your entire novels every time you need to remember something. It becomes a story bible in a way.
 
[00:23:18] Matty: Yes, the story Bible idea is one that I'm very interested in. I recently talked with Cara Malone about using AI to help create a story bible. I'll get back to the AI aspect in a moment. I'm trying to offer two perspectives, even though I said I wouldn't. When I finish a draft, the last thing I do is have my computer read the story to me. At that point, I'm picking up on things like duplicated words or errors that a spellchecker or a writing aid might miss. And I'm trying to be more diligent about making those notes then because I know I won't be tweaking any further. God help us.
 
But I usually have a file on my computer with word files, actually PDFs, of all my books. So 90 percent of the time, if I'm wondering, "Did that tertiary character have a beard or mustache?" I can usually find that with some searching within the document.
 
Using AI to create a story bible
 
[00:24:16] Matty: But I had a question come up the other day, and I'm hoping that AI will soon be able to help me with it, if it can't already. I'd like to load all my books into it, then ask the AI, "Did this character ever meet this character in person?" Because there are two very important characters, and I can't remember if in the first four books they ever actually met each other in person. It makes a difference to this one plot point in book five. Are you experimenting at all with AI for story bibles, or does the story bible approach you're describing address that question?
 
[00:24:54] Michael: Okay, so yes, I have experimented with this. I have experimented with it in ChatGPT. ChatGPT Plus has a feature that allows you to create custom GPTs, and the benefit of custom GPTs is it's like a customized mini version of ChatGPT that you can train by uploading knowledge documents.
 
So in theory, what you should be able to do is upload manuscripts of all your novels in a series, have that become the training document for ChatGPT, and then you would be able to ask it questions, just like you said. In practice, it does not work right now, and the reason for it is because it hallucinates.
 
It also has some difficulty ingesting large amounts of text. I mean, it can ingest a PDF, but the longer the text, the more challenging it becomes. It often gives a lot of false positives. I tested this about a month ago, quite extensively with a series I've got that has about seven books right now.
 
And it didn't give me any results that I liked. There were things that were wrong, things that were not quite right. It made up characters. So, I do think that the architecture is there, and at some point, whether it's GPT-5 or a future version, I do think it will be able to help us create story bibles in exactly the way that you mentioned.
 
[00:26:28] Michael: In the meantime, I just use a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, and that works because I can filter it by character, I can filter it by scene, and I can find what I'm looking for quickly. The goal is to find something on your outline faster than you can find it in your book, and that just takes practice.
 
It's ultimately about figuring out what sorts of questions you find yourself asking and making sure that you capture those questions as you're writing.
 
[00:27:03] Matty: The benefit of that spreadsheet approach, rather than searching within a PDF book by book, is that if you're keeping one big spreadsheet of all your notes about a series, you could say, "Show me all the ways I've described this character's house."
 
And then you could say, "Oh, yeah, well, in book one, they only ever went into the living room. But then in book two, they had the opportunity to go upstairs." And then I have to remember this part of it; it would be nice to see the development of that over a series as well as within a book, which is what I'm limited to when I'm using the search approach.
 
[00:27:39] Michael: Yeah, and what I do is write down the key details. So if there's a detail that I think is going to be repeated or that I would like to repeat, those are the ones I write down. And that helps me. You mentioned the house; it's funny because I do the exact same thing. I've got a character in the series I'm writing right now, "The Good Necromancer," where his house is a really important part of the series.
 
And in every book, he goes into a different area of the house. So I have to remember what rooms he's in, what's in there, and also what he's said about them. You know, because he gives some history and some details about it, because it's a historic home. So things like that are really helpful to keep in your outline.
 
[00:28:24] Matty: Yeah, I realized that across all my books and short stories, there are a couple of go-to home decor styles that I use, and I try to keep that varied. But I was thinking, when you were talking about the danger of an AI hallucinating when trying to give you story Bible information, I wonder if, at the point where the AI is better at ingesting large quantities of data but is still hallucinating, you could address that by saying, "Let me know if Character A has ever met Character B in person, and show me the text where that happens." And then if you still didn't trust it, you could actually search your master documents for that text to make sure that it hadn't made up the reference text it was giving you.
 
[00:29:11] Michael: You could, but you know, if you have to still go back into the reference text, then I think you've kind of defeated the purpose.
 
[00:29:17] Matty: Yeah. Just switching over to a quite different topic, do you pair a word count goal with your pantsing approach?
 
[00:29:26] Michael: Not really. I tend to write a lot of words. So, most of the time, you know, I don't really care. I'm going to write a couple thousand words a day, most of the time. Usually, at the beginning of a novel, I usually will write less because I'm still exploring, and I like to take my time to establish the setting, the characters, and the stakes and everything like that.
 
And so, I give myself permission to write fewer words. Usually, it's the first week, I will write fewer words and then, once I feel comfortable and things really start to take off, then I'll start swinging for the fences.
 
[00:30:08] Matty: Or running for the hills, depending.
 
[00:30:11] Michael: I love torturing analogies. It's one of my favorite things to do.
 
[00:30:14] Matty: Well, one of the things I wanted to ask is, if someone is using or experimenting with the pantsing approach, the writing into the dark approach, and now they're in a dark room and they don't know where they're going, and they've panicked, you know, when you get stuck in a pantsing scenario, do you have any recommendations for how people get past that?
 
[00:30:30] Michael: Yes, I do. And the biggest recommendation is that it is psychological. There is something about writing into the dark that really forces us to look inside ourselves and understand who we really are. And a lot of the problems that people have when they're staring at the blinking cursor in a dark room is that they're afraid. It's fear. And understanding the nature of what fear really is, is something that can set you free.
 
Differentiating fear from anxiety
 
[00:31:03] Michael: So, if you don't mind, I'll tell a story. So, have you heard of Gavin De Becker? He's a security consultant who has built his career protecting valuable people.
 
He wrote a book called "The Gift of Fear." In it, he talks about how fear is actually a biological response that is engineered to save your life.
 
There's a story he tells about a guy who's surfing and gets attacked by a great white shark. The shark is eating him, and he starts fighting the shark. They say to blind the shark, you know, jam your thumbs in the shark's eyes. He does that and the shark lets him go. But the guy doesn't let go of the shark. The shark starts swimming down into the ocean and he's holding on. Why would you do that, right? He gets to the ocean floor, and something tells him to let go of the shark, and he swims up and lives to tell about it. That is fear. Fear makes you do things that you would not normally do as a way to save your life.
 
[00:33:26] Michael: Now, there's also anxiety, which presents in much the same way as fear when you're staring at the blinking cursor: your heart rate's going to go up, your blood pressure is going to go up a little bit, your pupils are going to dilate, and you're going to have shallow breathing. But you're not in any danger of being eaten. Fear and anxiety may seem like the same thing, but they are not. He says that anxiety is a response to something that you imagine or that you remember.
 
So when you're staring at the blinking cursor, you're probably imagining that the story's not going to work, that readers won't like it, imagining all sorts of things that can go wrong that really have no basis in reality. It's just your brain playing tricks on you. And when you understand that, you can make a decision.
 
[00:33:26] Michael: To stop being afraid of things that you imagine or remember, and it will set you free. Now, I know it's not any consolation because you still don't know what's going to happen in your story, but it's giving yourself permission to trust yourself. That is absolutely critical because we writers are really sensitive and emotional people, and that's why we're able to do what we do. But the downside is that because we're sensitive and emotional, we live inside our heads a lot.
 
Learning how to stop doing that is, I think, the first key to learning how to write into the dark successfully.
 
[00:34:04] Matty: So, I'm going to belabor the shark story just a bit to explore a question. That is, I can imagine that somebody does the equivalent of continuing to hold onto the shark even after it dives. They're staring at the blinking cursor, their blood pressure is going up, and they decide to grab the shark by the eyeballs. They start writing whatever pops into their head to get past the block. Then the shark dives, and they hang on. In the sense of continuing to write whatever they've chosen to get past that hump, it carries them through the entire rest of the book. For some, what would be a mind-clearing exercise turns into a path that pulls them into the depths, taking them into more danger.
 
Do you have any thoughts on how people can identify when they've taken a wrong turn? Are there red flags they should watch out for that suggest they're sticking with an idea too long?
 
[00:35:38] Michael: Okay, so, you're making an assumption, if I may. You're assuming that the words you write to get out of a corner are bad or are just a writing prompt. That's not always the case. In fact, most of the time, when people have writer's block, they think the words they're writing are really bad.
 
You know, how do you back up from that? And I think you ultimately, what I think is when you get to a chapter and you're staring at the blinking cursor, often the reason, one of the reasons that can happen is because you went astray somewhere just before where you are. So what I encourage people to do is to look back.
 
You know, it's sometimes the, on a plane, they say the nearest exit may be behind you. It could be that something you wrote 500 words ago, that's what went off the rails. And maybe you just need to backtrack a little bit, figure out what that is, and then you can go down another path. And I think that's, that's a far more productive way to think about it than thinking about, well, am I completely going down a rabbit hole?
 
Do I need to blow up the whole novel or that sort of thing? Usually the problems are right there in front of you. You just got to figure out what they are.
 
[00:37:50] Matty: So cool. Well, Michael, thank you so much for the conversation. It was always super fun to talk to you about almost anything. And you always have such practical advice to offer. So please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
 
[00:38:05] Michael: Yeah, you can find all the things I'm doing at AuthorLevelUp.com. I've got a book called "The Pocket Guide to Pantsing" that covers everything we talked about today. And it's also got their links to my fiction on that website as well.
 
[00:38:18] Matty: So great. Thank you so much.
 
[00:38:21] Michael: Thanks, Matty. Always my pleasure.

Episode 233 - Data-Driven Publishing with Pamela Fagan Hutchins

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Matty Dalrymple talks with Pamela Fagan Hutchins about DATA-DRIVEN PUBLISHING, including business and creative collaboration with a publisher; the rise of "super indie / alt traditional”; changing one's genre or plotting approach based on the data; battling imposter syndrome; the danger of violating reader expectations and the power of targeting the enthusiastic sub-genre fan; and the value of writing between bright lines. 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.

Pamela Fagan Hutchins is a USA Today bestselling and Amazon All Star mystery / thriller / suspense author who believes in soulmates, loves to laugh, and lives out the adventures in her books at a rustic lake camp at Maine’s Mooselook Lake and in an off-the-grid lodge on the face of Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains with her husband, sled dogs, and draft horses. She was also a guest on an installment of my video series What I Learned, when we talked about her book HER LAST CRY.

Episode Links

https://pamelafaganhutchins.com
https://www.facebook.com/pamela.fagan.hutchins.author
https://www.instagram.com/pamela_fagan_hutchins/
https://www.youtube.com/pamelafaganhutchins

Summary

In this episode of The Indy Author Podcast, host Matty Dalrymple and Pamela Fagan Hutchins, a bestselling mystery thriller/suspense author. The discussion focuses on Pamela's transition from being an independent ("indie") author to signing a contract with Bookouture, a digital publishing imprint of Hachette UK. Pamela describes Bookouture as a "super indie/alt-traditional" publisher that is highly data-driven in their approach.
 
One significant change Pamela discussed was Bookouture asking her to write a police procedural genre instead of her previous amateur sleuth and legal thriller books. Pamela was initially hesitant due to impostor syndrome, as she had no direct experience as a police officer. However, she embraced the challenge, seeking guidance from subject matter experts like police chiefs and sheriffs to ensure authenticity and accuracy.
 
Another critical shift was in Pamela's plotting approach. Her previous method was more organic, while Bookouture pushed her to adopt a structured five-act structure with a strong midpoint at around 49-51% of the book. This midpoint was meant to provide a significant revelation or plot twist to propel the reader towards the conclusion. Pamela acknowledged that incorporating this structural change was initially difficult but improved with each book, as her editor at Bookouture provided guidance.
 
Interestingly, Pamela mentioned that Bookouture was willing to change book covers if the initial designs were not performing well, something traditional publishers are often reluctant to do. This flexibility allowed for quick pivots and adjustments based on data and reader feedback.
 
Pamela also discussed the data-driven nature of Bookouture's decision-making. Their data suggested that readers preferred police procedurals with law enforcement protagonists, leading them to request that change from Pamela. While Pamela did not have direct access to Bookouture's data, she acknowledged that their decisions were informed by insights into reader preferences and buying patterns.
 
A notable challenge Pamela faced was introducing her existing indie readers to her new Bookouture books, which had a slightly different branding and style. She made efforts to align her indie branding and pricing with Bookouture's to signal continuity to her readers. Bookouture was supportive of these efforts, encouraging Pamela to maintain her independent success while collaborating with them.
 
Pamela highlighted the value of adaptability and writing within specific guidelines, which, though initially restrictive, can focus an author's attention and improve their craft. She emphasized the importance of understanding one's motivations for writing – whether for personal expression or commercial success – and tailoring one's approach accordingly.
 
In conclusion, the transcript provides valuable insights into the collaborative relationship between an author and a data-driven digital publisher. It highlights the potential benefits of such partnerships, including access to broader reader insights, structured guidance on plotting and genre choices, and the flexibility to make quick adjustments based on data. However, it also underscores the challenges of balancing creative freedom with commercial considerations and effectively introducing a new audience to an established author's work.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Pamela Fagan Hutchins. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Pamela: Hi, Matty. I'm great. How are you?
 
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great also.
 
Meet Pamela Fagan Hutchins
 
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Pamela Fagan Hutchins is a USA Today bestselling and Amazon All-Star Mystery Thriller suspense author who believes in soulmates, loves to laugh, and lives out the adventures in her books at a rustic lake camp in Maine's Mooselook Lake. And if you watched an earlier video, you'll know why I'm emphasizing Maine. And in an off-the-grid lodge in the face of Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains with her husband, sled dogs, and draft horses. She was also recently a guest on my video series, "What I Learned," where we talked about her book, "Her Last Cry," and there I accidentally identified Mooselook Lake as in Minnesota. So, apologies to Maine, one of my favorite states, for making that mistake.
 
[00:00:43] Pamela: At least looking at such a small community, you offended very few people. A hundred at most.
 
[00:00:53] Matty: Well, still, I don't want to offend anyone in Maine as my second adoptive home there.
 
So it was actually our conversation about "Her Last Cry" that led me to invite Pamela to the podcast because we started talking about some changes to her publishing approach that I'm going to ask her to describe in a moment. And we wanted to talk about data-driven book creation.
 
What is "super indie/alt traditional"?
 
[00:01:14] Matty: Pamela, I thought it would be useful to start right out having you describe for our listeners what that big change recently happened in your publishing approach.
 
[00:01:23] Pamela: Well, I've gone from being a dyed-in-the-wool, rebellious, you can't control me indie for the last 12 years to signing a contract with Bookouture, they're with Hachette UK, and I think of them as, these are my words, not theirs, but what attracted me to them was I think of them as super indie or alt-traditional as a digital publisher that is extremely driven by learning from data.
 
[00:01:51] Matty: Yeah, I'm kind of a student of Bookouture, and one of the things that has led to is that I'm kind of struggling with a different way of representing indie versus traditional because I don't think that's the case anymore. I just think that professional indies have learned so much from the good stuff that the traditional publishing world has to offer. And the traditional publishers are starting to learn from what the indies are doing well. And I think Bookouture is a great example of an organization that's kind of tapping into the best of both worlds. So it's definitely a spectrum. It's not an either/or if it ever was. And I just think it's a fascinating company to follow. And you must have too.
 
[00:02:31] Pamela: I do too, and a mutual friend of ours is who I really got interested in originally, because of Lisa Regan, and she was so happy with them. We started chatting and I thought, "Wow, that sounds really smart." It sounded smart to me because it's what I've been trying to do in a smaller way on my own for 12 years. And all of a sudden, here was someone doing it bigger on behalf of a large number of authors with some very successful books. And I just salivated after all that data. How can you not want to be part of using good data to its highest possibility? I only have a small amount of data compared to them. I want their data. And I don't get their data, but I get the use of their data. I get to learn from their data.
 
And the other thing I really liked about them is, first of all, they embrace authors from the indie space because they don't have any snobbery to it, right? There's no "Oh, you're indie, you're dirty, we won't touch you." It's "Can you write? Can you sell books? Okay, we can do something with that. I think that falls in what we do. So cool, let's all play together." And they encourage you to continue whatever is working for you outside their space as well. Whether it's multiple publishers, indie career, keep those going. Just don't step on each other's toes. We put together schedules and things that honor that with each other.
 
The Value of Adaptability
 
[00:03:55] Matty: One of the things that I've really been impressed with, from what I've heard and read about Bookouture, is its willingness to pivot. And I think because it is digital-only, there are things they can do like changing up a cover if the first one isn't working, as opposed to having 50,000 copies of a print book in a warehouse somewhere. That's the cover that people are going to be seeing for the next decade, which I'm a big fan of.
 
[00:04:22] Pamela: Exactly. I think it's wonderful. A friend of mine early on told me, "Oh, think twice about Bookouture because they'll change your cover on you at the last second." And I was like, "Wait, that's what I like about them." I like that they're willing to say, "We were wrong, and we're going to do better in the long run by changing now than just letting this title not work after all the work that went into it." Letting it not work as a vehicle to reach readers because of some antiquated notion that "that's the cover, forever, we will never change it because we shipped it from China with 48,000 of its friends on a boat."
 
[00:05:03] Matty: I'm surprised at that reaction. Was that reaction about "watch out for them because they'll change your cover at the last minute," did you have a sense of what was driving that reaction?
 
[00:05:12] Pamela: That it ruins publicity. That you have these moments to publicize, and the cover reveal is one of them. Here you've done the cover reveal, you've created the impressions, and now you're changing it out on people. But frankly, as an indie, I've changed some of my book covers five times. I just keep playing with them and testing them through ads until I find what's working best right now, usually a series lead, right? The rest of them don't matter as much. I want to hook them on that first book, and so with "Saving Grace," which is the very first book in my "What Doesn't Kill You" super series, first book in the Katie Connell series within that, and "Switchback," which is my lead in my Patrick Blintz books, I've changed those covers over and over. I don't have anything tied to an identity with it or anything else. It's about what's working now. What makes someone say, "That's the book I want to read," when they hit that page. And we get it wrong, which is one of the reasons I wanted to work with somebody else, frankly. I felt like I was too emotionally invested in things like titles, descriptions, covers. That was my weakness. I felt like I could write well enough anyway, and that was my weakness. I was the one calling those shots, and maybe that needed to be a more data-driven decision.
 
Changing One's Genre Based on the Data
 
[00:06:32] Matty: There were a couple of things that we talked about earlier that were places where your writer life changed as a result of partnering up with Bookouture. And I'm going to throw them out, and we can take this conversation wherever. But one of the things that you had mentioned that was very interesting is not only does an author obviously get tied to their cover and description and so on, but also their genre. And so one of the things that Bookouture asked you to do was to write a police procedural. Could you describe a little bit about where that request came from and what your reaction to it was?
 
[00:07:05] Pamela: I had all these long, lovely conversations with the woman who is my editor now, before I'd signed with them. She'd say, "Great, we want to work with you, and we love this book, but we'd like you to change it from X to Y,” from what it is now to a police procedural. And I kept saying no, I don't think so. At one point, I literally said to them, "You know what? I'm going to go away for a year and we can talk again later, but I'm going to go ahead and write more books in this series because I believe in this book and I'm going to do it now." And they were like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's talk again." And I thought we'd reached a point where it was going to be amateur sleuth again because it was really an unconventional sleuth, not a cozy. I'm not a cozy writer, but an unconventional sleuth, meaning non-police.
 
And somehow we ended up again with, I was going to start immediately and start a police procedural. At which point, my husband and I, who collaborate closely on both our careers—I am his other half in his career, he's my other half in mine—we said, "If we're going to do this, let's just do it. You want to learn from them, you want to break yourself free of things that may be holding you back by working with them, just go ahead and do it." And so I said yes, and immediately called our dear friend who's a police chief and said, "Help me!" And he has.
 
[00:08:21] Matty: So, what was it specifically that was deterring you from pursuing a police procedural?
 
[00:08:28] Pamela: That impostor syndrome, feeling like a fraud. I had been the things that were often at the helm or the protagonist's main career or avocation. Whatever it was that stood out as their identity, I could identify with, in my other books, either through a close family member or myself, I felt I could write them with authority. And authenticity is really important to me, getting things right. I had never been a cop. I'd been a private investigator; I'd been a lawyer, but I'd never been a cop, and I was scared. It turned out that with the help of others, I could handle that just as well as I did any of those other fields.
 
[00:09:09] Matty: And did your publisher provide any help in terms of getting you the information that you felt you needed, or was that really on you as the author to find the subject matter experts to tap into?
 
[00:09:20] Pamela: I never asked them to help me, so they might have, but I did it on my own, and I told them what I was doing. I actually reached out to the sheriff and the undersheriff in our county. The sheriff was wonderful, but it ended up I relied on the police chief more heavily even though I was writing something that was more rural and was a sheriff's department.
 
But I found that the law enforcement people, most of them found it fun. Some were nervous. Some were like, "Oh, don't tie my name to that." But I found just the right guy, one who's ready for me to crow his name and find him lots of writers to work with.
 
[00:09:53] Matty: Yeah, as I often say on the podcast, it is fun to find those subject matter experts who know inside and out what happens in real life but are willing to say, "Well, yeah, that normally wouldn't happen, but you could make it work if this." Like, "Oh, I love you. Yes."
 
[00:10:07] Pamela: There's nothing worse than the expert who says, "But it just wouldn't happen." And you're like, "Hmm, can't or wouldn't?" Wouldn't is good. Wouldn't is exactly where we're pushing to. We want something that is more exciting than every day.
 
[00:10:21] Matty: Yes, if the books were all about what happens every day, then nobody would be reading them.
 
[00:10:24] Pamela: Exactly. Yeah. So, that was different for me, but I've enjoyed it. I'm on the fourth book in the series right now, and I'm feeling more confident about trusting my instincts and knowing we can fix it later, and saving some of my questions for Travis, my consultant, until we're down the road.
 
[00:10:43] Matty: And we can fix it later is related to the details that you put in about--
 
[00:10:49] Pamela: Yeah, and I want to strike a balance between my details being correct and not burdening a book with details. And I found that one of the things that's good about me never having been a cop is I am not, I don't feel burdened by the details. I want as little as possible so that we can keep the pace of the book up. And I'm not constrained by needing to include all this background and all this detail, etc. Because to me, it's meaningless. I really think of it more like a reader. How do we get from point A to point B, while doing it correctly, but on the edge of vigilantism, and not getting thrown in jail.
 
So we don't get fired or thrown in jail today; it's roughly what a cop could and would do, and yet we get there fast enough to satisfy a reader who wants to read a thriller.
 
[00:11:36] Matty: Yeah, I think that, the idea of what details do you leave out, I was at a talk that James McCrone gave at the Brandywine Valley Writers Group meeting last night, and I think he was quoting Keith Richards, or maybe about songwriting, but it was, "You're not done when you have nothing else to say, you're done when you've taken out everything you can." Something to that effect, but I thought it was great words to live by for authors.
 
[00:12:04] Pamela: I think that's fantastic. It's one of the things I find challenging when I write books that are written more by people who are subject matter experts, is that it's harder for them. The ones that have that expertise and can leave out enough are spectacular. That's what I want to aim toward.
 
Changing one's plotting approach
 
[00:12:24] Matty: Absolutely. Genre is obviously a pretty central thing that you were asked to change, but another really important thing that you were asked to change was your plotting approach. So can you describe what your plotting approach was before, what your publisher asked you to change it to, and how that change went for you?
 
[00:12:41] Pamela: My plotting approach was pretty much "throw it all to the wall until it sticks" and get there somehow. And I roughly was embracing a three-act structure, really it's a five-act structure, with an inciting incident somewhere at, say, 15 to 20 percent of the way into the book, then three major acts, and then an act five, which is your ending, your denouement. That's how I looked at it. I did a lot of work on these in the past. I would print all my pages out, in a two-page book format, tape them to the floor, go through with highlighters, and look for continuity issues, see if I was dividing the acts up correctly. But in dividing the acts up correctly, what I wasn't thinking about was the midpoint of the book.
 
The midpoint of the book is the midpoint of the middle act. I was thinking about the beginnings and ends of acts and how do you get between those. So when my first draft came in, they said, "We really need a midpoint." And I'm like, "Talk to me about this midpoint." So they had me read a book called "Into the Woods" by John Yorke. So I read "Into the Woods," and for the most part, I was going, "Yeah, yeah, this is what I do," until I got to the part about the midpoint, which basically was, this is the point at which you move from what you didn't know towards having some kind of explosion of knowledge or a change point that leads to, at the end, your acceptance of what you've discovered, your reawakening, your endpoint.
 
And that your big moment of key discovery is right there at the end, between 49 and 51 percent, hit it right on the nose, Pamela. And I went through and, sure enough, for a crime thriller, I did not have that huge key discovery, which in a crime thriller, one would expect also to come with some whiz-bang, right? You want something at risk so that the protagonist is pushed forward into the second half of the book, resolving whatever it is they've now discovered and can't avoid resolving.
 
I'd always thought of it more as an inciting incident, and then you have an act, and an act, and an act, and an ending, and that whiz-bang in the middle was missing. So I did that. The first structural edit was just awful. But then the second was good.
 
And by the time we got to "Her Last Cry," the third book in the series, my editor gave it a kiss and a hug and said, "By George, I think you've got it." And now I'm writing book four. And literally last night, that's what I was doing, was looking at what I'd written so far, realizing I'd crested what I intend to be the midpoint, and that I needed to revisit it before I moved on, because my key discovery was there, but I didn't have enough whizbang. So anyway, I went back, and that's what I did this morning, was worked on my midpoint, because to me now, I really think of the book in two halves, as the biggest structure, and then I obviously also think of it in all those little micro pieces as well.
 
[00:15:56] Matty: I want to loop back to the same question for genre because I realized I kind of lost the thread of the data-driven thing. But talking about the structure, did you ever get a sense of what data your publisher or editor had that was leading them to push you so forcefully toward this structural approach?
 
[00:16:16] Pamela: No, I don't really know, from a data perspective, what they have that pushes them toward that point, other than it is their predominant theory of how you structure books and that they sell a lot of books. And when you master that, they feel it pushes their readers through the book and into buy-through, if they're buying the books, or read-through if it's on Kindle Unlimited.
 
My suspicion, and it's a question I didn't actually ask them, was that their data came from series writing and moving on to the next book. Someone can buy your book and stop at 47 percent because it wasn't satisfying, or they can stop at 75 percent because you didn't show them a compelling enough reason to be pushed from this key discovery towards the inevitable ending. That was my feeling.
 
The genre issue was much clearer. They were saying their data shows that their readers prefer police procedural or crime fiction that has a law enforcement detective, usually, as the protagonist. This isn't all readers; it's the readers they can reach, their data, specific to them and who they have reached in the past, and as a result, keep expanding into selling more too. For this particular portion of their business, because they have multiple genres, but for crime fiction, their data showed that they didn't do as well with Amateur Sleuth, except in the cozy space. They didn't do as well with what I was writing when I came to them, which was more of a legal thriller. That just didn't translate to series that took off and were worth sticking around for a few more books.
 
[00:18:02] Matty: It's interesting that this can be extrapolated on a micro level for an individual indie author. I don't think anybody has a favorite publishing imprint, but Bookouture books are very distinctive looking. You can run through a montage of the top 100 Kindle books or top 100 selling eBooks, and you can kind of pick out which ones are Bookouture books. They're very heavily color-saturated with a natural scene with an object in it, like a barn or a boat. You can see them and know, "Oh, that's a book like this other book that I read and really liked." I can imagine they're using data because you have a sense of what readers everywhere are looking for, and you home in on that. Or you kind of create your own data because if they've now trained Bookouture readers to recognize the books, and then to expect that between 49 and 51 percent there's going to be that midpoint moment, then you're satisfying a reader expectation that you've created. A publisher can create an expectation among a pool of readers in a way that maybe an indie author over many books can do, but you're exponentially expanding the expectation setting if you're doing it through a publisher.
 
The danger of violating reader expectations
 
[00:19:22] Pamela: But I think that's a really good point. When I reached books 12 through 15 in my "What Doesn't Kill You?" super series, which as I wrote it was probably 9 through 11, but I pushed them to the end of the series because they didn't perform well. I'm convinced the reason they didn't perform well is because I moved out of what I had set reader expectations to be.
 
I took a character that I, one of my favorite characters, and I personally think the books are great. I think the books are great, but they were not what readers had come to expect from my protagonist in my first few times giving protagonists their turns at bat, and the sales showed that.
 
And to take that another step further, by doing this with Bookouture, I've taken a two-year chunk out of what I'm doing, right, because I'm on books four through six with them right now. And I'm not meeting reader expectations because I was writing amateur sleuths. My covers looked like my covers. There were no serial killers, or there were, but they didn't get a point of view. This is a very big difference in this genre they asked me to write versus what I was writing. I still had multiple murders in my books; people are dying left and right, but I never did the antagonist, the nasty bad guy point of view in my books. Bookouture's brands their crime fiction towards what their data shows them is the way to brand it that will reach the most readers, their readers and hopefully additional readers. That brand doesn't necessarily match what reaches mine.
 
So it's been a struggle for my readers to realize that these are A, my books, and B, they should be their books. Even though when you open them, they're still Pamela Fagan Hutchins books. Very character-driven, you're going to fall in love with this kick-ass protagonist, and there's no glorification of serial killers, and people aren't getting mutilated on the page. But that isn't so clear to them from the brand, so it's all been very interesting, their data versus my data, and where in the end this will have us all end up, right?
 
But teaching my readers to shop outside of the brand to get me has been interesting. I changed all my covers, some of my descriptions, fonts, everything. I changed my website, I changed my pricing, all trying to signal, "It's okay, we're all the same. This is the still Pamela." But it was an interesting shift and we're not there yet.
 
[00:22:11] Matty: Did you alert your publisher that you were making changes in your independently published books to make them visually more similar to theirs? Were they concerned about that at all?
 
[00:22:23] Pamela: No, what they want is for those over 3 million books that I have out there in people's hands to bring those readers with me while also wanting their readers to embrace me. What they didn't want, which is contractually prohibited, is for me to release books 45 days before or after they release one of my books so that our advertising doesn't overlap. Our major advertising pushes can't completely avoid overlap because you always have to be doing something for your indie books, or they'll die, and you'll never get it back. But they were like, "Whatever you can do to bring your people along."
 
We coordinate on newsletters—I have a list of 15,000—and how do I bring them along? What does it look like for authors with medium to big lists when we coordinate with what you're sending out? Coordinating on advertising, when they're advertising, what do I do, etc.
 
All of that, we've been trying to signal to my readers that it's okay, these serial killers aren't going to get you. They've been really cooperative with that and very open when they think they don't want me to do something, asking me please not to do X or Y.
 
They may not love everything that I do, but I know that they do have some of us, because some of us bridge indie and this new world of digital publishing, which is quasi-indie or alt-traditional, whatever you want to call it. We get way more into their business on this than their other authors do. The ones that come from traditional are like, "Okay, you take care of it," and I'm like, "What were the numbers like?" I literally woke up last night because there's a price promo running on book two in the series, and the rank tanked for 24 hours, so I wrote a letter to my editor asking what happened, what didn't scale, and expressing concern about not being able to pivot very fast. Then I didn't send it because I know they're aware. But it's my first inclination. If it were me controlling this advertising campaign and the spend increased but the rank went in the wrong direction, I'd say I had the wrong audience, but I've already told them that, so they know.
 
[00:24:49] Matty: So when you, in other circumstances where maybe you've sent the email or you've talked through it with them, have there been other circumstances and how does that interaction with them work where they have one group of authors who are saying "you take care of it" and the other, a second group of probably indie authors who want to be more involved in it? What has been your experience with how they receive that?
 
Business and creative collaboration with a publisher
 
[00:25:10] Pamela: They're so polite, first of all, because they're British, so I'm not really sure what they really think of me. But when I say, "I'm so sorry, I know that I care a whole lot about this, maybe more than your other authors, and here's why," they've actually invited me to give them more feedback, and I've caught them in some boo-boos. They're not perfect, they're humans. We had some things that on the first promo they did didn't go real well. And when they finished it, they said, "What would you have done differently?" And they literally got on the phone with me and said, "What is it that you see that may have gone wrong here? What can we learn from this? Because you're right, this didn't go like we expected." And it was nice to have that conversation.
 
Yeah, the second one is going better. Notwithstanding me wanting to send that email this morning. But going much better. I think they were having like a 35 percent conversion rate on people who clicked on the ad, and they were really excited about that, that was 10 points better than their normal conversion.
 
So, I think that when you do work together, especially when you're trying to combine audiences, if you will, they want my audience, I want theirs, or they want my readers, I want theirs. Audience is probably the wrong word. I'm thinking in terms of ads, which is audience, but at the end of the day, those are readers. And when we're trying to strategize on how to find the readers that are going to love this book out of their readers and my readers and the whole world of readers and collaborate on it, that's been nice. I didn't expect it.
 
They also changed my covers when I didn't think that they were going to work. And I was told never to expect that they would ever change a cover. And they changed all three of them. I wasn't ugly or anything. I was just like, "Those are barns in Kansas. And these books are set in Wyoming. And honestly, those aren't the same places, you know?" And they were like, "Okay, you're right. We really looked at this too much from an 'America is America' perspective and not what really shows the ruggedness of these books." So they changed them all. I thought that was cool.
 
[00:27:13] Matty: Any publisher is probably going to have more data than any individual independent author. Did you feel that the areas where you were able to bring more value in terms of maybe correcting some misdirection were more personal or because of reader interaction? You're not tapping into a giant database. So where did you have the edge in those conversations?
 
[00:27:37] Pamela: I have a lot of engagement with readers. And while you can't take what any one person says, a lot of times, if you get a couple of people saying something in different places, they're representing a large number of people; they're just the ones that spoke up. So if I get a couple of data points spread out over different platforms, I start to think they're saying something here and I should listen.
 
I started getting people saying, "I'm so glad I read your book. I really was afraid that it was a serial killer book. And I was really afraid to read it." Bookouture was saying, "Your pre-orders were fantastic. They were the best we've had in a very long time for a new series. And then we didn't get the sales we thought we'd get once the books launched. Do you have a feeling for why?" And I said, "I don't think my readers are coming to the party. And I don't think they're coming because of something that I don't think you're going to change. But it's the description of the book. It doesn't read like what they're used to reading."
 
They're trying to please the hardcore crime thriller readers, and my readers are trying to move to crime thriller from where I had them. You open the book, and it's a combination of crime thriller and Pamela Fagan Hutchins, and my readers are happy, but some of them are scared. So, I think we're getting late adopters.
 
We're trying to figure out how to bring my people along at the same time as we bring the world along with it. It's going to be hit or miss. The conversation was very much about what I would be doing differently, how I would adjust the audience. We were talking ads, basically. What would you be looking for?
 
I was able to come back to them a day later and say, "That feeling I had, that the ads weren't reaching the right readers when you did the 99-cent price promo with heavy Facebook advertising. They were using their proprietary ad groups, and the day after the promo finished, all my also-boughts on the series were British-based crime drama. That's not who's going to ultimately fan me. I'm more like C.J. Box, Craig Johnson, Jeff Carson, D.K. Hood, the people that write Mountain West, rural, rugged, etc. Amazon is telling me these are the people who responded to your ads, and that says that's who received your ads. If I was looking at what to do differently, I'd be thinking long term, which is, are these going to be devoted fans of these books? And you haven't convinced me that the answer is yes yet. So that's what I'd be looking at: Are we reaching the right people?"
 
[00:30:24] Matty: That's interesting because that's data that anybody can have access to. You don't need a giant corporate database to do that.
 
[00:30:29] Pamela: Exactly. Look at your also-boughts the day after you run a promo, you've got more data than you're ever going to have, but a lot of it disappears very quickly, right? Those change every single day, so it's a matter of looking at your own data while it's hot. It's there because it's going to go away. I mean, I look at things like rank every single day for my top six books, my series leads, and my new releases just because it's an indicator of what's happening. But looking at those also-boughts right after a big promo, that tells you who bought your book. It's the closest you're ever going to get to knowing with Amazon.
 
Targeting the enthusiastic sub-genre fan
 
[00:31:11] Matty: Any conversation about reader targeting that I've ever heard assumes that if you're writing cozies, you're finding the people who read all cozies all the time. If you have a very niche romance, you're looking for those people. But I've got to believe that there are a lot of readers out there like me, who one day are reading chick-lit, the next nonfiction history, then a sci-fi series, then a police procedural. I feel like a successful publisher with access to all this data is almost incented to target the enthusiasts of a specific sub-genre, like readers of C.J. Box but not Liane Moriarty, whereas in reality, I think there's a lot more overlap in real life than any publisher, indie or traditional, is allowing for. Do you agree with my assessment, and do you think an indie author or a publisher is better positioned to tap into readers who have a wider interest?
 
[00:32:34] Pamela: I think that for an indie author who's been at it for a while, you potentially have a better ability to tap into that wider interest because you're doing it specifically for your books, as opposed to a group of books where you're getting more granular. You're grouping the books and readers together.
 
I do agree that people read broadly, but with advertising, your best conversion comes from targeting your best converter. You're looking for someone that sees your image and your copy and immediately thinks, "This is for me!" So when planning my advertising, I'm looking for the superfans of the genre, the superfans of what I write, and then hoping that through their recommendations and their reviews, they bring other people along with them.
 
But I'm looking for the most efficient use of my spend. So, I agree with you, and when targeting, I would really focus on those superfans.
 
[00:33:41] Matty: It's always tough to distinguish the marketing targeting from the creative process because I know that I limit my own ability to reach readers because I have to write the things that are of interest to me, not necessarily the things that I think will do best in the market. And so, if I could train my creative brain to be more disciplined in that way, I'd probably be doing better. But on the other hand, I probably wouldn't be writing books. Kind of doesn't matter.
 
[00:34:06] Pamela: I do the same thing. When I sat down to write this series for Bookouture, I first wanted to make the protagonist an MMA fighter. I wanted her to be really badass and it just interested me at the time. And they were like, "Our data says that women who actually physically fight in an organized fashion are a turnoff. She can still kick some ass if she wants to, but it needs to not be in an official capacity." At first, I had my feelings hurt, and then I realized I had other things that interested me. But had I been writing that book on my own, I might have just run with that. It interested me right now.
 
The value of writing between bright lines
 
[00:34:41] Pamela: I'm going to see what I can do with a really, really badass woman. Instead, I went a different direction. It's been interesting to me because it's trained me to work a little bit more between some pretty bright lines, whereas before, my lines were pretty dim and fuzzy and wherever I wanted them to be. And if I wanted to write a series of books that did terrible, which I've done before, then I can do that, and I can waste two years. So, yeah. It's never a waste, right? We always get better. Somebody loves those books. They become the body of work.
 
[00:35:17] Matty: And I don't think there's that much difference between an exercise, well, except for the time you're spending on it. There's not that much time between an exercise where you're saying, "I'm going to write a really great story in 150 words." That's a really interesting and intriguing exercise. Maybe I don't want to spend a year writing the 80,000-word version of that, but those guidelines can be restricting, but they can also be sort of empowering in the sense that it's focusing your attention in a way it otherwise wouldn't be focused.
 
[00:35:50] Pamela: Yeah. I agree with that. And at some point, you have to decide why you're writing. And what I mean by that is if you're writing for yourself, then you should write whatever you want all the time. If you're trying to sell your books, then you need some kind of idea of who you're writing to and what they like to read, and thus that creates some guideposts for you. It may be that you are unconscious of them, and you aim toward it just out of affinity with your readers, and that's fantastic, but they're still there. If you are writing towards it being a commercial venture as opposed to, "I'm doing this for me, and I don't care if it sells. I just love it. I live to write.”
 
I'm trying to make money. I mean, I'll be honest, because I gave up my day job. You know, I'm trying to make money. So, at first, it felt a little bit limiting, and then I embraced it because I embrace data. It's like, 'This is a learning experiment, and it either works out or it doesn't, but either way, I'm better for it,' you know, having gone down this road.
 
And that's really how I look at it. If it all ends tomorrow and I don't write another word for them, I'm a better author, an indie author, and businessperson in the world of publishing than I was before because I've been exposed to a new way to do it and have that to consider and potentially inculcate into what I do."
 
Matty: I actually could think of other questions, but that is such a nice wrap-up. I think that I'm going to go with that. Pamela, it is always so much fun to talk with you, and I appreciate so much you sharing the kind of behind-the-scenes inside scoop of what your experience has been making this transition. So please let the listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find all your books, regardless of who publishes them, online.
 
Pamela: All right, I can do that. PamelaFaganHutchins.com will point you in the right direction. My Bookouture books, the new series, Detective Delaney Pace, are only available in Kindle eBook form on Amazon, although the paperback and audio versions are available anywhere that you can order your books. Bookouture is a digital-only company. They do partner with print providers that stock bookstores and things like that, but anywhere online. My books are available everywhere online. We're not exclusive to Amazon with those anymore, so you can get them anywhere. And the best place to interact with me, and I encourage you to do it, talk books, whatever, talk publishing, dogs, is Facebook. I have a Facebook page and a Facebook group, and that's where I'm really most active.
 
Matty: You do have a super fun Facebook feed, so I'll just put another plug in for that.
 
Pamela: It's always nice to see Matty come up on there.
 
Matty: Well, Pamela, thank you so much. It's been so much fun to talk with you.
 
Pamela: You too. Thanks for having me.

Episode 232 - What Has Changed and Stayed the Same with Amazon Ads with Bryan Cohen

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Bryan Cohen discusses WHAT HAS CHANGED AND STAYED THE SAME WITH AMAZON ADS, including ads as a research tool; whether Amazon product pages are actually getting busier; the impact of A+ content; the advice to go deep rather than wide on ad platforms; how AI is (or might be) changing the ad game; budgeting for beginners; and whether one book is enough for an ad campaign.

Bryan Cohen is the CEO of Best Page Forward and Author Ad School. He's helped over 30,000 authors learn ads through his 5-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge. He also runs the Author Ad Agency, which helps full-time authors to scale up their self-publishing earnings. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, daughter, and cat.

Episode Links

https://learn.bestpageforward.net
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2230194167089012
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT_vHN_rKtRhtxs81s892vQ

Summary

This episode of The Indy Author Podcast features a conversation between the host, Matty Dalrymple, and guest Bryan Cohen, CEO of Best Page Forward and Author Ad School. They discuss various aspects of Amazon ads, providing insights and strategies for authors, particularly indie authors, in marketing their books.
 
Bryan Cohen has helped over 30,000 authors with advertising and emphasizes that Amazon ads can be an effective research tool to understand book positioning and market receptiveness. He notes that while the perception exists that Amazon ads have become more expensive, he's observed that costs can remain low, offering valuable data on how well a book is positioned in the market.
 
The conversation delves into the strategic use of Amazon ads, with Bryan pointing out that these ads can serve not only as a marketing tool but also as a means to gather insights on a book's reception and market fit. He suggests that even with just one book published, authors can benefit from Amazon ads to assess market response and refine their marketing and content strategies.
 
Bryan discusses the changes in Amazon ad placements, indicating an increase in ad spaces on product pages, which has made the pages busier. However, he advises that not all ad placements are equally effective and emphasizes the importance of strategic ad placement and understanding Amazon's advertising mechanisms.
 
A significant part of the discussion revolves around the use of A+ Content on Amazon and its impact on book sales. Bryan shares insights on how A+ Content can affect conversion rates and the importance of testing to see whether it enhances or detracts from sales performance.
 
The dialogue also touches on the broader marketing landscape for authors, comparing Amazon ads with other advertising platforms like Facebook and BookBub. Bryan suggests that while different platforms have their strengths, authors should focus on understanding and leveraging each platform's unique capabilities to maximize their advertising effectiveness.
 
Throughout the conversation, Bryan advocates for a balanced approach to marketing, where authors should not only focus on advertising but also on creating quality content and engaging with their audience. He emphasizes the importance of adapting strategies based on market feedback and continuously learning and refining advertising approaches.
 
In summary, the transcript covers a comprehensive discussion on the use of Amazon ads for indie authors, highlighting the importance of strategic advertising, market research, and the continual adaptation of marketing strategies to achieve success in book publishing. Bryan Cohen's insights provide valuable guidance for authors looking to navigate the complexities of online advertising and market positioning for their books.

Transcript

Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Bryan Cohen. Hey, Bryan, how are you doing?
 
Bryan: Hey Matty, I'm doing well. I'm happy to be here.
 
Meet Bryan Cohen 

Matty: I am pleased to have you here. And just to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Bryan Cohen is the CEO of Best Page Forward and Author Ad School. He has helped over 30,000 authors learn ads through his five-day Author Ad Profit Challenge. He also runs the Author Ad Agency, which helps full time authors to scale up their self-publishing earnings. And he lives in North Carolina with his wife, daughter, and cat. And I also wanted to send out a big congratulations to Bryan for passing 500 plus and 10 years of his great Sell More Books show podcast. So, Bryan, congratulations.
 
Bryan: Thank you, Matty. It's been a great, a great long time helping indie authors.
 
Matty: Yeah. Well, that is a very, very impressive track record. And the fact that you, you've done it so consistently and for such a long time and with such great information is, a great testament to you. So thank you for doing that.
 
Bryan: Of course. Of course.
 
Matty: So we are going to be talking today, not surprisingly, about Amazon ads, because obviously Bryan's the guy to go to for Amazon ads.
 
Strategic changes in Amazon ads 

Matty: And so I wanted to start out by asking What have you seen change, if anything, at a strategic level with Amazon ads? Like, if someone had asked, are Amazon ads, any good, is the answer you would give about why different now than it would have been a year ago, five years ago, however far back you want to go?
 
Bryan: Sure. Yeah, no, I do think it's a little different than it would have been a few years ago. not for the reasons people might think. People might think, oh, well, Bryan's going to say it's more expensive, which Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It's not necessarily more expensive from what I've seen. I've seen authors get hundreds of clicks at very low costs here in 2024.
 
Ads as a research tool 

Bryan: So I know it's not necessarily that it costs more. I have seen that it can be a really good research tool to know how well your book has been positioned. which I wasn't always aware of, even, that when ads, we've heard the refrain, Amazon won't take my money, you try to run ads and it doesn't work.
 
We have found that sometimes it's not about Bidding too low, or it's not about, oh, this market is too expensive. I can't get, sometimes it's about your book's seven KDP keyword phrases and your book's three categories and your book's title. Sometimes little things like that actually will let Amazon spend your money or not spend your money.
 
And so, I used to think, and this is something I even see people still talking about today, when Amazon, when you have a book out on Amazon, you're not ready, you should wait until you have three books. And I've changed my tune on that, because I think Amazon ads can be really helpful, even just with your first book out, helping you to figure out, okay, Is Amazon taking my money?
 
If there's not, if they're not taking it, it's probable that something in the information you gave Amazon when you publish, Amazon isn't receiving it in the way you thought they would. And so I find that Amazon ads can still be one of the lower cost marketing methods. But it can also be a really good tool when you're starting out or when you're trying out a new series to see, okay, is Amazon figuring out what I'm sending it?
 
Is it picking up what I'm putting down? Whatever metaphor you want to use, that is one of the reasons I still recommend Amazon ads.
 
Matty: And is Amazon better at identifying those things than let's say, I don't know, book club ads or Facebook ads or something like that because there's such a strong tie between the data you're giving KDP and then the performance of an Amazon ad?
 
Bryan: I do think that Amazon can be in line and more so in line than maybe a BookBub ad or a, a Facebook ad. I think it can be. The problem is a lot of authors do have misalignment issues somewhere in the midst of the keywords. Subtitle categories, all of that stuff. And so I think the public perception of Amazon ads is that they are not as strong at connecting readers, as the other platforms, but it is interesting that when we have seen, and this is especially the case with a lot of our agency clients, they are already selling well, cause they're already full-time authors. It's easier to get those ads to spend even as low as 27 cents a click. We're getting those ads to spend when a newer author comes to, through our challenge or through ad school, and they say, I can't even get one click.is the platform broken? And then we look at this other account and we see a thousand clicks in a day.
 
We say, no, platform isn't broken, but there might be a disconnect here. Yeah. Yeah.
 
The desire for immediate social feedback 

Matty: it is. It's a very different mindset. I have, experience, I've had some experience across all three platforms, but more on Facebook and BookBub. Those are the three I think of, like, when I'm thinking about advertising for my own books. Those are the three I think about, and I think one of the things that appeals to me about Facebook ads is you get this very immediate and personal response.
 
Feedback on why people are liking or not liking your ad, in some cases. So the example I can think of is that a couple of years ago, I was testing out a new tagline for my, Lizzie Ballard thrillers, and I, the tagline I had come up with was, what happens when an extraordinary power transforms an ordinary life?
 
And so, I thought that sounded pretty cool, so I started writing ads against it, and then someone made a response to the post, that made it clear that they thought it was going to be like a religious book, like an extraordinary power. They thought that was not true. We're talking this through non religiously affiliated power, but it was going to be, really does it.
 
Oh, well, that's really good to know because, that's something I could easily pull back from, whereas it's harder. My experience is it's harder to get that kind of sense of why, like you could see that your ads aren't spending, but is it the keyword? Is it the quality of the cover? Is it the quality of the content? Can you glean that kind of stuff from the Amazon ad results?
 
Bryan: I think that's a really good point, a really good observation, because you do get that social feedback on Facebook. You do get that social feedback on some, on a platform like TikTok, and you wouldn't get that feedback from, from Amazon. And so my answer to a certain extent has always been, well, take our free challenge and send us the links.
 
Cause we do it. eight weeks a year that we're around there for free, send us the link. We'll go take a look. we'll look at your keywords, but yeah, I mean, I think that if you have some money to spend and you want that immediate result, absolutely makes sense for Facebook or TikTok to get some feedback, but I think it really depends.
 
And this goes back to Authors having individualized ways that they take care of things based on their personality, based on the way they like doing things. Fortunately, I think they're, if people like the hand holding, they come to us. If they want to get immediate results and don't want to have to talk to a person for real and make it more on social media, go to Facebook, go to TikTok.
 
Either way, I do think it still comes back around to when you have a book that is selling. And maybe you found success with it on Facebook. We have found that success can be doubled when they're also running the ads on Amazon and not just confining it to one platform. I think that Amazon ads can be a primary driver of traffic to a book.
 
But they're a really good secondary driver when something else is working.
 
Are Amazon product pages actually getting busier? 

Matty: One of the things that I feel like has changed over time on Amazon, and I'll ask you to confirm or deny, is that the pages seem busier and busier. So, if I'm shopping on Amazon and I go to a book and I start, looking for, I realize I've clicked into book two of the series and I want to go look for book one.
 
It becomes harder and harder to find that information because there's just so much there. Is that actually changing? And if it is, is that something that has made you adjust your strategy about Amazon ads?
 
Bryan: I learned some interesting things this past year. late last year, as part of my agency, I reached out to Amazon and found out some things. And it turned out that, and my team was helpful with this. Amazon has their AMG ads is what they used to call them. They're called something different now and the name escapes me, but as it often does, but there is the AMG ads were always known as, okay, if you've got 10,000 to burn, you can go to Amazon and say, Hey, I've got 10,000.
 
And they say, great, that's our minimum. You spend 10,000 with us a month, we'll run some special ads for you. I said, okay, well, I don't have these 10,000 to burn for my books, but, is there a way to do this without 10,000? And they said, well, we subcontract through some agencies to let you run ads that are very similar, which Amazon refers to as DSP or platform ads.
 
And it turns out that we've Could, if we hit 10,000 across lots of authors, we could actually run some of these ads for authors. And these ads are what has made the system feel busier. It used to be there were a couple places you'd see ads. The carousels on the product pages that you'd see that kind of have replaced also boughts in a lot of places.
 
And the search results. That became a little busier with sponsored brand ads starting to show up at the top of the search results. But then how does it feel busier? You go to an Amazon page, you see at the very top of the browser, there's now an ad. Underneath the buy button, there's an ad, and often underneath the product description, there's an ad.
 
Now sometimes regular old sponsored product ads can show up in these places, but more often than not, these are DSP ads or Amazon's own AMG ads. Now, interesting data from running these for six months. Most of them don't convert. The top of the page ads. Terrible. The ones that are even near under the button. Terrible.
 
The only ones we found that have been able to convert for us, and mileage may vary, is right under the product description, which makes sense. In the web terms, these are above the fold, so you don't have to scroll to get to them. Now, all of that being said, to answer your question, yes, the pages are busier, they're busier because of these other ad placements that Amazon is now selling in other ways.
 
Us normal folks, we can't usually get access to these kind of ads. But the good news is, those ads, for the most part, in our experimentation, aren't really that valuable. And so, it's the kind of thing where, even though sponsor product ads a little bit cheaper, a little bit more affordable for the regular author. We still find that these ads that all authors have access to actually do better and have better tracking somehow than these fancy pantsy ads that we've been able to peek under the hood and see. And so, I think that despite it being busier, there are still lots of really good opportunities there.
 
The impact of A+ Content 

Matty: One of the things that I realize makes some pages look busier is the A plus content, so I know that for my Ann Kinnear books, there's a huge part of the page now taken up with one of those, like, triptych, sort of, I made them in Book Brush, you load an ad and then it breaks it up for you so you have, like, three parts of one image, which looks super cool, but I'm like, I wonder how long Amazon's going to keep doing that, cause that's, A huge amount of screen real estate for basically just a giant picture that I uploaded that was associated with my story.
 
Have you seen any pro or con impacts of A plus content on the success of people who are running Amazon X?
 
Bryan: Well, you brought up that Amazon, are they going to keep doing this? Amazon loves A plus content. Not sure why. I wonder if there's a search engine optimization something. They get more search traffic by having more images. That I don't know. But they love pushing it. I've been fortunate enough, Amazon has had me come on and teach some classes.
 
And at the end, they have these, Q& A sessions that aren't really live. They're just answering some questions in an Amazonian kind of way. And Amazon loves making sure that A plus content is delivered. mention. Maybe it's because it was a very requested feature and they're hoping that it makes readers happy, or authors happy. But, for a long time when A plus content was first announced, we did experiments on it. We looked, hey, does this improve a chance of a book being profitable or does it reduce the chances of a book being profitable? And because of all that real estate taken up, we actually found that because, and we think it's because it took so long to actually get to the reviews.
 
That it did reduce conversion. It did make the royalties, and, the profitability worse for those books. It's gotten a little better over time. places like Book Brush having tools so that the images don't look bad because part of the reason I think conversion was worse is because the images looked bad, but it's still a bit of a problem that it takes up all that real estate.
 
And so I'm a big fan of testing. Get 100 clicks without the A plus content, get 100 clicks with the A plus content, compare group 1 to group 2, and see, did you profit better, did you convert better, when you had the A plus content in place, or did not?
 
Matty: If someone does not have A plus content yet, do you recommend that they provide some in order to run that test? Or is it the kind of thing that you say, if you don't have it now, don't bother, but if you do have it, maybe test it without to see if it improves?
 
Bryan: If you don't have it now, don't bother, is what I would recommend.
 
Matty: Okay, this example just popped into my head. I recently got a screenshot of a friend's Kindle. He had opened up his Kindle. He had, purchased other of my books before, and it had an ad on the lock screen for one of my books.
 
Unpaid lock screen ads 

Bryan: Inexplicably, it had an ad for one of my short stories, which I thought was weird.
 
Matty: But that was with me not thinking. Not having paid anything, I wasn't running any Amazon ads, do you know how often Amazon just puts an ad up? Like, I've got to believe that for that person's Kindle lock screen, there was a whole queue of other books that were maybe paying to have that placement.
 
Do you have any insight into how, those lock screen placements, are assigned?
 
Bryan: So you're not the first person I've heard who's had a book that they weren't running any ads for just randomly show up. I do think sometimes this is a function of kind of a pseudo also bought or books that you might like kind of carousel loaded in for when there aren't enough lock screen ads to actually go around.
 
but it is pretty rare. I don't think that it's something we can count on with any, reliability. I don't have deep, deep insight, like, one of my contacts at Amazon has told me specifically. It will show up 1 percent of the time, so I don't have anything specific to that. But anecdotally, it can happen sometimes, but as many know, and many have probably come on this show to say, we're in a pay to play environment.
 
More often than not, you are going to have to pay to get placement. That being said, I would not pay for the lock screen ads. They tend to be, a little bit pricier, and often it prices out authors who are trying to get a lower cost click on their ads.
 
Follow one course until success 

Matty: So you had mentioned earlier the idea of Amazon being sort of a primary driver of sales and perhaps being supported by other ad platforms. for someone who's relatively new to the advertising, the book advertising game, are there combinations that you recommend or combinations that you recommend people stay away from?
 
Bryan: That's a good question. I think if you're new, sticking with one is probably going to be better, better to go deeper on one than to necessarily broaden out and try to learn multiple things at once, because it is like a four year degree, any of these things that you are going to be going deeper on in order to truly go as deep as you need to go, you know.
 
Go deep rather than wide 

Bryan: You need to focus. the old, acronym, I heard John Lee Dumas say it once. I don't know if it's his. Follow one course until success. It is helpful to focus on one. Let's say, though, that you have learned one of them. And, there are various combinations. Let's say you've learned Facebook ads first. Amazon ads are helpful to set up. in addition, it will look like they are not doing anything because if Facebook ads are already sending traffic to your books, you may assume just, this is our natural psychological assumption. The thing I was already doing is the thing that's working. The new thing probably isn't. That isn't always true in what we've found, but I will say that if you are running Facebook ads already and then you start Amazon ads, I would run the Amazon ads for at least three to six months. I would not make any quick assumptions on whether or not those are working. Let's say you've already run BookBub ads.
 
and you're trying to run Amazon ads. These can work really well together. BookBub ads spend a lot faster. And so, you are going to want to keep an eye on your budget. I don't necessarily have any huge concerns, oh, that I, that are different than the Facebook and Amazon combo. Similarly, give the ads three to six months.
 
If you've run Amazon ads, or you know Amazon ads, and then you're adding another one, I would probably add Facebook next, but take it slow. No need to add big budgets. There are some really good courses out there. I'm a big fan of, Matthew Holmes's, work on Facebook ads. He's got a great free book out there, that can help you start.
 
I've learned from other great people, like Mal Cooper, like James Blatch and company. Like, there, there's a lot of good stuff out there. But when there are different schools of thought on the same platform, sometimes it makes sense to take this idea, and this idea and combine them together, but a lot of the time it doesn't.
 
And so just be careful when you're saying, well, I tried to take Matt's idea. I tried to take James's idea and mash them together because it felt right to me. But feeling is not fact. You need to consider going deep on one of the methods. For that specific platform first, then you can consider adding some bells and whistles to it, but I would not, go to the buffet and add different parts, to, to one particular learning style because it is possible they will not go together well.
 
Relying on the algorithms 

Matty: Well, the mention of, Matt Holmes is interesting. I'm going to glom together two questions here. So I took the Matt Holmes, course on untargeted Facebook ads, where you allow Facebook to determine, you don't provide these, this, people who like Stephen King are going to like this.
 
You let Facebook do that. And it totally made sense to me. And I tried that for a while. It wasn't really panning out for me. I'm not necessarily blaming the theory. It's there are a lot of moving parts. So. I know it's working well for some people, but one of the things that appeal to me about it is that it makes sense to me that if, if AI is writing novels, if AI can do the things that it can do, then Facebook algorithms as a form of AI, like I trust that they could be better at picking targets for me than I could be.
 
And that the platforms that rely on me doing research into my own books, like Better Understanding Comp Authors, I'm kind of looking forward to the day when I can press a button and, Chad GPT will say, as it does now, I'm not sure how accurate it is, but, oh, you know who good comp authors are for your books?
 
These. And I think Amazon is. is perfectly positioned to do this because they, like, they have the text of your book. I feel like it can't be that far away that they're going to be doing the equivalent of untargeted Facebook ads. That was a whole mess of stuff, but can you comment on, like, the pros and cons of you making the decisions about who will like your books versus a machine making decisions about who's going to like your books?
 
Bryan: Well, it's very interesting because, we have found that especially for some of our authors who are making over 6,000 a month, so they qualify, for our agency, they, they find that they're getting the most clicks on their auto ads, which is, Somewhat just generated by Amazon, based around your 7 KDP keyword phrases, based around your categories, based around previous maybe data that you have going to your book.
 
And so it is kind of similar in that way, nowhere near as detailed or sophisticated as Facebook's Advantage Plus, audiences, and I have heard of them working for some people, not working for others, but yet you got to try it because if it does work, there's your push button, there's your chat GPT, pick all the things that, if you can get it to work with less Input from you and less effort from you, and it works.
 
You got to do it because there is only so much time in the day, right? There's only so many hours. There's only so much energy. There's only so much passion that can go into a single day. And if we can figure out that, oh, this Facebook method saves time, saves energy, great. Amazon doesn't feel like it's quite there yet.
 
I would love for it to be there. I would love for it to be a little bit easier. I feel like, sometimes teaching Amazon ads, we're bending over backwards, trying to explain the little, quirks of the platform. It'd be nice if those quirks weren't there and it just kind of worked. but I do think in a few years, Matty, we will be in a position that it will be easier for everyone to be able to advertise, but that will mean some of the people that here in 2024 who currently have an advantage, over, over authors who maybe are struggling with those ads, that advantage may dissipate.
 
And, you know as well as I do, when, authors who are secure in their earnings start to see that gap, dissipating, they're going to be angry, and they're going to say, this is no good, and they're going to say mean things about that platform, or the machines, or how it works, and it's like, Well, this is why you build up an email list.
 
This is why you try to future proof your business. This is why you, you become anti fragile in whatever ways you can. This is why you connect deeper with your readers, while you have that advantage because these kinds of advantages could be temporary. And so it's good to build a stronger foundation for your business.
 
Matty: Yeah, I can imagine that the improvement of AI is not only going to be potentially a time saver for authors, but also remove, provides a more objective source. So for example, I could see someone writing a book and they say, this is definitely a police procedural. I'm going to, I'm going to put in a lot of police procedural related terms into my keywords.
 
And then, they put it up, it doesn't do anything, but behind the scenes, if you let a machine. Picket, they would say, oh, no, this is really more cozy. And they start showing it to cozy readers. And then suddenly the sales boom. And I just think that a lot of these is, ad approaches require the person who's probably the least good at objectively assessing the work to assign this stuff that is supposed to be objective, like keywords. It provides that third party perspective in a way that I think it can be very difficult for authors to bring to their own work.
 
Bryan: Yeah, you need, whether it is a person or a program, getting some neutral point of view on your books can make a huge difference. I absolutely agree.
 
Matty: Yeah, an experience I had was taking my, The description of one of my books and putting it into mid journey or something like that, and saying, give me a cover, not because I was planning on using the cover, but I was just curious, and it featured a secondary character much more prominently on the cover, and I thought, oh yeah, because you know what, that character's name shows up Before my protagonist's character in the description, maybe it would be a good idea if I didn't do that, actually put my protagonist's name first. So, those kinds of insights, I think it's useful to play around with this stuff, even if you don't end up using it in the real world, just to see. Oh yeah, I never thought of it that way before.
 
Bryan: Yeah, that totally makes sense. Good exercise that you did there for yourself.
 
Attributing performance results to advertising efforts 

Matty: I think one of the challenges of using multiple platforms is this question of to where do you attribute the results? And so for a lot of my author career, I've only been doing one thing at a time. So if I get a big jump in sales, I'm like, okay, well, I was running Amazon ads. It's probably from Amazon ads.
 
Is there any, again, sort of strategic advice you can give when people are running ads on multiple platforms or making multiple promotional efforts, how they know where those came from?
 
Bryan: When you get really complicated when you're like some of the clients that we work with who are running Facebook ads, Amazon ads, they have a vibrant TikTok following. They're doing maybe TikTok shop or they're also doing Shopify, and some of the people who don't buy on Shopify will then go over to Amazon and buy This makes it.
 
Like, if you think back to high school calculus, this is a multi-variable equation. And so you want to look at potential cause and effect. Any assumptions you have to throw out the window, because if you see that, hey, I got more Facebook clicks this day, it must've been that. But then you dive deeper, and you see that, oh, well, there's a chance that Facebook, that Facebook traffic was actually going to a bad, irrelevant source that day.
 
And so you say, well, maybe it wasn't the Facebook. It is very, very difficult. And so, what you have to really look at You have to look at the data very objectively. You cannot go into it with a bunch of assumptions. I have had authors say, well, I know that these five sales didn't come from my ads because my uncle said he told his friends about it, and they must have bought it.
 
And it's like, well, you don't know anything when it comes to this because Amazon is not going to share that data with us. And so you really have to come at it very much from as much of a neutral perspective. We were just talking about a neutral perspective. As much as, as neutral as you possibly can be, because once you, when you throw in Amazon plus Facebook, okay, it gets a little more complicated.
 
If you have 3 or 4 promotional methods going at once, it is very difficult to tell where the sales actually came from. I would, for the most part, not recommend 3 to 4 promotional methods, unless you're already doing pretty well, because it, there comes a certain point in your career, and we've seen this with some of our agency clients, they’re making 20 grand on a bad month.
 
And so they know, well, if I spend five to 10 grand across these platforms and make 30 grand, it doesn't really matter where they came from to a certain extent. They're just happy that they threw money at ads and good things happen. They had a good profit margin and they're going to do it again. And there might come a time where they have to kind of reckon with that.
 
but in the short term, if they know I'll spend 10, I'll make 20 30 or 40, then they can go ahead and do that. But for folks who are starting out, you might want to keep things more simple.
 
Budgeting for ad beginners 

Matty: I think that brings up another thing that I always like to encourage, people who are experts as you are to talk to is if someone is just starting out, I think we hear these, I spent 10,000 a month on Amazon ads and I earn, 10,000 times whatever. When people are just dipping their toe in the water.
 
What should they be budgeting, as a daily budget, as a weekly budget, however they, you would recommend they approach it, when they're just starting out.
 
Bryan: Yeah, absolutely. With Amazon ads, we usually put a 5 daily budget per ad. but then if you're worried that those ads are going to spend. All that money. If you have five ads, you have 10 ads, and you don't want to spend 25 to 50 a day, which they usually won't if you bid pretty low, around 34 to 39. But let's say you're nervous about it.
 
You can actually put all those ads into an ad folder that's called a portfolio, and you can set a portfolio budget cap and say, Actually, I don't want this to spend more than 40 for the month. And you say on a recurring basis, each month I want to spend 40 or less. I would say that. When you're first starting out, you could set those portfolio budgets, 40 to 50 in a month.
 
when you're just starting out, when you just have one book, it's not even likely to spend all that. but it's nice to know that budget is in place. I think a lot of authors, when they come into this, they say, well, I've got 400 earmarked. I'm going to spend this on ads. Then you go to Amazon, and it spends 4.
 
And you're like, but I budgeted 400. Why didn't it spend it? I'm going to raise my bid, which is not what we would recommend. And so you might want to budget for a certain amount, but you just got to keep in mind with a platform like Amazon, it might not actually go and spend that money, but, it’s good to know those numbers so that you could put them in as a portfolio budget cap.
 
Is one book enough for an ad campaign? 

Matty: So I wanted to ask a time investment question. you would mention before about, we all have lives, and so how much time do we invest in this kind of thing? So I think that a piece of common author advice is, if you're wondering what to do with your time, you never go wrong using it to work on your next book.
 
And I think that's generally true, although I'm kind of hearing a shift, because I think if I had heard you speak as I have years ago, then the message would have been, if you only have one book, maybe wait until you have another book. Now I think I'm hearing more of a shift to, there's no harm in running ads against an early book, because it can advise, it can give you that market research insight.
 
That suggest, maybe this is really cozy and not a police procedural, or maybe people aren't sympathizing with your character, whatever that might be. But, I think there's also a point where you've got a bunch of books, like, I have, I currently have, 10 novels by the end of this year, I should have 11 or 12, and I almost feel like, maybe it's better, like, maybe I should make 2025 my promotional year, not stop writing altogether, because I think there are dangers there, but do you ever think that there's a time when you would advise an author to say, now it's time to shift your, Let's shift your focus a little bit.
 
Let's have a concerted chunk of time that is strictly going to be focused on learning and optimizing and using promotional tools like Amazon ads.
 
Bryan: I think folks do this naturally. I think that people do kind of go into promotional mode, especially if they buy a course or they are trying out a new method. I think there can be benefits of it, but right now, and I got a little bit in trouble for this, this was exciting. So I was talking about on some more book show that this exact question, if you have, one book out, or how many books would you wait until you run ads?
 
And I say one, because if you are planning to write a ten book series, and first book has no chance of selling once you've run the ads, and you realize, like, maybe you didn't quite get the genre right, maybe you didn't get the tropes right, then, hey, the ads have actually pointed you in the direction of, well, maybe you could write something a little bit different and see how that goes.
 
I got in trouble for it a little bit, because someone listened to that post, or listened to that, episode, and said, Bryan is telling me that I should cancel my series if it didn't sell well on ads. And then that was posted in a public group, the writing gals, and a lot of people were like, That's terrible advice!
 
And it's not exactly what I was saying, but it's not exactly the opposite of what I was saying either, because What are you going to get more out of? Are you going to get more out of writing and researching a series starter, running ads to it, determining, eh, it's not where it needs to be, and then writing and researching a second series starter.
 
And then maybe taking the lessons learned from that and writing a third series starter for a totally different series, maybe even a different subgenre. Or writing three books in one series and then running ads to it. do you get more out of? I wonder if you get more out of option A, because that writing and research process that usually we don't do until we've finished a series, put it on the shelf, moved on to another series, is where the growth can happen to a certain extent.
 
I remember I was writing a series, and I was writing book 5, and I was like, this is the best book I've ever written, and no one's ever going to find it. Because it's deep in a series that the book one isn't so good. And so to go back to the question of, is there a time where you focus on promotional methods or you, or do you always just keep the writing going? a big fan right now of you focus some time on the writing and research and. You can focus some time on promotion, but I think the big growths, the Richter scale, 10x growths, those happen jumping from a series to a different series to a different series. Now, I did message the person and all these comments come in and I said, you don't have to quit a series.
 
You don't have to give up a series. But there is nothing wrong with saying, I'm going to write another book one and I'll come back to book two of this later. You never have to kill a series, but I am very big right now, Matty, on can I save an author two to three years of their lives? And this is kind of the theory I'm going on of, especially based on lots of authors I've seen who've had success.
 
This might be the thing to concentrate on. And you might want to wait until you have the big hit where one of those series starters does seem to take off on its own. maybe you go into promotion mode, not necessarily when, you're in a position where you'd need to double your sales to be happy. To me, that feels like, well, ads are going to bump what you have up 20 to 30 percent at most. If. If you're not happy with what 20 30 percent more would bring, then I wonder if you focus on that next series starter and go deeper into that writing to market genre research and then save the promotional time for later.
 
Theoretical? I'll put that, forward, philosophical maybe, but I'm always trying to think of how can authors kind of level up, and this feels to me like maybe the direction they need to go in.
 
Matty: Well, I like that idea that you're not suggesting people trash their starter if it's not doing well on the ads, but that by the time you've tested your third starter, and this is the one that catches on, then it's easier to step back and say, oh, you know what I did differently?
 
I spent more time developing the character, and you know what I could do? I could go back into series one, and I could write that second book, except this time, guess what? more character development, or an interesting backstory, or whatever that might be. And so, the learnings that you can gain from what it was about that one that finally hit could be profitably applied to the earlier ones.
 
Bryan: right. that's, like I said, the theory, but I've seen too many authors. All of those have success with their 3rd series or their 4th series or their 5th series. And I wonder, well, what if that didn't happen in year 6 of their career? What if it happened in year 2? And it just makes me wonder.
 
Matty: So, Bryan, I appreciate you being willing to delve into all these sort of philosophical and theoretical questions about, Amazon ads, and I know you have lots of resources for the more tactical side of Amazon ads as well, so, please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about those resources and everything you do online,
 
Bryan: Absolutely. And thank you, Matty. It's been a lot of fun talking with you today. So, the 5 Day Author Ad Profit Challenge is a free event that we do quarterly. The next one's coming up April 17th, 2024. We'll have more in the future each quarter. this is a free course, free support, free Q&As. Often copied and duplicated. People try to do these kinds of challenges, but, I feel like we've really gotten a good handle on our process here, and that's why this one coming up is the 19th challenge we've done, and usually several thousand people are taking it at once, we love putting this on, it's a good way to learn the basics, it's a good way to.
 
Matty: Get your hands dirty and actually make a few ads, but do, to do it in a safe environment where you have a lot of support, where you're not doing it all on your own. That is at AuthorsAdvertise.com. That's AuthorsAdvertise.com and you can register for the challenge. as I have done myself.
 
Bryan: As you have done yourself,
 
Matty: That's right.
 
Bryan: I'm so excited that you'll be there.
 
and then I have a podcast too, the Sell More Book Show podcast, sellmorebookshow.com or anywhere you listen to podcasts. as Matty mentioned, we just hit 10 years, hoping to do as many more as we can.
 
Matty: Great. It was lovely talking to you, Bryan. Thanks so much.

Episode 231 - Aim Lower - The Secret to Hitting Big Goals Is Targets So Easy You Can't Miss Them with Roland Denzel

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Roland Denzel discusses AIM LOWER - THE SECRET TO HITTING BIG GOALS IS TARGETS SO EASY YOU CAN'T MISS THEM, including how big goals teach bad habits, how tiny dopamine hits mean the world to your habits, how habits need slack and an expiration date, and his advice: One at a time, please.

Roland Denzel created The Indestructible Author in 2015 to help authors just like him be more productive and write more books, all while staying healthy, happy, and sane. You might know Roland as the author of numerous health, fitness, and nutrition books, a health coach, and a restorative exercise specialist, but the truth is Roland has always been an author first. He has written over ten books, dozens of short stories, hundreds of blog posts and articles, and at least one poem, all while raising a family and working a sixty-hour a week day job.

Episode Links

Roland's Links:
https://indestructibleauthor.com
instagram.com/indestructibleauthor/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/IndestructibleAuthorGroup/
https://www.youtube.com/@rolanddenzel-authorcoach

Roland's Previous Podcast Appearance:
Episode 155 - The Benefits (and Costs) of Membership with Roland Denzel

Summary

The main topic discussed was Roland Denzel's philosophy of setting small, achievable goals to build positive writing habits, rather than aiming for overly ambitious targets that can lead to failure and burnout.
 
Denzel argued that big writing challenges like NaNoWriMo teach bad habits by requiring unsustainable word counts and grueling writing schedules. This can make writing feel miserable and result in associating it with negative emotions. Instead of 50,000 words in a month, he advocated for much smaller daily goals, like writing for just 1 hour per day 5 days a week. The key is making the targets so easy that you simply cannot fail to meet them.
 
This provides frequent small "dopamine hits" and rewards for accomplishing achievable tasks, reinforcing the habit in a positive way. Denzel emphasized the power of things like checking off to-do items, calendar markings, or little celebrations to provide psychological satisfaction. He also stressed giving yourself "slack" - permission to be imperfect and making goals flexible enough to account for disruptions.
 
Trying to stack too many new habits at once is a recipe for failure according to Denzel. He recommended introducing just one new positive habit at a time, mastering it through repetition until it feels easy, and then layering in the next habit. This helps avoid feeling overwhelmed.
 
Habits should also have defined expiration dates, like a 7 or 10 day "test run", to evaluate if they are truly serving you well before committing long-term. If not, you can adjust or scrap the habit without it feeling like a failure.
 
The ultimate aim is to find an enjoyable, sustainable process for writing and accomplishing goals, rather than resorting to white-knuckle grit and ultimately burning out. Tiny successes and dopamine hits build positive momentum over time.
 
Denzel's own experiences illustrated these principles. He built a writing career around the constraints of a day job and family by carving out 30-60 minute sessions whenever possible rather than trying to force long dedicated blocks. The key was shaping his process around his life, not the other way around.
 
In summary, Denzel advocated setting tiny, easy-to-achieve goals that provide frequent positive reinforcement as the secrets to building productive, sustainable writing habits over the long-term. His overarching philosophy centered on an enjoyable, low-stress approach to slowly layering in success after success.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to "The Indy Author Podcast." Today, my guest is Roland Denzel. Hey, Roland, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Roland: Hey, good morning, Matty. I'm doing great.
 
[00:00:08] Matty: That's great to hear.
 
Meet Roland Denzel
 
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Roland Denzel created "The Indestructible Author" in 2015 to help authors just like him be more productive and write more books, all while staying healthy, happy, and sane.
 
You might know Roland as the author of numerous health, fitness, and nutrition books, a health coach, and a restorative exercise specialist. But the truth is, Roland has always been an author for us. He has written over 10 books, dozens of short stories, hundreds of blog posts and articles, and at least one poem, all while raising a family and working a 60-hour-a-week day job.
 
And Roland previously joined me in Episode 155, which was "The Benefits and Costs of Membership."
 
The Power of Aiming Lower
 
[00:00:42] Matty: This was a while ago. I can't remember the context where this came up, but I heard Roland talking about something and invited him on the podcast to recap it. This is great because normally now I'm playing with ChatGPT to come up with an intriguing title, and you did this for me.
 
So the title of what we're going to be talking about is "Aim Lower: The Secret to Hitting Big Goals Is Targets So Easy You Can't Miss Them." Roland even gave me a little teaser for what we're going to be talking about. Whether it's writing a book in a month or setting the same resolutions year after year, the big goals we set for ourselves often come with unsustainable habits.
 
But what if the secret to reaching your big goals is to build habits so small you simply can't fail? I just love this. Roland was also kind enough to send me some bullet points for what he wanted to cover with this topic. He did all the work for me; this is so great.
 
Big Goals Teach Bad Habits
 
[00:01:30] Matty: The first one we want to talk about is big goals teach bad habits.
 
Talk a little bit about that.
 
[00:01:38] Roland: As an author, we've probably all tried to do NaNoWriMo, for instance, National Novel Writing Month, and you get all mentally prepared for it. You say, "I'm going to get up in the morning, or work at lunch, or all of the above," and you aim to write 1,666 words per day. It's 30 days, so you just knuckle through, and you get it done.
 
What happens is it's such a challenge. There are good things about challenges like this; it can prove to you that you can do it, but the downside is that it doesn't teach you any good habits. In fact, it probably teaches you some bad habits because if you have to knuckle through something, that's not sustainable.
 
If you have to force yourself to do all these things, and then you're dreading it or regretting it, then at the end of that month, it's very unlikely you will continue the same way. You're going to tone it down or you're going to change your process. So many people crash at the end of National Novel Writing Month and take the next month or two or three off, and they don't look at that book again or any book for a long period of time.
 
So what did that teach you? It taught you that you can do something hard. You can physically do something hard, but it also taught you that writing is hard and it's miserable on a subconscious level because we have to give our subconscious minds a lot of credit for doing things to help us and also to hurt us.
 
Our subconscious is there to protect us, and it's not always the protection we want.
 
[00:03:16] Matty: Yeah. I have never done NaNoWriMo, nor have I ever used word count as a measure of my writing because my fear is that if I had to write 1,666 words a day, I would get to 1,500 and then just write 166 words of nonsense, because I would feel like I had to. It's like when the assembly line starts moving too fast and you're just slapping the pieces on because the goal becomes more important than the quality.
 
[00:03:49] Roland: Exactly. Is that a bad habit? Yes, it's like, do you want to write words just for the sake of words? What's the point of that, right? You're just going to have to delete those words the next time or when you're editing you'll be like, "What was I thinking here? This is nonsense." So that's definitely a big part of it. There's also the thing where, let's say, you take a day off and there are all these fancy spreadsheets that people use for National Novel Writing Month. So you get to a certain point, and it's Thanksgiving. You're traveling that day, dealing with family, and traveling back. No writing that day, which should be fine, right? But the spreadsheet auto-adjusts. So now, the next day, you have to write, say, 1,754 words, and it feels overwhelming.
 
If you're sick, or there's an emergency, or your laptop crashes, and it takes a while to get it back, then the next day, you're up to 1,900 words. Pretty soon, all of this pressure mounts because you have a goal of meeting this arbitrary 50,000 words in a month, right? Hopefully, you finish it because then you'll get a dopamine hit knowing you can do something hard when it comes to writing. But if you fail, you get the opposite effect. You've told your conscious and subconscious mind that you've failed before.
 
So next November, or the next time you decide to write a lot in a month, even if you consciously think you can do it, subconsciously, there's a part of you that's reminding you it didn't work out last time. Last time it was really hard, wasn't it? You felt your body tense up so many times. Is it really worth it? Then you either decide it's worth it and make it harder on yourself, thinking, "I'll be more strict this time, so I know I'll succeed." Which, if you fail, it's even worse. You're really piling it on yourself. Or you think the solution is to work harder, which isn't true. What you need is a sustainable, enjoyable way to write, one that continuously gives you little rewards, little successes. You want those kinds of positive outcomes to build habits and to tell yourself you're on the right track.
 
[00:06:52] Matty: Yeah, if I were in charge of the world, the two changes I would make to NaNoWriMo are not to do it in November because the only worse month they could have picked would be December. Why not do it in January when nothing else is going on? And the other thing is, I think it would be cool to aim for thirty 1,500-word short stories because then at least at the end of the month, you could say, "Well, I didn't get thirty 1,500-word short stories, but I got fifteen 1,500-word short stories." You have an actual finished thing. Even if your schedule totally goes out the window, you might have three substantial stories, and at least you can say, "Look, I finished these three things," not, "I didn't finish this one ginormous thing."
 
[00:07:43] Roland: But for people new to short stories, it could take hours of mental thought and energy to come up with the idea for a short story, right? So now, if you have to do that every day, you might be even more exhausted by the end of the thirty days. Some people might do better, but some could be like, "Oh, I could never write a short story," and that could just ruin them.
 
Goals Should Be So Small You Can't Fail
 
[00:08:08] Roland: So, the next bullet I gave you is that goals should be so small you can't fail, fail-proof, right? Think of a goal that you want to do, like writing short stories. Your goal should not be to write thirty short stories. That's like a long-term goal and it's very arbitrary, just like 50,000 words. Your goal is to write a novel, right? Great. So put that off in the distance. Then you say, "What are the things I need to do? What are the habits or what are the systems I need to put in place to write a novel or to write these short stories?" Then drill them down to the very smallest elements.
 
These are the things you can set your daily little goals or your daily little systems in place for, but they need to be easy. Let's take National Novel Writing Month. We'll pretend it doesn't exist, but someone says, "I want to write a novel," which is the same goal as NaNoWriMo.
 
So I want to write a novel. So you can say, "Well, I need to write more. I need to write regularly. I need to keep my story moving." So what can I do that I think is sustainable, that I can absolutely accomplish every day or most days, and that I will feel good about once I'm doing it?
 
For me, I would say, back before I did NaNoWriMo, I generally have about an hour a day where I can spend some time writing. It's broken up throughout the day. So I would say, "You know what, I think I can write for an hour a day."
 
Then think about how likely you are to accomplish that on a scale from 1 to 10. If it's a 6, that's a 60 percent chance. No, that's not very good. It's too hard. The goal needs to be smaller. Think of an even smaller goal that you know you can achieve. So say, "Can I do an hour total throughout the day?" Okay, that's better. Instead of an hour in the morning, I can spread my hour throughout the day. Maybe that's a 70 or 80 percent chance, 7 or 8 out of 10. Then ask, "Does it have to be every day?"
 
[00:12:34] Matty: Well, no, but it has to be maybe five days a week. Six days a week is too hard. So it's only like a seven. Five days a week, an hour a day of writing, and I'm going to qualify writing as sitting in front of my computer and doing nothing else but putting words on my digital page.
 
I think that's a nine. I think that's pretty achievable. A nine or ten. Because I can find a way to get that, you know, five days a week. That's the kind of goal you need to have, right? And for short stories, if you're really good at them, you might think, okay, I want to work on a short story every day.
 
It doesn't have to be the same short story because especially at the beginning, if you haven't written one, it could take a lot of not just time thinking. Whenever you're learning something new, it not only takes mental energy but also what I call emotional energy. Because if something frustrates you, it's not just a matter of, "Oh, it's frustrating and my CPU is spinning." It's frustrating, and I feel it viscerally in my body. Like, "This is so frustrating." And then these subconscious things, "I can do it, I can't do it," all these things come up. It's like emotional energy. And for authors, especially, that can be so draining that they burn themselves out very quickly.
 
So you might want to think, "I'm going to work on my short story for an hour a day." And then list off or make the tiny little things that make up creating a short story—coming up with an idea, a character, a setting, sitting in front of my computer and typing, outlining—it doesn't really matter what it is, as long as you, in your agreement with yourself, know that those are the little things required to meet your goal.
 
Tiny Dopamine Hits Mean the World to Your Habits
 
[00:12:54] Roland: Exactly. So, you probably know who Jerry Seinfeld is, the comedian. He had a challenge for himself to write a joke a day. It didn't have to be a good joke, a long joke, or a great joke. Just a joke. He had to spend time writing a joke per day. Sometimes it's five minutes, sometimes it's an hour. But when he got it done, he would just put an X on his calendar. It doesn't sound like much, but an X on your calendar creates a dopamine hit. Just like if you have a to-do list and you check it off, it feels good. You should always put things on your to-do list that you know you can do. It gets you started, right? And then as your list goes up, you feel those dopamine hits every day. Those are positive reinforcements that you're doing the right things with your habits. And the reverse is true.
 
If you can't meet those things, if you can't get that little hit, you don't get that dopamine hit, then you have a slump that day. So that's why it's important to find something that you know you can do, that you feel very confident that you can achieve. And there's a little bit more to that.
 
[00:15:13] Matty: There are more protective measures we can put in place that will mitigate the effects of missing a day, like I talked about before, maybe five days out of seven, not necessarily every day per week. That's one way. That's common.
 
These tiny little dopamine hits can be like a check on the calendar or like when little kids use happy face stickers, right? You could make your own to-do list, you could make your own chart. Like Austin Kleon—I don't know if you know who Austin Kleon is—he writes books like "Steal Like an Artist," "Show Your Work," right?
 
He has a thing on his website with a form you can print off, and it's like a 31-day calendar, right? It's just a fun calendar in his special handwriting, and he says do whatever you want. Type at the top, write at the top, and put like a sticker, draw something.
 
It just gives you something that gives you that little feeling, that little hit that feels good every day. They're super tiny, but don't underestimate how powerful something small can be.
 
[00:15:13] Matty: In your experience, is there a difference between making those kinds of checkoffs physically on a document versus in an online task management thing or a spreadsheet or something like that?
 
[00:15:25] Roland: There probably is. For a while, I used a to-do app, and all of my apps on my phone have the sounds turned off.
 
So when I click a to-do, nothing happens. It doesn't vibrate, it doesn't do anything, right? So there's something to be said for that ding, for that noise, right? So you have to find what works for you. Does it feel satisfying? Like, does your to-do list make a flash, or does it make a ding, or does it vibrate in your hand?
 
Does it send you a message or a notification that feels good? Because that's another thing, like, I think it's Microsoft To Do, every time you check it off, it'll send you an email, or something at the end of the day saying you've done something. So that could be enough to get that email. So, unless you're sure that the digital works for you and makes you feel good when you click it, find something here in the real world, tangible, like those little silver bells that hotels and restaurants used to have, right? Ding, ding, ding, right? Get one of those and keep it on your desk or next to your door, so like when you see it and you get there like, "Oh, I did that today," ding, and hit it.
 
But it's something, so that's why, I mean, other things like that, stickers are inexpensive. You can have a calendar, like I have a big whiteboard calendar over here, and just checking it off with a different color pen is really nice.
 
[00:16:54] Matty: I realized that the task management software I use is Trello, and in Trello, if you can put a checklist attached to an item, and so I have one, like my daily tasks, the things that I do every day, check scribe count and check my promotion calendar and things like that. And I've added an automation so that on my daily calendar, once I've checked everything off, first of all, if you check everything off, when you check off the last thing, all the little checkboxes vibrate in a happy way.
 
[00:17:24] Roland: Oh, that's good.
 
[00:17:25] Matty: And then it clears out all the checkmarks and it moves the task to the next day. So it is sort of like what you're saying about the stickers. It is oddly satisfying to have a little happy dance from the checkboxes.
 
[00:17:37] Roland: Isn't it? Yeah.
 
[00:17:41] Roland: Yes, other things you can do is, if you have... this doesn't really work if you're not very active on social media because you can post things on social media. For example, "Hey, I achieved my goal for the day." It might be super annoying to your Facebook friends if you post every day that you achieved your goal, but if you have, maybe, one thing like, "Here's my goal for the week," and every day you update that post to say you've done it that day, that could be different. You have to see if that is satisfying for you, and if you have enough friends or followers who are engaged, you're going to get responses, people saying "good job," and things like that. So that could be another way to do it.
 
Habits Need Slack
 
[00:18:22] Matty: I want to move on to the next bullet, which is "Habits need slack."
 
[00:18:26] Roland: Yes. So, I learned that not everyone knows what the term "slack" means. You have to have slack, which is just like relaxing. It's like you give yourself a break. That's why I think it's funny. But habits need slack too. I already talked about one type of slack, but I didn't use the term at the time. It's like, instead of committing to seven days per week, I'll aim for five days a week. That's one way of building slack into the habit you're trying to form because it's unsustainable to do something seven days a week forever. Something can happen. So, you either have to make the task easier, or you have to cut yourself some slack and say, "Hey, I'm not going to be super strict with myself."
 
The key here, with all of these things, is you have to give yourself slack, make the goals small, and define the rewards before you start building the new habit. You have to set these rules before you begin, because if you adjust them later, even for a good reason, I guarantee somewhere deep down, in your soul and in your bones, you'll feel the tiniest bit like a failure. For example, "Oh, I've gone 12 days and I realize that I can't do this seven days a week, so I'm going to do five days a week." That's good, it's good that you're flexible, but having set that expectation ahead of time would have been much more positive. Because now you're not changing the rules. When you change the rules, you subconsciously feel a bit like a failure, and that's what you want to avoid. You want to continue moving forward with positives and not have to take a step back with negatives. So, cutting yourself some slack is crucial.
 
[00:21:38] Matty: That feels more comfortable to me based on my writing style.
 
[00:21:41] Roland: Yes, so that's a different kind of slack. Slack can be anything, but it essentially goes with giving yourself permission to not be perfect. The key is to ensure that you grant yourself this permission ahead of time.
 
[00:21:57] Matty: I like the idea of setting goals ahead of time, not only because it sets you up to feel good when you achieve them, but also because it's a method of triaging what you think you want to accomplish. You might be considering participating in NaNoWriMo, and as you plan out how you'll manage your time and allocate your attention, you may conclude that there's only a 20 percent likelihood of following through. Deciding whether you truly want to commit to NaNoWriMo ahead of time allows you to thoroughly consider your decision. However, I did have a question about slack. There's the slack of, "I intended to write for an hour a day, but I'm just not feeling it," or "I was going to write for an hour today, but my car broke down and I'm dealing with that." These are instances where you need to accept that writing seven days a week isn't feasible, and aiming for five days a week is much more realistic.
 
Then there are times when you're ill and can't write at all for a week. Do you manage these kinds of emergency situations differently?
 
[00:23:04] Roland: That's a great point because there are definitely unexpected events that can disrupt your routine. The good news, if it's significant—like your car breaking down or falling ill, as I did with COVID a couple of weeks ago, which prevented me from writing for a few days—is that you know you had a valid reason for missing those days. It's also beneficial to remind yourself that if something drastic occurs, it's understandable, and it's not a point of failure. There are simply times when you cannot do what you planned.
 
[00:25:28] Matty: I think another way to handle those catastrophic moments is to set such small goals that you can't fail. Habits need slack because, let's say, you start feeling unwell on a Monday and you think, "Okay, this is a catastrophic moment for my writing goals. I'm going to feel terrible today, I'll try to get back to it tomorrow." Then, if the next day you still feel bad, you might think, "Today is another catastrophic day. I'll get back to it tomorrow." However, if you realize you're getting sick and you know it will last a week, you could say, "I'm going to take a week off because I know that's how long it takes." And then, if you get back to it on day five, you feel good about returning to your habit sooner. The key is not to plan too aggressively after a setback, which could further a sense of failure.
 
[00:26:24] Roland: This is one of the barriers. That's a great point, but it also reminds me of the issue where we tend to start things on New Year's Day, the first of the month, Mondays, or our birthdays. These are real days on the calendar, and I understand why we choose them, but they're quite arbitrary in the grand scheme of things, even saying "I'm going to do this for the month of November." It's also arbitrary. So you could say, "I'm going to do it for 30 days," and if you need a sabbatical, you pick up where you left off after you're well. Right? So, do you feel like you have to start over a little? You can either start over again or pick up where you left off, depending on what's better for you. If you were already in the groove, give yourself some slack and say, "Hey, it's going to take a couple of days to ramp back up to where I was."
 
[00:27:57] Matty: But I just want to continue. It's going to feel good for me to pick up where I left off and say, "Hey, I did 30 days of this." Yes, there was a sickness there. I had some sick days in between. When you link it to November or December or January, right? You can't get that back. You can't say, "Well, I'm going to finish NaNoWriMo in December," because that's not NaNoWriMo anymore. NaNoWriMo is an official thing, and it's in November, so even though you mean well, part of you is going to say, "Well, it's not quite NaNoWriMo."
 
[00:28:18] Matty: Well, every time NaNoWriMo comes up, I explain why I don't do it. I feel like to give equal time, I'm going to have to get a NaNoWriMo person on the podcast to represent the other view, but maybe not in October because I'm sure they're all booked up with podcast interviews in October. But, it obviously works well for some people, just consider whether it works well for you or not. Habits need to have an expiration date.
 
[00:28:24] Roland: Yeah, this one's big. This is all part of Slack, if you think about it. When you're trying to build a new habit, if you say, "I'm going to do this forever," and you don't like it, then eventually you're going to feel bad because you're abandoning it. So, if I'm trying to write 1,666 words per day and I don't like it, at the end of the month, whether I did it or not, if I hated it, I've learned nothing. All I've learned is that I don't like it, but I haven't learned that positive habits can help me. So, if you give yourself an expiration date, usually shorter than a long-term goal, let's say seven days, most people can do something for seven days, and seven days is a good taste test.
 
I'm going to try this for seven days and see, reevaluate. Do I like it? Is it working for me? And here's the language that I prefer: Is it serving me? If I continue with this habit, is it serving me well? Because if it's not, if I have to cringe and force myself, then I'm not going to be able to continue it forever, and I'm wasting my time.
 
So, giving it that seven days, for instance, as an expiration date, and saying, "Hey, at the end of seven days, if I reevaluate and I don't like it, I can either make it easier, change the rules, or stop doing it and replace it with something I do want to do." Because who here hasn't tried something for 21 days to build a habit, which is totally fabricated? There's no science in that at all.
 
[00:30:18] Matty: But you should know within a few days whether you like something or not. And giving yourself an expiration date means that you do not have to abandon it. A realistic expiration date, it's hard to say, so yeah, for seven days, ten days, whatever, if you realize, "Oh, it's not working for me," it's part of that slack and it also saves you from wasting time.
 
[00:30:47] Matty: Yeah, I like that idea of asking if it's serving you because I think that there's also the less common but still possible problem where you've successfully incorporated a habit into your life. It was serving you well for a while and now you're doing it without really thinking about it.
 
[00:31:17] Roland: Yeah, exactly. And if you have both an expiration date and a check-in date to say, "Okay, I've been doing this for a month, a year, two years, or a decade," you can assess whether it's still a valuable way to spend your time and if it's providing the benefits you were looking for.
 
One at a time, please
 
[00:31:19] Matty: And, the sixth bullet you suggested was "one at a time, please."
 
[00:31:24] Roland: Yeah. We have a tendency to dive right in. "I'm going to write my novel, so I'm going to write 1,666 words, I'm going to write for an hour, I'm going to get up early, I'm not going to watch Netflix." You pile all these things on at once, which all sound really good. "This is what it would take for me to finish my novel. I'm going to do all of these things." Well, that's a lot to try at once, and it's a lot to process mentally and emotionally. Giving yourself the space to try something new is important. So when you're trying five or six new things at a time, or even three, each one becomes more difficult to experience, to try, and to test, to see whether you like it.
 
If I try all those things at once and after a week I hate my life, my new life that I've built for myself as an author—no more Netflix, getting up early, writing an hour every day—I don't want that, right? But if you try one at a time, each one is more likely to succeed, and each can be fine-tuned to be a habit that you'll not only keep up but hopefully enjoy. You've heard of habit stacking, right? I prefer the term habit layering. Habit stacking is like piling everything on at once—Netflix, getting up early, etc. But habit layering is when you've semi-mastered a habit, it's on cruise control, like writing for an hour a week for seven to ten days, and you have the mental and emotional space to add a new one on top of it, to layer it. Something that doesn't conflict. Not writing for an hour and a half, but keeping that one and building on it. Habits take 21, 30, 90 days to build, so you keep going with that one. Then you say, "I feel I could write better if I got up a little earlier," and now you try that. You have to start small again, asking, "How much earlier can I realistically get up?" And then you consider all the factors—will I disturb my family, do I need to grind my coffee beans, etc. Then, once you're on a really good track with that second habit, you can consider layering the next one, and so on. We don't have the emotional strength to compartmentalize multiple habits at once, especially when they're all directed towards one goal. When we fail, it feels like we've failed at everything, which can be overwhelming. This is like what happens when people decide, "On Monday, I'm going to start the keto diet and go to the gym five days a week."
 
And, I need to start going to bed earlier because I know that's going to help me go to the gym. They do all of these things, and then after two or three weeks, they look back and realize they've stopped doing all these things. What a failure. So they give up everything, and because it was all tied together, it was one thing that they were doing.
 
They give up everything, and then, how long does it take to start again? Because every time you have a failure, it's that much harder to start again. No matter what it is. If you've ever been on a diet, you think, "I was on a diet last year. It didn't really work. I'm going to try it again." But you could try it right now, you could try it on Monday, but you just keep putting it off because consciously and subconsciously, last time you tried, you failed, and this time, it's probably going to be the same. So the way to mitigate that is to go through these steps: smaller dopamine hits, cutting yourself some slack, give yourself an expiration date, and do one thing at a time, and then layer them as every time you succeed.
 
[00:35:47] Matty: It's interesting because, as we've discussed before, I have a challenge with getting enough movement in my life, and I've talked to many guests about this. A couple of months ago, I was at a book club, and this topic came up. Someone asked me what my day was like as a full-time author, publisher, and podcaster, and I described it, mentioning how it was a very sedentary lifestyle.
 
Afterwards, one of the women in the book club introduced herself as the executive director of the local YMCA. She said, "I don't know if you've ever been to the YMCA, but here's my card. If you'd like a tour, give me a call, and I'd be happy to take you through it." I thought, why not? I hadn't been to the YMCA, even though it's six minutes from my house, because I had a probably decades-out-of-date idea of what they were like. But I went for a tour, and it was a very nice place with a lot of appealing features.
 
So, I signed up and started going. One of the things I really liked about it, illustrating many of the points we've discussed, was the app that allowed you to sign up for classes the day before. I loved that I wasn't committing to 10 weeks of yoga. It was like, "I'll do aqua aerobics, and then when I go out to the car, I'll open the app and think, 'Oh, chair yoga, that sounds like fun, I'll do that tomorrow.'" So, I had a lot of flexibility in what I was signing up for, and if I decided I didn't like aqua aerobics, I didn't have to go, and I wasn't wasting any money.
 
I was sticking with it and found that on the days when I went to the YMCA, I was also more likely to take the dogs for an extra walk because I was already out and about. So, one good thing led to another good thing. Then at the end of December, I got the flu and obviously didn't go to the YMCA.
 
[00:38:59] Matty: And then after I was over the flu, I still had this chronic cough, and nobody wants to be around someone who's coughing a lot these days. So I wasn't going to the YMCA then. And then I was on vacation, so I wasn't going to the YMCA, and I got back from vacation about a week ago. The earlier part of the story is, I used to have an item on my calendar from 10 to 11:30, which was when I blocked off time for going to the YMCA. But when I got into the habit, I took the calendar entry off because I thought I didn't need the reminder anymore. However, when I got back from vacation, it had sort of fallen off my mental radar. It wasn't that I was thinking about going to the YMCA and deciding not to, it had just disappeared from my conscious mind as something I needed to include in my day.
 
I realized that I should have put it back on my calendar as a reminder and kept it there until I no longer needed it as a reminder. That illustrates, in my own life, all those things about goals being small, like "yes, tomorrow I'm going to go to the YMCA," and the dopamine hit of saying "today I went to the YMCA," and all those good things. So, this is a good reminder to me to get that back on my calendar and on my actual schedule.
 
[00:38:59] Roland: Oh, good. I mean, there is some benefit to changing that reminder on your calendar too, because after a while, it just becomes another calendar reminder every day. You sort of tune it out.
 
[00:39:11] Matty: I think the benefit is that it blocked my time. So, like, I do have events that get scheduled automatically through Calendly, and it was a reminder to me, but it also prevented other things from showing up in that time block, which was important.
 
[00:39:25] Roland: Yeah. I like that.
 
[00:39:27] Matty: So, I do have to say, when I was reading over these notes ahead of time, and you were talking about the power of small and things like that, and then I look back over your bio, which ends with raising a family and working a 60-hour week day job. So, in closing, I just want to ask, personally, as someone who has achieved the things described in your bio, is there any contradiction there that we need to discuss? Like, did you say "I am going to not only raise a family but I'm going to work a 60-hour week day job, and then I'm also going to do all the things you're doing on top of that"? How does that all mesh together? How does that work logically together?
 
[00:40:03] Roland: Well, my goal is not to be a full-time author. My goal is just to write books that people enjoy. Yes, I do want to make some money from my books, but that's not my primary goal. Making money from my books is a good goal, right, and it's a strong part of my goals. But I have no illusions about being a full-time author. I wrote books that I really wanted to, mostly they're health and fitness books. I have some urban fantasy coming up, but right now, they're health and fitness, and I had a message that I wanted to get out there. So putting it out there, I knew that I had a family, which was important, and sometimes I've had a full-time job, and sometimes I've had jobs that, you sort of... I was a health coach and an author coach, and I did consulting for printing and publishing companies.
 
[00:41:58] Roland: So, it all adds up to those things, but that was where I was primarily making my money. So I had to say, "Here's what I'm doing. This is my life. I have a family. I can't neglect my family, right?" And I also have these jobs, this work. So I looked at how I could build a writing career around that foundation. That's where I came up with the idea that I could write for an hour a day. Luckily, I've trained myself over time to be able to write without needing a solid block of time. Sometimes I can write in the morning, or if I have a longer lunch break, I can take half an hour of my lunch and write then. If I have the energy after work, I can write a little bit there. So over time, it's become like sometimes it's an hour and a half of writing, sometimes it's half an hour, but it's built around my life, rather than my life being formed by it. Yeah.
 
[00:41:58] Matty: That's so cool. It's always lovely to speak with you and so helpful to be reminded of these things that make so much sense when you describe them but are sometimes hard to remember in the moment when you get all caught up in whatever the latest thing is that you want to do.
 
[00:42:11] Roland: I do have a freebie that people can download if they go to indestructibleauthor.com/habits. They can download this thing; it's got a poster you can print off, stick on your fridge or your desk, and it will give you all these habits. It goes into a bit more detail on how to set your goals, how to set your habits, and all the ways to get your little dopamine hits. And I think signing up for my email list is a dopamine hit in and of itself.
 
[00:42:37] Matty: Perfect. Thank you so much, Roland.
 
[00:42:39] Roland: You're very welcome.

Episode 230 - The Good, the Bad, and the Surprising of Kickstarter with Megan Haskell and Jennifer Hilt

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Megan Haskell and Jennifer Hilt discuss THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE SURPRISING OF KICKSTARTER. They offer their insider perspectives, covering both fiction and non-fiction books, including how Kickstarters enables authors to tap into a growing desire among readers for access to creators; which comes first, a Kickstarter campaign or a reader community; how Kickstarter has become a platform where readers browse for books (and aren’t looking for bargains); the importance of starting small; the challenge of data management; the value of a campaign as market research; ideas for backer tier offerings; which parts of the campaign were harder or easier than they expected; and the importance of not just adding a Kickstarter campaign on top of your existing schedule and of building in rest time.

Megan Haskell is the award-winning author of The Sanyare Chronicles, the epic fantasy "Forged in Shadow," and a women’s contemporary fantasy series, starting with "Aether Bound." And she and Greta Boris are the forces behind The Author Wheel.

Jennifer Hilt is the author of THE TROPE THESAURUS series, including TROPE YOUR WAY TO A STRONGER STORY and books on horror and romance tropes. She is also the USA Today bestselling author of 24 books across four pen names. And Jennifer is my co-host for the MINING THE MOVIES WITH TROPETALK video series that you’ll find on The Indy Author YouTube channel.

Episode Links

https://meganhaskell.com/​
https://www.jenniferhilt.com/

Summary

This episode of "The Indy Author Podcast" features a discussion with Jennifer Hilt and Megan Haskell on their experiences with Kickstarter campaigns for their books. They cover the basics of Kickstarter, their personal motivations for using the platform, and the different strategies they employed in their campaigns. Jennifer focuses on non-fiction projects related to tropes, while Megan discusses her fiction series. They share insights on setting up campaigns, choosing reward tiers, and the importance of direct reader engagement. Challenges such as fulfillment, international shipping, and managing backer expectations are also discussed. The conversation highlights Kickstarter as a tool for expanding reader reach, testing market interest, and providing unique reader experiences. Both authors stress the importance of understanding Kickstarter's community-driven nature and the need for clear planning and execution in campaigns.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guests are Jennifer Hilt and Megan Haskell. How are you guys doing?
 
[00:00:07] Megan: Good!
 
[00:00:09] Jennifer: Happy to be here.
 
[00:00:10] Matty: Yes, I'm very happy to have you here, one of my few multi-guest podcast episodes. So, this is a special acknowledgment for you guys.
 
Meet Jennifer Hilt and Megan Haskell
 
[00:00:18] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Jennifer Hilt is the author of the "Trope Thesaurus" series, including "Trope Your Way to a Stronger Story" and books on Horror and Romance Tropes. She's also the USA Today bestselling author of 24 books across four pen names. Jennifer is also my co-host on the "Minding the Movies with Trope Talk" video series that you will find on the Indie Author YouTube channel.
 
Megan Haskell is the award-winning author of the "Sanyare Chronicles," the epic fantasy "Forged in Shadow," and a women's contemporary fantasy series, starting with "Aether Bound." She and Greta Boris are the forces behind the Author Wheel. So, as soon as you've caught up with the Indie Author Podcast, please go over and subscribe to the Author Wheel Podcast, which is a wonderful podcast.
 
[00:00:59] Megan: Oh, thank you.
 
[00:01:01] Matty: And I invited Jennifer and Megan on the podcast to talk about Kickstarter because Kickstarter is just in the news so much, and I thought this would be a good combination because we have someone who has had success with a non-fiction Kickstarter, Jen, and someone who has had success with a fiction Kickstarter, Megan, and then we have someone who has no experience with Kickstarter whatsoever, me. So, we figured that we would bring a good combination of perspectives to this. Jen and Megan have also promised to share not just the glory moments of their Kickstarter but also some of the more challenging moments as well.
 
What is Kickstarter?
 
[00:01:48] Jennifer: Before that, can I just take a minute to define what I think Kickstarter means? Because I didn't know that.
 
[00:01:55] Matty: Oh, sure. Yeah, please.
 
[00:01:56] Jennifer: If you're listening here and don't get it, Megan, chime in with whatever you think. But Kickstarter is a way of what we call direct sales, and you're interacting with your readers. It's similar to GoFundMe in that idea, except Kickstarter is only for creative projects. That's just kind of like the basics, which I didn't even really understand when I first was like, what is this Kickstarter thing? So just to give you a rundown of what that is. You can only use it for creative projects, and then we'll go into all the details about that.
 
Background on Jen's Kickstarter campaign
 
[00:02:27] Jennifer: My Kickstarter, the reason why I was interested in it, is I sell non-fiction; my non-fiction books are obviously about tropes. I've been using those wide, and I was seeing people like Sky Warren, Brian Cohn, and Russell Nolte doing Kickstarters with their non-fiction books and having success with that. I was like, I know zero about this, like, probably even less than zero if that's possible. So, I was wondering if that would be something that would work for me. That was kind of how I got my entry; I just plunged into it.
 
I had a book, "My Trope Thesaurus Romance," my second book, that I hadn't put out on Amazon or wide or anything like that. And I had a pretty good draft of it. It wasn't completely done, but I had a pretty good draft. And I thought, well, what if I use that for a Kickstarter? That was pretty much all I thought with it. And I went into it quite naive, I would say. Megan and I can talk more about that. But that was my entry into doing it: I have this product, I see other people having success with it, let me give it a go and see what happens.
 
Background on Megan's Kickstarter campaign
 
[00:03:37] Matty: And Megan, how about you? Give us a little background on your Kickstarter.
 
[00:03:41] Megan: Sure. So I actually have done two so far. The first was nonfiction, which was for the Author Wheel. We did a Kickstarter for our "Foundations of Great Storytelling, Preparing to Write," and that one was reasonably successful as well. Then I did my fiction one, which was kind of me putting my toes in the water because, like Jennifer, I didn't quite know what I was doing and was figuring things out. I wanted to test something that I already knew how to do.
 
So I did a paperback Kickstarter for the second book in the "Rise of Lilith" series, "Aether Crossed." Like Jennifer, it was successful. I fully funded within a couple of hours and exceeded my goals. I was really excited about it as a way to kind of get going. And now I'm just about to launch my second fiction Kickstarter, which will be for a special edition hardcover of my debut novel, "Sanyare: The Last Descendant," for the "Sanyare Chronicles." I think that's my big tip of the day: go slow, put your toe in the water, and build from there. That's my two cents on my Kickstarters.
 
The mechanics of Kickstarter
 
[00:05:10] Megan: The way Kickstarter works is that you set up your sales page, your campaign page, and you set up different tiers for the rewards that your backers can opt in and support you at. Then you hit launch, and you can choose how long your campaign is and how much funding you need to make it happen. For my paperback fiction campaign, I set my funding goal at $500, which would basically cover the print costs and shipping costs of the books and give me a little boost for the launch of the book. You can launch elsewhere afterward, but for the Kickstarter, I set a small goal because I was putting my toe in the water and wanted to fund those costs.
 
Then you set your time period; mine was a 21-day campaign, meaning I had three weeks to convince enough people to back me to achieve that funding goal. I managed to do that, getting $500 in a couple of hours, which was fabulous. That let me know I was going to meet my minimum goal and would be able to fund the print of the paperbacks and all the associated costs.
 
If you don't fund on Kickstarter, meaning if you don't get enough backers to meet your goal, the campaign doesn't fund. I don't like looking at it as failure, but it fails. And so, none of the backers get charged, and you are not required to complete that Kickstarter. For example, there are Kickstarters out there, like for a board game, they set usually high funding goals because they have bigger costs than we do as authors for books. So if they don't hit that 100,000 funding goal, they don't have to make the game at all. They don't owe it to anyone. But if they do hit that funding goal, they have to fulfill it for their backers. So it's really important to set your funding goal at a level that is achievable but covers your costs, so that if you fund, you can actually afford to make the product.
 
Expanding reader reach
 
[00:07:44] Matty: I'm curious to ask both of you, what were your own author business goals when you decided to pursue it? Jennifer, you had talked about that a little bit, but did you have very specific goals in mind, like what you wanted to achieve? You wanted to fund something, or you wanted to expand your reach, or you wanted to get more visibility or anything like that. Any additional goals you had there.
 
[00:08:06] Jennifer: Yeah, I definitely wanted to expand my reach and find other readers/community because it seems like often the people who are supporting Kickstarters are not exactly the same people you're going to find on the other channels. So it's really a way to give you more audience. That was kind of the thing that I was interested in because, like Megan said, when you're finished with your Kickstarter project, authors usually wait a minimum of three months before they put up the product for sale on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other vendors.
 
So, you're selling the same product twice to two different groups of people, I guess. That was obviously very appealing as an author because we don't get that a lot. That said, there's a lot of work involved in doing that. And, like the things that Megan talked about, like setting up your page and campaign, the first time I did it, I would say that all that took me a month. I'm not a particularly techie person, probably that's not a surprise, but just figuring out what everything meant took me a lot of time to figure out what rewards really mean, what a tier is, how that works with someone, and then just working out the pages themselves to make them look attractive and those kinds of things.
 
For me, all that was a really big part of the learning process that I was glad I did, but it definitely takes time and energy to do. It's not a set-it-and-forget-it thing in any kind of way. And it's just important for people to know that. I wanted to look for more of an audience, and I definitely had that opportunity, but it also took a lot of time and energy to learn how to do that search. So, that was really my biggest thing, because, oh, one of the things that was really nice about it is because the Kickstarter people are often other creative people, they really tend to want to sign up for your mailing lists. We're always trying to improve our mailing lists.
 
So that was a really great benefit that I found as I gained a whole bunch more newsletter subscribers. Things like that were more long-term goals. But the initial thing was just to broaden my reach and learn a bit more about ways to sell direct besides what I had been doing.
 
A growing reader desire for access to the creator
 
[00:10:28] Megan: I think for me it was, like Jennifer said, reaching a new audience. The interesting thing is that we're in this moment of transition within the author and reader communities, where there are huge differences between the readers that are in Kindle Unlimited, for example, who just want to read as many books as they can, and maybe they find favorites and become a different kind of reader, but they start out there, at least. And then there are the readers who are interested in having a physical copy of something, in supporting an author directly, that kind of sustainability of the creative industry. There are readers out there who are strongly in favor of that and in favor of reaching those authors and having access to more, you know, to the creative process for that author.
 
So I'm not saying you need to go out and have coffee with them, but like, just that access is a premium.
 
[00:11:30] Matty: That's a really premium deliverable to give them.
 
[00:11:31] Megan: That would be huge.
 
[00:11:33] Matty: It would be a really premium deliverable.
 
[00:11:36] Megan: Absolutely. One of the premium tiers that I did offer on mine was a one-on-one coffee on Zoom. I didn't meet them in person, but on Zoom. It was a very high tier, a high-cost item, and there were a few other things involved with it as well, including the books, obviously. But I did have a few backers who were like, "Yeah, I'm going to spend a couple hundred bucks so I can sit and chat with you because I think it's so cool to have access to an author and talk about the creative process and how you came up with the story idea." So it's a different audience. And for me personally, that's the direction I wanted to go, or wanted to pursue, that more community-based, experience-based group of readers rather than the 'as many books as fast as possible' reader community.
 
So that was just a personal strategy decision for myself. It feels right for me. It's the kind of business I want to run. But I know there are plenty of authors out there who are like, "No, I just want to write and I can write fast and I want to put out a lot of books and make sure my readers have that bingeable quality." And that's totally cool. It's just a very different mindset and a very different type of reader.
 
So for me, it was largely starting to try to tap into that community. And then also that first campaign, the paperback campaign, I knew it wasn't going to be a big-ticket seller like the really super high edition, luxury hardbacks. But it was my way of being like, "Is this even really feasible for me? I know how to make a paperback already. So, okay, let's do that and see if we can start to figure out what this Kickstarter thing really is, and how much work goes into it," because it is a lot.
 
[00:13:34] Matty: Yeah, we're definitely going to be delving into that, and I wanted to share a story that I think I heard at 20 Books, but I remember someone talking about the fact that someone did something like a Kickstarter, and one of their tiers was where the author would fly to the contributor's hometown, meet them at the airport, have lunch with them, and hand them a signed book. This was a multi-thousand-dollar tier, and he got like two people who were willing to spend, I don't know, $10,000 a piece or something like that for him to fly to their airport and hand them the book. It was really just a great example of almost literally the sky's the limit if you have the kind of community you can tap into.
 
The chicken and egg question of reader community
 
[00:14:15] Matty: Which leads to my next question, which is sort of a chicken and egg thing because you want to build up more of a community using the Kickstarter, but you kind of have to have a community that wants to interact with you in that way to start with. I do sense that a certain amount of the Kickstarter activity is Kickstarters supporting each other, especially in the author community. There's this community of Kickstarter-using authors, and they're very generous about supporting each other's Kickstarters, but among your reader base, it has to be seeded with people who want to, or maybe already are interacting with you in that way. So, Jennifer, can you talk a little bit about that? Which comes first? The seed of that kind of community, or can that come as a result of the Kickstarter?
 
Kickstarter as a platform for browsing for books
 
[00:15:02] Jennifer: Yeah, one thing that I keep learning, and I keep forgetting, but I keep relearning, is that there are so many people out there. Especially in our author communities, we sometimes feel like there's only a finite number of people interested in our work. That probably is true, but there are also just so many people out there. Kickstarter has shown me a window into just how many other people out there that I didn't even know who could be potentially interested in my work. There's a lot of people on Kickstarter. The biggest challenge when you put something up there is gaining visibility for them to see you. They have this little sticker that if your project funds in a certain amount of time, you get a "projects we love" thing, and then you get a little more visibility.
 
In general, I just think there's a whole lot of people out there who want to read and are interested in different ideas. Like when I did two campaigns, either time I have done very little promo, like pre-order equivalent, just because it's taken me so long to set it all up. I tend to be like, "Okay, guess what, this is coming out in three days, the campaign's going to start," and it's been really interesting to me that immediately I see people backing it who I don't know any of these people.
 
[00:17:12] Matty: Yeah, I guess I always just assume, because this is how I would use Kickstarter, and of course, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking everybody else is using something the way I'm using it, but I only ever go to Kickstarter if I hear somebody that I already like announce they have a Kickstarter. Then I'll go look and say, "Oh yeah, that looks good, I'm going to fund that," but I would never go to Kickstarter just to poke around.
 
[00:17:34] Jennifer: But I know people that do.
 
[00:17:36] Matty: Yeah, evidently. Megan, what are your thoughts about that?
 
[00:17:39] Megan: Yeah, so I agree. I think there are people that Kickstarter has become the primary way that they shop for books. They want, especially book collectors, who want that physical copy in their hands. I think there are people, that's how they do it. They like the system, they like interacting with the authors directly, they like having that physical, gorgeous product in their hands. It's a completely different audience than the people who are just reading ebooks online and are used to that. So I think there's that aspect to it.
 
As far as the chicken and the egg, I think it's both. You need both. If you've been primarily or exclusively online with Amazon, especially if you're exclusive with Amazon, but even if you're wide, even if you're across all the ebook platforms, your audience is therefore going to be mostly digital. They're going to be the ones that have subscribed to your list. Now, some of those people will be super fans or want that physical, beautiful collector's edition because they love your work. But, as a percentage, it's hard to say what that percentage is going to be. It will fund some, but it's probably not going to be everything.
 
Meanwhile, now you've got this Kickstarter page, and especially after your first campaign. And we'll see how this works out for my second campaign. So, Jennifer, you might be able to speak to this a little bit more. But it starts to snowball because all the people that backed your first campaign you can now message them and say, "Hey, I've got a new campaign up, I've got a new book, or I've got this special edition." So now they do already know you, they're already in the system, and I think there's more momentum there. Start small. On that first campaign, again, this is why I think, my personal belief, and I have not done enough Kickstarters to prove this out yet, but, my personal belief is that you start small. You put your toe in the water, easy funding goals, something you already know how to do, something that's digital, or, I mean, Kickstarter likes physical products, so you still should do a physical product of some kind, but start small, don't have massive goals for your first Kickstarter.
 
[00:20:22] Matty: I'd be interested in hearing from both of you about how your Kickstarter experience differed from what you expected, like what were your biggest surprises as you went through the process? And Jennifer, let's start with you on that one.
 
[00:20:34] Jennifer: Biggest surprises... Let's see, I would say, overwhelmingly, backers have been lovely. Like, if you have some worry about like, oh, I'm going to get some, no, people have just been great. I've really enjoyed interacting with them; they've been nice, enthusiastic, understanding, just great.
 
The challenge of data management
 
[00:20:52] Jennifer: The management of how you deliver the stuff is a whole other thing and a very real part of it, and so the data management part of a Kickstarter campaign is kind of basically three things for me. One, a product that you create. Two, the Kickstarter campaign itself that we were talking about, that you're trying to get funded. And then three, what they call fulfillment, of how you actually get all those things that you've promised people to them. And so those are, in my mind, pretty much three distinct things that I have to do. The fulfillment part takes a lot of time and energy from me as I'm learning how to do it.
 
And there's not just a platform you can use Kickstarter to do it, but there's another platform that can help you do it, and one of them that I use is called BackerKit, and they do it for a fee, but it helps you manage all the people, like the email addresses and the physical addresses and who gets what, because as you get a whole bunch of tiers, it can get very confusing very quickly.
 
So, learning how to do all that has been something that's taken a lot of time and energy, and I feel like, oh, I'm really understanding it the second time, but the first time that I did it, I was like, very much pulling my hair out, like, "What am I doing? How does this work?" And it was very intense for me to figure all that stuff out.
 
So I think it's just kind of like everything else. You don't know until you do it, and I wouldn't have thought there would be so much, like, data management involved, which is probably incredibly naive on my part, but that, but there it is.
 
Controls on use of backer data [00:22:26] Matty: I'm curious as to how much of the backer data you get. Do you get email addresses and mailing addresses because you need them to fulfill, and are there any restrictions on how you can use that data?
 
[00:22:46] Jennifer: You cannot just take and download all the emails and put them on your list unless you ask. I can communicate with them through Kickstarter or BackerKit about their order, but if I want to send them an email privately or send them my newsletter, there's a way that you ask them in a survey at the end of your campaign, with a question that says, "Hey, do you want to be on my mailing list?" Overwhelmingly, that community says yes, which is why it's a great way to grow your email list. But you absolutely, 100 percent, cannot just take and download all these emails and put them on your list.
 
[00:23:47] Matty: Makes sense.
 
[00:23:49] Megan: And they don't give you any of that information until your Kickstarter funds and closes. During the campaign, other than sending backer updates within Kickstarter, it's like a message through Kickstarter to your backers or people who are following your campaign. So you can do that, but you don't actually see who those backers are until after the campaign closes and is funded. Then you can move them over to BackerKit or there's another one called PledgeBox. There are a few different companies, as Jennifer was saying. That's when you get that information, and on all the sites, they have this big thing that you have to check the boxes that say, "I understand, I will not copy, save, or distribute this email list. I understand this is their privacy, laws and all that stuff." So that's an important consideration as well. But for people who are concerned about being backers, that's what you can tell them, is that you don't have access to their information other than what you need to do to fulfill the Kickstarter, and you're not keeping or saving it anywhere.
 
[00:24:59] Matty: So Megan, I want to give you a chance to answer the question about what was the biggest surprise for you as you ran your Kickstarter campaign.
 
Kickstarter as market research (e.g., readers want to read but not take online cocktail classes)
 
[00:25:05] Megan: So again, kind of going back to this is an ongoing learning process, right? So I thought for my fiction campaign, because my series has a protagonist who is a bartender, I created cocktail menus for each of the books with the help of a bartender friend. And I thought as an upper-tier add-on, people would love to have an online Zoom cocktail class with my friend who teaches them, right? It was just such a no-brainer, why would you not do that? But nobody backed it.
 
[00:25:45] Matty: Really?
 
[00:25:45] Megan: Yeah, nobody backed it, except for a couple of people who bought in at the highest tier because they wanted the one-on-one. Honestly, they didn't really care that much about the cocktail class, but nobody else backed it. So, I was like, "Oh, well, fun fact of the day, readers like to read, not attend a cocktail class." Sometimes I think Kickstarter can be another great way, like live events, to really start to understand who your audience is and what they really want, as well as interacting with them more personally and so forth like we've talked about. But that was a big aha moment that like, "Oh, no, this is, that didn't fit. It wasn't what the readers wanted." So taking that information moving forward, I will not be offering a cocktail class in the future.
 
Ideas for backer tier offerings
 
[00:26:43] Matty:  Well, we've mentioned sort of in passing what you were offering as different tiers. Megan, can you just go through what your different tiers were in one of your Kickstarters and what the financial commitment was from a backer for each of them?
 
[00:26:55] Megan: Yeah, I'll do my best. I don't have it up, but, so the base level was just to support the project. So I think for $3 or something like that, you could just support the project. And I had a couple of digital downloads, like coloring pages, for that one. Then I had the digital-only or ebook-only tier, which was just for the ebook of "Aether Crossed." I kept the same lower-tier items as well, so it still had the coloring page, a computer wallpaper, but digital downloads. That one I think was $10. Then I had the two-book series in digital, it might've been like $15 for that one or something. So that was all my digital-only tiers.
 
And then I had the paperback, so that was my first physical tier where I actually had to ship stuff out. With the paperback, you also got a bookmark, and it was signed by me, and then I think I charged $25 because it included shipping. Shipping is tough, and I'm still, for my next campaign, I want to figure out international shipping, which Jennifer, I don't know if you've done international shipping, but I may have to
 
[00:28:09] Jennifer: We should talk because I would like to figure it out too because people ask all the time and I'm like, I'm afraid, I'm afraid.
 
[00:28:14] Megan: Yeah, international shipping is tough. But for U.S. shipping, I included that in all the tiers so that it was all wrapped up in a single price. Then I had the two-book paperback tier because it was the second book in the series. And then I started adding on the VIP tiers, or the experience tier. It was an expensive high-ticket item, but it was a cocktail class, a group Ask Me Anything on Zoom meeting, and of course, all the digital books, all the physical VIP tier, which had all the physical books, as well as all the digital stuff, as well as all the classes. And then I had the super extra VIP experience, which included the one-on-one. So, yeah. I want to say that one was like $350.
 
I think I offered a discount at the beginning of the campaign to try to get people in there, and then after a week or something, I think the full price was $350, I want to say, so, yeah, that was how I broke that one up.
 
Now, for the hardback edition that I'm about to do, I'm going to try and keep it a little simpler because it was a lot to manage on the back end as far as understanding which backers were in which tiers and what they got and making sure they all got the things that they were supposed to get and all that stuff. So I think I am going to try and simplify it a little bit, but we'll see. Sometimes my ideas run away with me.
 
[00:29:51] Matty: And Jennifer, how about you? What were some of the things you offered at different backer rates?
 
[00:29:55] Jennifer: Yeah, similar to Megan, the same thing of like ten dollars was the ebook. I had like a one-dollar PDF. Ten dollars was the ebook and I think thirty dollars was the paperback. So when you get the paperback though you get the ebook and you like everything below it. So it all kind of meshed. And then the BackerKit, the users are used to that. So you don't have to explain that. You know, it's pretty laid out. So that makes sense. I simplified for my second one because it really seemed like people are just basically interested in books and classes and then doing some more one-on-one things.
 
So those are the kind of things I offered. The neat thing about this is that in addition to the things that you're actually offering for the tiers and things, there's also things that are called add-ons. And that's how people who have a really good backlist, like Megan's fans, per se, they can go back and get copies of her books that she has. I can also get those also, even if they're not in a tier. So it's a different way of adding.
 
I think the one thing that I really learned that I think is important that sometimes gets lost is, if you have a really good product, you don't have to knock yourself out with lots of bells and whistles. So I think it's okay to not offer 9 million other things to have a good thing and some various versions of that can appeal to people at different price points, but you don't have to do all the things. And I think that, I've seen that has helped, you know, work for me, but I also see other campaigns where that's working, too. If people like it, they're going to like it. You don't have to entice them with a whole bunch of other extraneous elements.
 
Backers aren't bargain hunters
 
[00:31:39] Matty: I'm curious about how you balance the price you're charging or asking for from a backer for a product, and then what you eventually want to sell it for when you get to the point where you can put it up on a retail platform.
 
[00:31:51] Jennifer: I don't actually think that's an issue. Early on, I made the mistake of thinking these were different kinds of backers who want different experiences. They're not just looking for a bargain at $7.99 for an ebook. They're happy to pay a higher price if they're going to have some interaction with you, they're going to have a paperback that's signed, and those kinds of things, so it doesn't really compare directly. It's not as much of an issue as I would have thought at first.
 
[00:32:22] Matty: That's interesting.
 
[00:32:32] Jennifer: Did I have a philosophy? I guess I'd heard or read somewhere that the $60 tier should be really good stuff, so when I do a $60 tier, it's like, it includes a class, a digital copy, and a physical copy if you're in the U.S. I really try to make sure that has a lot of good stuff for that price point. The things below it tend to just be more like regular book sales. That was just my way of doing it.
 
[00:33:33] Megan: To add on to that, the key part here to remember is that you have to know your costs. Understanding your budget before you go in is incredibly important. So figuring out what it's going to cost you to print, are you going to do print on demand or a print run, what the shipping materials costs, the credit card fees costs, all these other costs have to be built into that Kickstarter tier. Backers understand that.
 
So when you're coming up with your pricing, it matters, but not as much as you might think. The nice thing about nesting everything is that you can have all these little digital add-ons that give your backers something exclusive for Kickstarter, like the wallpaper or coloring book page I made, which haven't been sent out any other time or place. For some backers, that's going to be awesome.
 
If you just have a lot of digital items included in your tiers, you can build up over the course of all the tiers what those are, and those digital items, at very basically zero cost, add to that backer experience and give you that higher tier price value.
 
[00:35:19] Jennifer: For example, I just did five small videos, mini vids, talking about tropes in various movies that are only available to people at the $60 level and above, and they get the little code to watch those, and those are theirs.
 
[00:35:32] Megan: So those are like in addition, you know, so like she's saying, you can add other things on digitally that's not more like things that you're shipping.
 
Which parts were more difficult than expected?
 
[00:35:40] Matty: That's cool. So, that leads into the next question I wanted to ask, and I'm anticipating the answer a little bit. But, of all the people I've spoken to about Kickstarter, the thing that people said took much more time than they expected was fulfillment. I'm wondering if that was the case for you, or if there was some part of it that was much more difficult than you expected, whether that was time-wise, effort-wise, or psychically, what was much more difficult than you expected? Jennifer, let's start with you.
 
[00:36:08] Jennifer: I think it was just, like we talked about, figuring out who gets what, when. You can just use Kickstarter to do it. You don't have to use one of these other fulfillment providers. I used BackerKit the first time because people had said it makes it easier for subsequent campaigns. It was pretty stressful figuring out all the stuff the first time. The second time, things have gone a lot smoother. Part of it, I think, is BackerKit has improved. It still takes a lot of time to figure out how all this stuff gets to everybody.
 
[00:37:09] Megan: There's a learning curve. Go in knowing that it's going to be challenging, from campaign setup all the way through fulfillment. Don't bank that money until you get everything shipped out because there is a new ecosystem to learn. It's going to be challenging, especially if you haven't ever worked in a warehouse. You have to give yourself patience and grace and break it down into small, easy-to-complete steps. Figure out the next thing you need to know, and then the next thing. Don't expect to create the campaign page in a week and then launch the campaign and think it's going to be all smooth sailing. It is a lot of work and a lot of learning. So just be prepared for that.
 
How KS compares to running an online store
 
[00:38:38] Matty: It might be useful for people who aren't familiar with Kickstarter to think of it as setting up an online store, a more elaborate one. They need to figure out the technology, fulfillment, and how to reach the customers they want to reach. There are analogies to all those things for Kickstarter. It's like establishing a new outlet with all the little pieces and parts that need to be accommodated.
 
[00:39:12] Megan: For authors interested in more direct sales, Kickstarter is a great first step because it guides you through the process. You can use templates and information out there. It's easier to do direct sales like a Shopify store after Kickstarter because you now have inventory, copywriting, and many pieces you need, which you built with Kickstarter's help.
 
[00:40:21] Matty: That's interesting because I would have assumed it would be the other way around, starting with the online store and then Kickstarter.
 
[00:40:32] Megan: You can do it that way, I did. But Kickstarter's active community and the guidance they provide can make it easier to then transition to an online store setup. It's just that the nice thing with Kickstarter is that there's such an active community, and they do kind of walk you through the pieces to get you set up, and then you have all those pieces in place, so you can more easily transfer them onto a website, what would be an ad hoc or more ad hoc website system.
 
What was easier or smoother than expected?
 
[00:41:02] Matty: Was there any part of it that was easier or smoother than you expected? Megan, let's go back to you.
 
[00:41:12] Megan: The easy part for me was actually running the campaign. The setup process to get the campaign ready was stressful, making sure I was going to make a profit. But the actual campaign run was less stressful because I had systems in place. I pre-scheduled a lot of stuff, so during the actual campaign run, I wasn't as stressed as I thought I would be.
 
[00:42:52] Matty: And Jennifer, you had mentioned that you found the BackerKit experience made that part smoother than you had worried it would be. Are there other things that ended up being smoother than you expected for you?
 
[00:43:03] Jennifer: Like Megan, I found the pre-launch pretty stressful, as I was trying to figure all this out and wondering if anybody would want the things I'm coming up with. But once the campaign itself is going, it does kind of roll along. You tend to it, but you aren't making big changes or doing big things, so it's more just emotionally being there. When it's going, you're less actively working it as opposed to the beginning and the end.
 
[00:43:58] Matty: That's lovely. So I wanted to ask both of you about just in general, how did you feel about the results of the campaigns you've run? Did it deliver what you were looking for? Are there any major changes you would make the next time you ran one? And Megan, let's start with you.
 
[00:44:13] Megan: The biggest change for the next campaign is that I'm going to simplify the tiers a bit and not offer a cocktail class. This next campaign will be very much more focused on the product itself, the hardback, making it really beautiful, getting enough backers to afford the print run. The first fiction campaign was successful because I learned a lot, what my audience is looking for, and what the audience on Kickstarter in general is looking for. The first one's tough, I'm hoping the second one is less so.
 
[00:45:18] Matty: Jennifer, what's your thought on that?
 
The importance of building rest time in
 
[00:45:20] Jennifer: I agree with all the things she said, and I'm just really thinking about going forward, making sure to build some rest time in because when you finish, you're like, "Oh, you have all these other things to do." And then you're thinking about the next one, but also realizing, "Oh, I need to take a break." There are people who can run many close together, but I'm probably not that person. And just to kind of honor the way that it works and not feel like, "Oh, just because this person did it this way, I have to do it that way." Kickstarter is very much a great platform to take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and work out what thing works best for you. But you don't have to follow so much of a set pattern and knock yourself out.
 
Don't just add KS on top of your existing schedule
 
[00:46:03] Megan: I like that a lot. Expanding on that, the thing I learned from my nonfiction campaign, which we're finally almost completely fulfilled with because we had to make some courses, is that you can't maintain your standard schedule on your creation of stuff when you're trying to fulfill or when you're trying to do these Kickstarters. You can't stay at that same level and then add something on top. It stresses you out. So, making sure that you go, "Okay, this is now a component of the process, and so some of the other things that you normally do are probably going to slow down. And that's okay, and you need to be able to breathe." My current mantra is "pause, breathe, recover."
 
[00:47:00] Matty: It could be PBR, except that's already Pabst Blue Ribbon, right? You could use a PBR to PBR.
 
[00:47:06] Megan: Yeah, there we go.
 
[00:47:08] Matty: Well, I love any suggestion that a guest ever makes in support of self-care and reasonability, and taking care of yourself as well as taking care of your business. So thank you so much to both of you, and I want to give both of you a moment to share where people can find out more about you and everything you do online. Megan, let's start with you.
 
[00:47:26] Megan: My fiction website is meganhaskell.com. All of my books are available there, in signed paperback as well as ebook, and I have a few titles that have been done in audio at this point as well, so that's all there. They are also available wide. For the nonfiction side of my life, you can visit authorwheel.com. And then I also have started recently writing a new newsletter called Clarify, Simplify, Implement on Substack.
 
[00:48:16] Matty: Perfect. Jen, how about you?
 
[00:48:19] Jennifer: You can find all my stuff at jenniferhilt.com. I've got my nonfiction there, and there's a little bit of my fiction too, if you'd like to take a look. And like Megan, I have a Substack going to trope talk and YouTube channel so you can find me around doing that stuff. And Megan's Substack, I really love.
 
[00:48:39] Megan: Well, I was going to say, I really love yours too, so we can all be happy together.
 
[00:48:44] Jennifer: Whenever your thing comes, I'm like, "Oh God, I needed to hear that right now."
 
[00:48:49] Megan: Yay!
 
[00:48:50] Matty: I love it when you guys do the promotional work for me. So thank you both so much. This was a great conversation.
 
[00:48:56] Jennifer: Thanks, Matty.
 
[00:48:57] Megan: Thank you for having us.

Episode 229 - How to Make Your Work Accessible with Michael Johnson

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Authors, who would like to tap into another 20% of the reading population? You can do that by making your works accessible to the community of potential readers with print disabilities.
 
Michael Johnson discusses HOW TO MAKE YOUR WORK ACCESSIBLE, including the requirements of digital accessibility, such as making images and graphs and charts accessible; tools and services for accommodating accessibility; IP financial and rights considerations; SEO benefits; and the impact of AI. Michael talks about both the social obligations of making work accessible as well as the financial benefits of doing so—there’s a substantial audience out there eager for more accessible content.

Michael Johnson is a seasoned executive with almost 40 years of experience in the technology, publishing, and distribution markets. He is the Vice President of Content at Benetech, working with publishers, conversion houses, technology platforms, and booksellers to help them understand and implement processes that allow for accessible content to get from authors all the way through to the end reader. 

Episode Links

Michael’s Links:
https://bornaccessible.benetech.org

Mentioned in episode:
https://authors.sounded.com/
https://www.vitalsource.com/

Summary

This episode of "The Indy Author Podcast" features Michael Johnson, Vice President of Content at Benetech, discussing the importance of making digital content accessible for people with print disabilities. Johnson, with nearly four decades of experience in technology, publishing, and distribution markets, emphasizes the necessity of creating digital books that can be easily consumed by individuals facing challenges such as blindness, low vision, dyslexia, and other disabilities.
 
He details the role of conversion houses in transforming manuscripts into digital formats, highlighting the critical nature of this process in achieving accessibility. Johnson outlines key issues in digital accessibility, including the need for alt text descriptions for images and graphs, accommodating mathematical and scientific content, and maintaining print page fidelity in digital formats to ensure that readers can navigate texts as intended.
 
Additionally, Johnson discusses the tools and standards required for creating accessible digital content, such as the use of specific markup languages and platforms like Microsoft Word and DAISY Consortium's tools. He addresses the accessibility of print books, mentioning large print and braille as alternatives, and explores the financial and rights considerations for authors and publishers looking to make their works accessible.
 
The conversation also touches on the impact of AI in improving accessibility, particularly in audiobook production, and the potential for digital braille to offer on-demand access for readers. Johnson concludes by highlighting the commercial value and social justice importance of making digital content accessible, suggesting that reaching the underserved market of readers with disabilities not only aligns with authors' desires to be read but also offers significant untapped commercial potential.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to "The Indy Author Podcast." Today my guest is Michael Johnson. Hey, Michael, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Michael: Doing great. Thanks for having me.
 
Meet Michael Johnson
 
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you here, and to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Michael is a seasoned executive with almost 40 years of experience in the technology, publishing, and distribution markets. He's the Vice President of Content at Benetech, working with publishers, conversion houses, technology platforms, and booksellers to help them understand and implement processes that allow for accessible content to get from authors all the way through to the end reader. And that is what we are going to be talking about with Michael today: achieving accessibility for your work.
 
What is a "conversion house"?
 
[00:00:36] Matty: But before we dive into that, or maybe as a way of diving into that, I had mentioned in your bio that you have done work with conversion houses. What is a conversion house?
 
[00:00:47] Michael: Okay, that's a great opening question. Most publishers in the world no longer handle their own end-to-consumer or reader process. They're not printing their own books anymore. They've been contracting out for decades to printing houses in various parts of the world, and they rarely do their own conversion from manuscript to an eBook for your Kindle store or any of those types of things. So, there's a subset of the publishing ecosystem that takes publisher files, typically InDesign files, or perhaps files from Vellum or a platform like that, and turns them into the various eBook formats. So when I say conversion houses, that's what I mean: they convert manuscripts into digital content.
 
What is digital accessibility?
 
[00:01:33] Matty: And I can see how those kinds of services would have a key role to play in accessibility. But I think to lead us into our conversation about accessibility, can you just describe a little bit, when you say accessibility in terms of books, what are some of the things that you're talking about there?
 
[00:01:50] Michael: When you talk about accessibility at Benetech or anywhere in the digital world, what we're referring to is making the books readable by people who have a print disability. A print disability might be blindness, low vision, dyslexia, color blindness, or any of a host of other muscular, skeletal, or neurological challenges, which basically means if I handed somebody my phone and it had an eBook on it, would they be able to read it? If the answer is no, the odds are there's some sort of print disability getting in their way. There are a number of ways to make a digital book accessible to those types of readers. By the way, those types of readers represent between 22 and 25 percent of the Earth's population, so it's a significant number. When we talk about digital accessibility, we're talking about some key issues.
 
Making images accessible
 
[00:02:39] Michael: The first one is around images. These could be simple images, like a picture of a dragon at a chapter heading, or more detailed images if it's a biographical work. Maybe you have a picture of George Washington or Sojourner Truth, whoever your biography is about. And these images need to be described so that people with different visual challenges can still understand what the image is.
 
[00:03:27] Michael: So the rule of thumb there is if the image is part of the comprehension of what we're talking about, then it's critically important to do an alt text description or perhaps a long description so that a reader with a visual challenge would still be able to get that comprehension from the image.
 
Making graphs and charts accessible
 
[00:03:27] Michael: The next thing would be anything that has to do with math, science, accounting, or any sort of numbers, like charts and graphs. A lot of this shows up in science fiction because people are talking about breaking space barriers, magical time travel, and other things, and there's often math involved. Not always included in the books, but when they are, anything around math, formulas, tables, charts, those sorts of things need to be made accessible.
 
[00:03:52] Matty: Is that a matter of helping someone who is visually impaired absorb the information, or is it about converting that information, like in a table, into some other format to make it more accessible to more people?
 
[00:04:15] Michael: No, it's not about repurposing the image itself. Some might say, for example, pie charts are easier to understand than bar graphs. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about whatever the image happens to be, you can use specific markup language as you're creating the manuscript that describes the image. If it's a pie chart, you could say, "This is a pie chart representing population counts. The largest part of the pie is blue, representing 52%," and so on. It's additional information as part of the image description.
 
Accommodating print page fidelity
 
[00:04:49] Michael: And the last one, which may seem mundane but is really important, is print page fidelity. If the page numbers are important in your book, then you mark them as such so that the reader who's reading in a digital format can follow along with the pages. Typically, if it's a mystery, sci-fi, romance, or family history, the page numbers aren't that important. But if you're publishing an economic treatise or something where the page numbers are referenced, like "see the chart on page 26," the digital copy needs to know where print page 26 is. So when the reader goes to page 26, they're not on page 17 in the digital copy because you didn't align the page numbers.
 
[00:05:41] Matty: I'm intrigued by that last point because I imagine that in many cases, if people were doing this without accessibility in mind, they might replace what would have been a page number with a link that takes someone to that data. Is that still accessible? Are you describing a different scenario that isn't accommodated by that kind of link that would adjust according to how the information was displaying on the person's e-reader?
 
[00:06:12] Michael: Well, you asked a Boolean question there, either-or, and the answer to both is yes. People still do link in their digital copies to other parts of the book. The danger is you either have to let the reader know, "I'm taking you away now, and I haven't provided a way for you to come back," at which point the reader can make their own bookmark or whatever it is in their book so they can click back to it. In terms of print page fidelity, what I'm talking about is literally having markings in the book that indicate "this is print page 26," "this is print page 27," so that the reader can navigate that way.
 
Tools for accommodating accessibility
 
[00:06:47] Matty: And what tools would authors use to do this? If someone has a package like Vellum, which is very commonly used, especially in the indie author world, are there built-in things in a package like Vellum, or is it something you have to add on?
 
[00:07:01] Michael: We have not done an in-depth analysis of Vellum, but I have had a few exchanges with them, and some of your indie authors have published on Vellum, and I've seen some of the output. It is certainly possible to do these things in Vellum. How one does it, I don't honestly know because we have not analyzed the Vellum platform. These things are easily done in Word, which has pretty good accessibility markup, and there's a free tool available from the DAISY Consortium called Word to EPUB, so you can take your Word file, run it through accessibility checkers built into Microsoft Word, and then convert it to EPUB, which you can usually upload to most eBook services. I've seen output from Vellum that is very accessible.
 
[00:08:01] Matty: I do know that being a Vellum user myself, they support the provision of alt text for images. So I'm sure they accommodate those other things as well, but I haven't done that myself. So, I have some to-dos coming out of this.
 
Accessibility in print
 
[00:08:21] Matty: We've been talking exclusively about eBooks so far. Is there an accessibility aspect to print books as well? Like, I have large print editions of my books. Is that a world you get into at all, outside of eBooks?
 
[00:08:36] Michael: Benetech does not. We are a digital-first, digital-only organization, and our focus is on making digital content available for the print disabled. There are two main choices for people with reading challenges: large print and braille. There are still many blind people who read braille. The American Printing House creates braille, and the Library of Congress has the National Library Service, which is a massive braille production workshop. Those are a couple of entities, the American Printing House and the NLS, where your authors could make a query to get their books produced in that way. But we don't do any physical, so I don't have details about that.
 
[00:09:27] Matty: Yeah, I found, just to share my own experience, that getting large print books is quite easy. The only added expense for me was the brief amount of time I had to spend in a tool like Vellum, which was hardly any time at all, just a couple of clicks to create an interior version that was large print. Then, a little bit of extra money with my book cover designer to create a design that was large print-specific with a large print badge on it. If you do that at the same time as your standard print cover, it's not very much extra because they're working on it anyway.
 
I found that I haven't been advertising it as much as I did when I first put them out, but it's one of those things that serves a new population, as you're saying. Especially if one is writing in a genre where the demographic might skew towards people who are looking for larger print, then it's a worthwhile thing to do and quite easy.
 
[00:10:21] Michael: That was very gently phrased.
 
Braille book production
 
[00:10:24] Matty: Can you talk a little bit more about the braille production process?
 
[00:10:30] Michael: I can talk about it in general, certainly. Most people are familiar with what Braille is — a series of raised dots that enable communication. The American Printing House and the National Library Service inside the Library of Congress are probably the two largest braille producers, but there are other blindness organizations with braille creation capabilities as well. Just a word to the wise: a large print book is much bigger, not just in footprint but also in pagination, than a traditional print book. A braille book is huge, typically given away under various government stipulations and processes. The National Library Services, for example, gives away their books, and I believe the APH does as well, though I'm not certain.
 
There's also digital braille, which brings Benetech back into the conversation with the electronic braille format (EBF). Imagine a blind person, who doesn't necessarily have to be blind as almost all Braille users are, with their hands on a Braille display. This is how they send emails and perform other computer tasks. With digital Braille, the keys pop up as if they're reading a print book, so they can lay their fingers on the display and the Braille appears. Benetech has a collection called Bookshare with 1.25 million titles, and any of those titles are available to our members in Braille. We do the Braille translation on the fly. It's not a physical production, but we do offer a digital braille format for our members.
 
IP financial and rights considerations
 
[00:12:18] Matty: If authors want to make their books available in these kinds of formats, is it something where they're granting rights to an organization to create that, or are they paying to have it done? What's the financial side of that? Or the rights side of it also?
 
[00:12:35] Michael: When it comes to Benetech, there's a donation agreement, and authors must sign it. There are no payments involved; neither we nor you pay anything. We handle the conversion for free, and the Braille copy is available to our members at no cost. We are a charity and receive some funding from the federal government, but a significant portion of our funding comes from various foundations and individuals who donate to us.
 
There is an agreement in place to protect the author's rights, and we have our own security measures to ensure that only qualified users can access the content on Benetech.
 
Most authors who are not associated with a publishing house contribute content because they want to reach readers who benefit from these services. The best recommendation is from one reader to another, saying, "I read this book, you're going to love it."
 
We have completed 29 million downloads in the 20 years we've had the service, so a lot of people are reading our books. Authors, individual people, small presses, and even some of the largest presses in the world, with a total of 900 publishers and almost 2,000 imprints, donate content to us. We add about 10,000 titles a month. So, in our situation, there is no cost for conversion and no revenue generation; neither we nor the authors make money from these distributions.
 
Most other Braille production houses do incur significant costs for creating physical Braille books. I don't believe the Library of Congress charges for these conversions, although they certainly bear the cost of production. For physical Braille inquiries, one would have to consult the American Printing House (APH) or the National Library Service. However, since we are a digital-only organization, I can't provide details on their processes.
 
Creating digital editions on the fly
 
[00:14:38] Matty: Creating a physical Braille book can be financially and time-consuming, and there may need to be an assessment process to prioritize which books to convert. If you're offering digital Braille versions, do you need to prioritize among the books submitted for conversion?
 
[00:15:13] Michael: At Benetech, we translate Braille on the fly. We accept EPUB files into our collection, and when a qualified member requests a particular book in Braille, they initiate the process. Our servers perform the translation, which takes some time, and then we provide the member with a link to download the Braille file. We only translate books when a reader requests them.
 
Terms to address authors’ and publishers’ rights concerns
 
[00:15:51] Matty: And as you were putting together the contract that you sign with the author or the agreement, a lot of people, knowing there are bad players out there, would be concerned about signing over rights and may feel nervous about that. Can you talk a little bit about what is or is not included in the contracts to accommodate authors' or publishers' concerns about that?
 
[00:16:14] Michael: Sure. The donation agreements were co-written by the American Association of Publishers. So that's the publishing world speaking. I realize that's not the independent publishing world, but that's the big folks, and we had guidance from them on what publishing houses and authors would demand.
 
It's a very straightforward agreement, if such a thing can be true in legal terms. Basically, the person asserts that they have the necessary copyright permission to donate the file, and we confirm that we will only use the book to make it more accessible, and only qualified members of Bookshare, who have a certified print disability, will have access to it.
 
We do not hyperdistribute, so we won't put the book anywhere other than Bookshare. Some authors and publishers give us worldwide rights, some only English language rights or North American rights, or other specific distributions, similar to the typical publishing rights matrix. There are no royalty statements because there are no royalties since there are no sales. The arrangements are not exclusive, so authors can distribute their books elsewhere as they wish. It's about as harmless as a legal document could be.
 
[00:17:30] Matty: If someone has an update to their ePub, what is the process for updating it on Bookshare?
 
[00:18:00] Michael: You would use the traditional feeds you use anywhere in your distribution channel, typically ONIX for that sort of thing. You can inform us if a book is out of publication or if there's a new edition and request us to use the updated version. While I'm oversimplifying the process, that's the general idea.
 
Accommodating the desired reading experience
 
[00:18:27] Matty: Accommodating readers who are blind versus those who are dyslexic can be quite different. Does Benetech address both kinds of needs? And if yes, what are the differences, and how do you accommodate them?
 
[00:18:43] Michael: Yes, we serve all of those print disability categories mentioned earlier, and it really becomes not just about the certified print disability but also about the intended reading experience of the individual.
 
[00:20:18] Matty: I can imagine that AI is making a huge difference. Certainly, the availability of AI-generated voices is going to make the production of new audiobooks much easier. Can you speak to how AI is being used to improve accessibility?
 
[00:20:34] Michael: There are a couple of things there. You mentioned AI as it relates to voices. There's a very interesting group, I have no connection, I just find them interesting, called Sounded. S-O-U-N-D-E-D, Sounded.com, and they have very good audiobook technology. They also do a tremendous job protecting the voice actor themselves.
 
So what they do is they get a voice actor, sign a contract with them. One of their founders is a lawyer who's very sensitive to rights and permissions. So they get the voice actor to agree to say, yes, I understand I'm going to do what you asked me to do, get my voice recorded.
 
And if you use my voice downstream in a commercial enterprise, then I get paid. So that's one thing. They use that voice and then apply artificial intelligence to take that specific person's voice and apply it to a textbook. They're not just reading a text and having what we used to call Microsoft Bob read it to you.
 
Even though those synthetic voices are getting much better, this is not that. This is an actual human's voice used in an enhanced way. So that's one thing I think every author, every publishing company should look at that group, Sounded.com. We use artificial intelligence to try and correct machine correctable things for accessibility.
 
I'll give you a specific example. We are far away from AI being able to solve the problem around image descriptions. Here's just a quick story, right? We're going to have three books. Each of the three books has a picture of the Eiffel Tower. The first book is a cookbook, and at the chapter header around soufflé, someone in editorial thought it would be interesting to have a picture of the Eiffel Tower.
 
Not teaching me how to make a soufflé, not teaching me what kind of eggs to use, whether I want them at room temperature or straight out of the fridge, there's no information being conveyed; it's an affectation. So, you can do two things. You could mark it as "Image: Eiffel Tower," which is probably just going to annoy people because it's a cookbook; what do I care about that?
 
Or, you can specifically mark it to say this is a decorative image, and the assistive technology would just ignore it. A lot of blind people read cookbooks, so if you just mark it as a decorative image, then the screen reader will just pretend it's not there. That's one thing. The exact same picture in a different book, in a travelogue book, whether it's a Frommer's type travelogue thing, or whether it's my own personal travel, or whatever it is I'm writing this book about, and now we're on the chapter about what to do in Paris.
 
Okay, the picture of the Eiffel Tower makes sense. So you say "Image: Eiffel Tower" and then you're going to add a long description. Maybe something interesting about Gustave Eiffel. Maybe it says don't go on Tuesdays; they're closed. I don't know what you're going to say, but something which says it is the Eiffel Tower and here's why I bothered to put the picture of the Eiffel Tower in this chapter.
 
So again, we're trying to convey knowledge. The third book, the same picture. Maddy, you could have taken the picture. They could have got it from Getty. I don't care where it came from. The same picture, but this is an engineering book. And the picture of the Eiffel Tower is there because we're going to be discussing the tensile strength of structural steel.
 
So AI is not going to be able to understand. AI could probably say it's the Eiffel Tower with growing degrees of accuracy, but I don't know how AI is going to be able to say, well, the author probably meant this. That's just, that's not a thing, right? AI is useful to us, right? When it comes to things like math and chemistry because the AI can read those formulas if they're in a good format and then translate in a long description to say, "X squared equals Y plus 4Z."
 
Okay, AI can take that, which might actually be a picture, a PNG or something that the publisher put in the file, and perhaps turn that in. So we do use AI in those circumstances, but to use AI to solve the image problem, to use AI to solve the print page correlation problem, I just, we're not seeing anything about it, and I spend a fair amount of my time talking to these guys.
 
I just had a talk yesterday with a firm that's focusing on image descriptions. And it's happening. It's better on the web in February of 2024 than it was in February 2023, and it'll be better in 2025, but there's a long way to go. Machines don't actually learn, despite what people tell you. So, we do use it.
 
It is helpful in certain circumstances, but with my simple Eiffel Tower example, I hope you understand that there's much work to be done yet.
 
[00:25:10] Matty: Yeah, it seems like the most immediate, practical benefit for people with reading disabilities would be the easier and cheaper availability of audiobooks. And, in the face of people who hate AI, one of the arguments I've made on authors' panels and things like that is that I think the positive side of this is that there are many books that would never have been available in audio had it not been for AI, not that it's suddenly going to displace all the human narrators.
 
Like I still hire a human narrator for my fiction books, but I do make my nonfiction books available, when I can, via AI-generated narration because those are books that wouldn't be available in audio otherwise.
 
[00:25:55] Michael: You're absolutely right. And we've been producing DAISY audiobooks for a very long time. The disability community and the accessibility community have been working in the audio space for quite some time, not forever, but for many years.
 
What is DAISY?
 
[00:26:15] Matty: You had mentioned DAISY a couple of times. Can you discuss in a little more detail what that is?
 
[00:26:20] Michael: Sure. The DAISY Consortium is a global organization focused on accessibility standards. I happen to be on the board at DAISY, representing Benetech. I can't even remember how many countries are involved, but there are scores of countries that participate in DAISY projects worldwide. The primary focus of most DAISY organizations is on people who are blind, but not exclusively.
 
Benetech, for example, covers a wide range of disabilities. So, we interact with the World Wide Web Consortium and the EPUB standards. Actually, the organization is very heavily involved with all sorts of digital and accessibility standards.
 
Accessibility best practices beyond books
 
[00:26:59] Matty: And I wanted to also jump back to something we talked about earlier, which is accommodating people with dyslexia. I have read that certain fonts are easier for people with dyslexia to read. Independent of books, if someone is, say, putting together a PowerPoint presentation or something like that, do you have advice on how they can make that more accessible with relatively simple to implement changes, like using one font over another?
 
[00:27:27] Michael: This becomes a religious debate, to be honest. I usually stick with Times New Roman because most of the people I interact with seem to think that Times New Roman is okay. However, everyone has their own personal preference. The important thing around disability and font choice is not to lock it up in a file, like a PDF, where I can change the font size but can't change the font itself.
 
So, if you have a properly done digital file, the user should be able to change the font to one that is suitable for them. PDF, of course, doesn't allow for that. But PDF has been a staple for many years, and it does an excellent job of taking a picture of pages.
 
The issue, of course, is that blind people can't see pictures, so it's not useful from an accessibility standpoint. There are some things that make PDFs more accessible, but really, EPUB is the answer. And EPUB is what the distribution channels want, anyway.
 
All Microsoft tools have built-in accessibility checkers and aids to help you ensure your documents are accessible. The big challenge with PowerPoints is reading order. So, you know, have you done a good job of defining headings, subheadings, bullet points, and so on? The accessibility checker will help you a great deal with those things.
 
[00:28:47] Matty: Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, what is the significance of defining those elements clearly?
 
[00:28:53] Michael: Sure. Reading order is critically important for people who are blind or have low vision because the PowerPoint is essentially an image. If the image is not effectively described and the content's consumption order is not clear, especially with a complex slide that has a graph here, some words there, and various other elements, it can be confusing. Those with print disabilities, whether they're blind, have low vision, or dyslexia, need built-in navigation that allows keyboard use, as clicking is not an option for those who cannot see where to click. The slide should be structured logically, just as one would order a table or headers.
 
Imagine you're in a classroom, like in my early days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and you have a pointer, tapping it against the board to direct attention. You want the user's focus to follow the flow of information you intend to convey. That's what I mean by reading order.
 
[00:30:26] Matty: I can imagine that for both books and presentations, the trend of placing headers at the bottom of the page can be problematic.
 
[00:30:37] Michael: Yes, and please avoid doing things like having a header three without a header two. Assistive technology does not handle that well.
 
[00:30:45] Matty: Interesting.
 
[00:30:46] Michael: It's not that hard to count to three. You know, it's H1, H2, H3. It's really not that complicated.
 
Next steps for making your work accessible
 
[00:30:51] Matty: Don't skip any numbers. So, Michael, if someone has listened to this and they're enthusiastic about making their books available to a broader audience, what steps would you recommend they take or what resources would you suggest they use to do that?
 
[00:31:05] Michael: Well, certainly, we're here to reach the disability audience. My email is michaelj@benetech.org. Anyone can reach out with questions. Michael La Ronn, one of your members, is an accessibility superhero. So, you know, ask him questions. He's probably already built a YouTube channel about it or something. He's on top of things. That's another good resource. The DAISY Consortium is an excellent resource. If you make your books accessible, you can deliver them to Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and others, and much of your work will translate across these platforms.
 
I can't speak for what Amazon or Barnes & Noble are up to, but they are certainly aware of, and will accept, EPUBs. They are quietly rolling out more accessibility features to their reading environments. Through the generosity of a company called VitalSource, Benetech even has its own ebook retail store, which is exclusively for accessible ebooks.
 
[00:32:52] Matty: Okay. Well, Michael, thank you so much for sharing that information. That's an area that is new to me and, I'm sure, to some of the other listeners as well. So thank you for giving us a glimpse into that.
 
If there are any other places you would like to send people to learn more about you and what you do, please let us know.
 
[00:33:14] Michael: Yes, benetech.org is the main site for the organization. There's a ton of information there, including some really compelling stories about how lives are changed when readers who previously couldn't access books now can. That's basically why I left my commercial work to join a charity. You read some of those stories, and it's clear it's not that hard to do, and the impact you're going to have on someone's life is incredible. And again, it's over 20% of the population. So, I'm not saying all 20% of those people will buy your book, but I am saying they're not buying your ebook now because they simply can't read it. There's a lot of commercial value there too.
 
SEO benefits
 
[00:33:53] Michael: There's also the group of people who decide what you see when you search for things on the internet. I talk to those people all the time, and they are delving into your ebook files, your EPUB files, and taking those alternative texts and long descriptions and using them. So, when someone searches for, say, Sojourner Truth, if you were doing work on slavery, civil rights, or the Underground Railroad, and you might not have Sojourner Truth in your book title or in your ONIX feed, but if you have an image of Sojourner Truth in your book and you've described it with your alt text, that will start to surface when people search for it. So there's that aspect too.
 
You should do it for the social justice reason, of course. Independent authors typically have struggled their entire lives to be heard and to get published, and we're trying to reach readers who have struggled their whole lives to get books they want to read, so it's a natural match to me. There's the social justice part, but there's also a lot of commercial value, a huge marketplace that is being underserved, and also the challenge we all face as authors: just getting people to know about our work. It's hard enough to write a book and get it published, even if you self-publish. But to get people to know that you did it is even harder. So this is another opportunity.
 
[00:35:20] Matty: Yeah, well, obviously, you've said all the things that are going to really attract the attention of authors everywhere. So, Michael, thank you so much.
 
[00:35:27] Michael: Well, thanks for having me. It's been fun.

Episode 228 - Six Keys to Author Success Part 2 with Nick Thacker

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This week on The Indy Author Podcast, I have Part 2 of a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Thacker about SIX KEYS TO AUTHOR SUCCESS. In this episode we talk about BUILDING AN AUTHOR PLATFORM, including the importance of building on land that you own; NETWORKING AND COMMUNITY, and the options offered by in-person and virtual communities; and ADAPTABILITY AND PERSISTENCE, including whether persistence can ever be a disadvantage.

Nick Thacker is a USA Today Bestselling Author of over 40 thrillers. He owns and operates Conundrum Publishing and Book Career in A Year and runs the write/repeat workshops and writing intensives. He is also the founder of Author.Email, the only email marketing platform for specifically for authors, and RadioWrite.com, the 24/7 writing inspiration radio platform, and he is the VP of Author Success with Draft2Digital. His passion is to help authors figure out what their plan is — not just the “what,” but the “how” and the “why."

Episode Links

nickthacker.com
https://www.bookcareerinayear.com/
https://www.facebook.com/AuthorNickThacker
YouTube
https://twitter.com/NickThacker

Summary

The transcript features a discussion between Matty and Nick Thacker on the keys to author success, with a focus on building an author platform, networking and community, and adaptability and persistence. Nick emphasizes the importance of authors having their own platforms, such as a website, to maintain control over their presence and not rely solely on social media, which can be unpredictable. They also discuss the technical aspects of website hosting and the transition between different hosting services.
 
Networking and community are highlighted as essential for authors, especially given the solitary nature of writing. The value of in-person and virtual interactions is discussed, with both being important for forming meaningful connections within the industry. Such networks can lead to opportunities, support, and shared experiences that are vital for personal and professional growth.
 
Lastly, adaptability and persistence are identified as crucial traits for long-term success in writing. The industry's dynamic nature requires authors to be open to change and continuous learning, while persistence is about maintaining focus on core activities like writing and marketing despite challenges.
 
Overall, the transcript underscores the multifaceted approach needed for authorial success, combining practical strategies with personal development and community engagement.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: So, we've now gone through three of the six keys to author success: quality writing, professional presentation, and strategic marketing.
 
BUILDING AN AUTHOR PLATFORM
 
[00:00:06] Matty: And we are on to the fourth, which is building an author platform. Talk a little bit about how building an author platform differs from strategic marketing.
 
[00:00:15] Nick: Sure. This doesn't have to be the fourth thing you tackle as an author. I mean, I had a web design company. I was building websites and hosting. So building platforms, which are effectively just a website, was sort of the first thing that I did. And I'm glad because I'm good at it.
 
It was a place I called my home base. Everything started and ended there. But it was also something I could do while I was waiting around for query letters to be sent out and rejected. And so it felt like taking proactive action. You don't need to wait until your marketing game is on point before you build a platform.
 
Build on land that you own
 
[00:00:51] Nick: Frankly, I might even put building a platform before marketing. Start building a platform when you've got a few books out, you know that this is something you want to do long term. They need a place to live online on land that you own, as we say. You don't want to build your empire on rented land. Having those social media profiles—Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter X, I don't know—those are great, and they're a great way to reach potential new readers and fans. But they can change the game, and they do change the game at any time. And so having your own author platform, also known as a website, is very important. At some point in your author career, you're going to want to focus on that.
 
It's the combined reach of your author's presence, both online and offline. It's not just a website, but this is your brand platform in some sense. It helps work for you 24/7. When you're not doing something, like being online or doing book signings, your website or your brand, whatever it is that you've built, will be working for you. And so it's important to be strategic about this. If you are building a brand, take the time to get a logo that you like, that's going to go on everything. Maybe two if you have different pen names. But get that website up so that no matter how people find you, they end up there and they see a whole world they can now get lost in.
 
You can find different series, and you can buy them from the website, or link out to Amazon or whatever. But now you control a platform online that cannot be changed by external forces unless you decide to change it. And that's the power of a platform—it's something you fully control. It's land that you own.
 
But think of the platform as everything. The website is what I call the home base, but all those outposts—putting your branded memes on Facebook, your branded images on Instagram, or your branded trailer videos on Twitter or YouTube—all of those things are part of your platform.
 
And the reason I have this broken out as a point is, it's not just about getting a pretty Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress website and calling it a day. It's about thinking through how people might find you. And once they do, what's the call to action that I've put?
 
[00:03:33] Matty: I'm going to use this opportunity to ask a completely self-serving question, which is that when I was getting ready to publish my first book in 2013, I got MaddyDalrymple.com. Later on, I got other ones like AnnKinnear.com for a character in one of my series who has a business and occasionally they refer to her website. I got them through GoDaddy because I didn't know anything. I am using Weebly as my website builder, which I don't mind, but they were bought by Stripe and they're not promising to support it after the middle of next year. So, I'm looking for options to replace Weebly, and based on my research, Wix seems like a good option. But I'm really confused about the hosting side of it. I don't love GoDaddy, but I have no idea what is involved in moving a website off its current hosting service. Can you give a primer for the non-technical people among us? If people are looking for that kind of change, how do they go about it? How extensive is the process?
 
[00:04:55] Nick: Well, depending on when this goes live, check out AuthorHosts.com. I've been hosting websites for probably 20 years at this point. I'm not new to the game, but I am finally making it more official and saying, "Hey, there's a way to do this in a process." I've got a team that I'm hoping to put in place so that we can scale. But the point is, this may be ready to go. So you can just go there and we can handle transferring it in and getting it hooked up with whatever hosting you need. Generally speaking, your domain name is like the address. If you own a trailer and that's where you live, that's your home, and you can move that home wherever you want, and the street address changes. That's the domain name, and that domain name can change or stay the same, but it's essentially a wholly separate thing from hosting the website. Your host can be on hosting company A, but you bought your domain from GoDaddy or Hostinger or HostGator. And all you have to do is connect those by way of what's called an A record, a DNS record. You can absolutely move to probably any other host depending on how your website's built. If it's modern, most of these places are, so you can pretty safely assume that, "Hey, I found hosting, I'm going to move my website over here."
 
Now, the complexity of the process of moving a website really depends on the site itself. Even with platforms like Weebly, there could be gigabytes of pictures and videos, or special code that was written for the website. It's important to realize that every website is different. Even the most basic ones can have different PHP configurations and so on. I'm hoping to help authors by saying, "Hey, okay, you want to do this, move it over to us. Great, we'll handle that. No worries. Or if you want to move somewhere else, understand you might have to upgrade your PHP installation, which could break your site."
 
I know this doesn't make things any easier for you, Matty, but the truth is, it can be complicated. There could be a lot more to it. Typically, what authors do when building a platform is get a WordPress website, a Weebly site, a Wix site, or Squarespace. Sometimes, with Squarespace and Shopify, they host the website for you, so you don't have to worry about it. That's a great option because you just pay them the money and they do the work. However, when you start moving things around, like a Shopify store, you can't self-host it. You pay them, and they host your store. If you want to move, you have to rebuild the website. It just depends on the configuration and what the website is built on.
 
Then there's the e-commerce component. For example, if you're using WooCommerce, which is a WordPress plugin, you can't easily move to Shopify because they're made to compete with each other. Anyway, I don't know if that helped you at all. But generally speaking, a WordPress website running on server A will work on server B that also hosts WordPress websites. There's usually not going to be any problem.
 
So, as long as you find that you can take your code and self-host it, which you can do with WordPress, and maybe some other cPanel stuff, but you can't do with Wix or Squarespace. By design, their model includes hosting the website for you. If you have your own code, your own files essentially, you can generally move those to a new server, and you're good to go.
 
And yes, it's involved. It can be an hour-long process or a 24-hour long process depending on how comfortable you are with all that stuff. But it's effectively just taking files on your computer and moving them into another folder, then just making sure that folder can still run the website. That's really what you're doing behind the scenes.
 
[00:08:18] Matty: I didn't realize that aspect of Wix being both a web builder and a web host. That's interesting.
 
[00:08:23] Nick: I think Wix is, I could be wrong, but like something like Squarespace, I know you pay them, it's like Medium. If you want to start a blog, you can blog on Medium all day long, but you can't take Medium's code with you to have another Medium website on your own server. You can take your content, you own that, depending on the terms. You can take your content and say, "I'm going to post this on a WordPress website," but now you're building a whole new website on WordPress.
 
[00:08:47] Matty: I back up my Weebly sites every month and always wondered if I could just take that backup and implement it somewhere else.
 
[00:09:00] Nick: Sure, that's the idea. That's how we move websites. So a WordPress website, which is what we host and recommend, can be backed up using a plugin like Duplicator Pro. It will create an archive file of all your files and folder structure, as well as the WordPress core installation. But it also includes your database, which holds the data, content, and all that on your website. Then it makes an installer file. You just load both of these onto a new server, and it will extract the stuff and set it all up for you. In a perfect world—though the world's not perfect, so hear me say this—there's always going to be an error or ten, but ideally, it'll be running right away.
 
However, even though it's WordPress, and every server on the planet can be configured to run a WordPress website, not all web servers are configured to run that exact website in the same way. There could be differences like Apache versus Nginx. There's a lot of stuff behind the scenes.
 
But my goal with AuthorHost is that you don't have to worry about that. You just say, "Hey, I want to pay you $15 a month to host my WordPress website." We'll get it, install it, make sure it works, and you never think about it again. It's just going to work and it's going to be the fastest website you've ever seen.
 
[00:10:09] Matty: Excellent. We talked a bit about building the author platform, which could be three or four pillars, depending on your perspective.
 
NETWORKING AND COMMUNITY
 
[00:10:16] Matty: Another one, and I love talking about this, is networking and community as one of the six keys to author success. So, what is your perspective on networking and community?
 
[00:10:24] Nick: My perspective is that you need it. Especially with a career like being an artist and being somewhat isolated, where you work by yourself. It's so much better to have these networking and community pieces in place. That's all I can say, really.
 
I started doing this over a decade ago when I began writing while still working a day job. When I decided to leave the day job and become a writer full time, I had panic attacks, major anxiety issues, depression—my world came crashing down because I was isolated. I got scared because I didn't have anybody in the trenches with me. I obviously had a wonderful loving wife, but she's not a writer, she doesn't get it, she's not in that world. So, I realized the hard way how important going to conferences, talking to other authors, and having interview-type situations like this is. Just having friends—that's your community. Being part of that community, being active, and talking to them, and just recognizing that we're both writing books, we're both experiencing the same Amazon woes or battling with Facebook ads together, whatever it is, is absolutely crucial for our mental health.
 
Period. End of story.
 
But, even if your mental health is great and you never need to see another human being, I still think building relationships with other authors, publishers, industry people, opens up so many more opportunities than you thought possible, whether it's collaborations, endorsement deals, traditional publishing contracts, or just insights.
 
[00:13:18] Matty: You know, there are people that I call—I don't know how to call; I'm a millennial, I don't call people—but like people that I might reach out to and say, "Hey, I hear you're moving over to ACX, which is Audible, Amazon, can you tell me this or that?" And if they can tell you, they'll tell you because they're your friend. You only get that by participating, by being part of that community, by being active. Usually, in person, it just works better. Yes, you can spend all your time on KBOR, which is a shithole, sorry, I never want to go to places like that because it just tends to be hostile. It's so much easier to just go in person and talk to these people who are normal human beings in real life, and shake their hand, give them a hug, and say, "Oh, what are you doing? What's going on?" And then you call them a friend. When you talk to them online, they have that relationship already. They know who you are, and you know who they are. But it's just—I mean, I don't need to really belabor this point either. I think we all understand how important it is—like, humans were made to commune. We were made to be together, not all the time, and certainly not if people are negative and all that. I want to cut them out of my life, sure. But generally speaking, we are made to be with other people. And so you have to, as an author, who has to do their job by themselves almost, it's that much more important to go make sure you have a community, a network to tap into, to be a part of, to plug into, just be around other humans. Simple as that.
 
[00:13:18] Matty: This is great because it's giving me all the opportunities to repeat the things that I like to repeat over and over again, but I definitely agree about the power of the in-person event. But I think that people can capitalize on that by extending it to virtual get-togethers because, like, I wouldn't be able to chat with you if it weren't for Zoom.
 
[00:13:35] Nick: Oh, totally. Tapping into both in-person and virtual communities.
 
[00:13:36] Matty: And another good example is from 20 Books. I went to 20 Books and got to meet a bunch of people that I had met through—they had all been on the podcast or were imminently about to be on the podcast, or I'd met in some other way, I'd been on their podcast, what have you. And now we're having monthly Zoom get-togethers just to check in. So it's nice to be able to tap into both of those. Especially because conferences can be so expensive and the travel is both expensive and stressful. I think it's often uncomfortable for people who are maybe more tending to be introverts. So in the opportunities where people can do in-person, I think that's great. And if you can't, then don't think that those opportunities are missing for you.
 
[00:14:18] Nick: No, thanks for saying that, too. The last four years have taught us that we can do a lot of this stuff remotely, including being part of a network and part of a community. And you're absolutely right. You don't have to go to conferences. I like conferences, and I am extroverted, but I understand that not everyone is, and that's okay.
 
[00:15:06] Matty: Totally fair. I do think that being in real life with people can accelerate some of that process. Whereas it might take you and I five or six of these calls before we can call each other friends, and we're sharing stuff together, maybe, maybe not. But if I meet you in person, you're going to get a story, something that happened today that has nothing to do with writing, and we might have a drink together, whatever. It just tends to accelerate that relationship, I find. But it's not a requirement, by any means. Don't feel like you can't be a writer if you're not going to conferences. That's not true at all.
 
[00:15:06] Matty: I think there's also a nice tie-in between that idea of community building or networking. Networking feels a little creepy and LinkedIn-ish, but,
 
[00:15:13] Nick: Yes, the word 'networking' is not one I like to use, but it is the best way to describe this idea of being with other people in your industry who work in the same sort of field as you do.
 
[00:15:24] Matty: And I think that the pro, if you can get rid of the weird baggage that the word 'networking' has, the value of it is this idea of the web of connections. Many years ago, I started realizing the importance of building these kinds of networks, and I tried to do a visual representation of it. Oh, I met this person at a conference, they gave me a blurb on my book, then somebody read the book, and it immediately became so complicated that it didn't work well graphically. But I think back on all the opportunities I've had, and many of those I can trace back to a conversation I had with somebody at a conference or something like that.
 
So first of all, there's just the fun of it. There's the good karma of being a member of a community and both benefiting from that but also paying it back. And then there's a ton of concrete business, financial, career benefits you can get out of it that you miss if you don't participate in that way.
 
[00:16:25] Nick: Absolutely. Yeah, it's kind of a small story. I was just at the Superstars Writing Conference here in town. I went to get coffee with some industry people, friends of mine. One of them pulled out a credit card, paid for all our drinks, and I made a comment, "Oh, I have the same card because it's such a great card. You get three times the points on social media ad spend." You know, that's the kind of stuff, that natural in-person interaction, like you mentioned financial stuff. That's the sort of advice that you get. I didn't go to a class or an online course to learn that. I'm sure someone would sell that to me if I asked, but it's just those quick little interactions where, had I not known about that card, he would have told me, "Yeah, I use this one because I get three times the points on whatever." It's just little things like that, that you pick up. Taxes, whatever it is that authors have to deal with because we're also people in a society, those are really great networking opportunities. But like you said, it feels very corporate to say that's networking, even though that's technically what we were doing.
 
[00:17:58] Matty: We're just hanging out. We're just buddies. And the conversation that we had when we had our coffees led to all sorts of things that could become partnerships and fun and opportunities. You can do that online, but it is a little faster to do it in person. So I am a proponent of going to conferences and getting out of your comfort zone. You don't have to go to 20 a year like I do, but go to one. Pick a big one to go to and say, "I'm going to save my money, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to just go and be around." I highly recommend it because I think you will walk away with at least something you didn't have before that you couldn't get anywhere else.
 
[00:17:58] Matty: Well, it's funny that Superstars came up because I was recording an episode of a different video series I have called "What I Learned," where I interview authors about their latest book. And I was interviewing Todd Fahnestock. He mentioned that he had just been at Superstars. And I said, "Oh, I started listing all the people I knew that were going, including Joshua Esso, who had been a previous podcast guest who turned out to be with Todd, and then I had been... I mean, this is a perfect example. I had been introduced to Todd because I knew Mark LaFave, who I had met through being a patron of his, and then contacting him about wanting more information about short fiction, which led to us co-authoring a book, and then I stayed in touch with Mark, and when I met Todd at 20 Books, I wanted a virtual introduction, and I knew that I had seen a post, a social media post with Mark and Todd, so I asked Mark to give me a virtual, like, you know, I think that's a perfect example." But, that actually comments started out saying that it's also a great way to vet opportunities, because now I've met and spoken with so many people who go to Superstars, and I can learn more about it, and I can get the behind-the-scenes scoop and see if it's for me.
 
[00:19:06] Nick: You can ask them exactly how they felt about it. And if it's not a conference worth going to, you'll find out very quickly by talking to the people you trust.
 
[00:19:12] Matty: Exactly.
 
[00:19:13] Nick: And I, and we talked offline too, like, well, I want to get you in there. I think you should go speak. And we're, you know, trying to figure out how to make that happen and stuff. But it, cause it is a conference that is worth going to. It's a lot of fun. There's a lot of people there that, that are, you know, I would want to network with, you know.
 
[00:19:26] Matty: Yes. Yeah, there are a couple of ones where not only do the programs look great, but all the people that I wanted to catch up with are there, and Superstars is definitely one of them.
 
[00:19:35] Nick: Right. Right.
 
ADAPTABILITY AND PERSISTENCE
 
[00:19:37] Matty: So maybe this is a good segue to item number six, which is Adaptability and Persistence. So, I love that you included this as one of the six keys to author success. I think it's another one, just like quality reading, that can sometimes be overlooked. So, share some insights on the importance of adaptability and persistence.
 
[00:19:54] Nick: Yeah. So similar to the idea of quality and our craft being foundational to our success, I don't think a long term author, someone who's in it for the long term, will be successful long term if they're not teachable. You know, willing to learn, willing to adapt, but also persevering through that.
 
To go through change after change after change after change. Because if there's nothing else true about any of the stuff I've said, it's that change is coming. Change will happen. You will be forced to change something about what you do, big or small or in between, maybe both, and it's so important to recognize and acknowledge that.
 
Now, everybody I tell this to is like, "Yep, that's fine, I understand, I got it." And then something happens, like Amazon says, "We're changing the payout to this," and KU's going to be kind of this 2.0 thing, and everyone loses their mind. Or a new industry veteran pops up and says, "Hey, I'm doing this or that," and it's unethical, surprise. And everyone loses their mind. Or Amazon comes out and says, "We're going to ask you to check a box that says, is this AI-generated or not?" And people lose their mind. So the point is not that authors are always losing their mind—that's probably true, too—but the truth is, if we can't adapt, we're going to die, we're going to get left behind, we're going to just quit.
 
If you cannot adapt, and you can't be forced to change in some certain ways, you're going to get left behind. You're not going to get to call this a career for very long. It's an adolescent industry, you know, it's not a baby anymore, but it's certainly not grown up. It's certainly not the 200 plus year history of traditional publishing that you can go and find.
 
And it's a dynamic industry, right? It's subject to variables that we wouldn't think are related, and the point is just that things change, and if you aren't on board with that, you're going to have a hard time. And you might make it for a year, you might make it for two years, but five years into it, things change every single week. You're going to probably be exhausted if you didn't expect that.
 
So I put this in there because it's a reminder to myself that hey, change is coming, but it's also a reminder to people who think that they're ready, you know, think that, "Okay, well, I understand how this industry works right now." It's going to change, you know. Just because email marketing is important today, and Facebook advertising, and all that is important, and social media is important, pick one of those things. How many changes have we seen? It's February, and we just had two weeks ago, Google and Yahoo colluding and deciding how we're all going to send email from now on. And they just laid down the hammer. That wasn't expected, for the large part, it wasn't expected.
 
We're talking about TikTok, BookTok becoming so popular. I didn't even know what that stupid website was four years ago, three years ago, even. And it may not be around, you know, another... I mean, it'll probably be around, but it's not going to be as useful, right?
 
[00:24:41] Matty: And so, the point is that everything will change. A lot of things in the indie author community will change very quickly and can take us by surprise. So the second half of that is persistence. It's being able to say, "Okay, I know things are going to change, but I'm going to write my books, I'm going to study, I'm going to be teachable," which is such an important thing. "I'm going to network and commune with other people doing it, I'm going to share ideas and swap horror stories of advertising, figure out what I need to do, and I'm going to keep going, stay the course, write more books. At the end of the day, I'll figure out how to do the marketing thing."
 
I don't know how many times I've felt like the rug's been pulled out from under me when I figure out an advertising tactic. Personally, Maddie, I think I broke the ACX promo code thing. They used to give you free promo codes for every book—50 to you and 50 to the narrator. I reached out to my narrators and was like, "Give me your codes if you're not using them. I'm going to make us a bunch of money." And I set up a thing on my website called The Amazing Audiobook Giveaway Thingamajig. You'd have to be signed up to my mailing list, but I would give you a code for any book that you want. I had all my book covers on the page; you'd click it, put your email address in, and I would send you a code for that book. We all knew that promo code was just a generic code for any book in their store, but I would tell people, "Go get this book with this code."
 
They used to pay you a certain type of payout for a sale from that promo code. I made like $18,000 one month, and then $12,000 the next month. I was doing great, and I thought, "This is it, I've made it." And I talked to this girl named Hannah from ACX at Superstars four years ago. I was like, "Hey, what's the deal with this? I'm making a killing. I feel like I'm gaming the system." She said it was kind of what it was designed for, a loss leader to get people an Audible account set up. And I swear, within two weeks, they were like, "Hey, we're going to sunset this."
 
[00:24:42] Matty: Oh no!
 
[00:24:42] Nick: I was doing this, and I was like, "Damn it, I shouldn't have said anything." But the point is, things change. The point is, it's always going to change. If I didn't have a book to advertise, I wouldn't be able to continue working, right?
 
My point is, it all comes back down to what we're writing. It all comes back down to writing more books and building those relationships through email marketing, social media with our readers. It doesn't matter—the way to do that is going to change, and the way I communicate with people will change, and my quality will get better, hopefully, over time.
 
But, you know, if I'm just the Mickelson twins, teaching people to go steal an audiobook and sell it, and then this happens, those people are all out of business. They don't have their own books to use, they don't have their own audiobooks to rewrap in new content, new ways, and so on.
 
[00:25:47] Matty: So, and I do mean to bash on them because I think they're scammers and they should probably go to hell, but the point is, you can build a career in spite of all this change by being willing to persevere through it and write more books. And you'll be fine. Truthfully, you really will. Can persistence ever be a disadvantage?
 
[00:25:47] Matty: I wanted to probe the persistence a little bit because it's one of these things where persistence is a positive quality, but any quality taken to an extreme can be a bad thing. I'm trying to frame this question in a way that isn't impossible to answer. When I look at my own business practices, I think some people pop in and out of stuff, like Facebook ads or Amazon ads or book swaps, and I'm not a "pop in and out" kind of person; I'm a "stick with it-er." But I think sometimes I stick with it longer than I should. Obviously, the way you have to judge that is going to be very different than if you're thinking about whether to continue writing versus continuing a Facebook ad. They're quite different questions, but I think they both carry dangers if you stick with something for too long. So, are there any caveats you would add about persistence? Is there a point at which persistence in an author's career can hold someone back rather than helping them move forward?
 
[00:26:55] Nick: Well, I don't mean persistence in specific practical tactics like Facebook ads. I do believe that having ads running all the time is generally better than not, but if you are running a Facebook ad that isn't working, you should stop the ad. I mean more generally, you should always be using email marketing, generally doing social media, generally doing advertising. There's a lot of wiggle room within it. My definition is to generally do those things. Generally be persistent. I'm not saying that you have to post on social media at 12 p.m. every day. I'm saying pop in and out. Set up a bunch of content at the beginning of the month. I'm late this month because we had a dog die, and my parents are in town, and there was a conference, but I like the idea of not ever having to log into Facebook. But I also know that Facebook is important. So persistence in social media for me means letting me batch a bunch of content or have an assistant get a bunch of content together, schedule it at the beginning of the month, and that's my social media touch point for the month. If I don't log in, I'm still being persistent in using social media as a tool that can be a force for good for my career. And yes, I agree with you, there is a lot of benefit to popping in and out. Mental health is the first thing that comes to mind. If TikTok is driving you crazy every time you do it, and you're kind of going nuts, like a political wingnut or something, then stop! Don't be persistent in that. But generally be persistent in reaching out to your tribe, wherever they may be.
 
If it's TikTok, figure out a way that's healthy for you to schedule posts, respond, or whatever you need to do for TikTok. Does that make sense? Yeah, I definitely like your caveat. You don't have to be doing what I do every single day. I teach a lot of this stuff. I do live streams all the time and try to make it clear that, hey, I'm being descriptive here.
 
I'm telling you what I do. I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not telling you that you have to do this the exact same way. But persistence is in the long term. Like, over the last 20 years of my career, did I do social media well?
 
You've got to be able to answer "yes" to that question, or you're just missing a lot of people you could have reached. But that doesn't mean you were persistent every single day in posting on Facebook, right?
 
[00:29:28] Matty: Yeah, I think that pairing that with adaptability is key because when those things happen in life, I'm very sorry to hear about your dog, when those things come up, then you have to take a step back and say, "Well, persistence might say I continue working on my book or I continue working on my email strategy or whatever, but adaptability says, sometimes not so much. Sometimes taking a break is what is needed." So yeah, I like pairing those two things.
 
[00:29:55] Nick: And that's why I did it. They sound like they might be contradictory, but they really need to go hand in hand. If all I did was be persistent in taking naps, I would never write another book, right? Definitions are important, and how we break this stuff down. But most reasonable authors will be able to hear that and say, "Alright. Okay. Being able to change and adapt and be willing to move forward and progress also goes hand in hand with being persistent to the things that are core to who I am as a writer, which is writing books, generally marketing, you know, and all the other things I said here."
 
Have that community of people. That doesn't mean you're persistent in going to conferences every single month, no matter what. It means I'm going to go, and when it feels like I'm not getting what I need out of it, or my mental health is struggling, or whatever, my family needs me here, take a break. No one's going to fault you for that.
 
You can still be persistent in being a networking and community individual, you just need to take a break.
 
[00:30:51] Matty: Well, that is all so great. Nick, thank you so much for joining me to talk about the six keys to author success, and please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
 
[00:31:02] Nick: Sure. The easiest place is nickthacker.com. You'll see the homepage there has all the little links to the things that I'm involved in, which is, or as you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, gratuitous. But that, you know, you find my fiction there if you're interested in action-adventure thrillers, and I do a lot of non-fiction, you know, teaching, training, coaching, all that kind of stuff at bookcareerinayear.com. So those are the two big websites I would recommend.
 
[00:31:24] Matty: Perfect, thank you so much.

Episode 227 - Six Keys to Author Success - Part 1 with Nick Thacker

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Nick Thacker discusses SIX KEYS TO AUTHOR SUCCESS PART 1, including This week on The Indy Author Podcast, I have Part 1 of a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Thacker about SIX KEYS TO AUTHOR SUCCESS. In this episode we talk about QUALITY WRITING, including how marketing serves as a force multiplier for our craft; the opportunities and the responsibility of being your own gatekeeper; balancing quality control with over-engineering; and how writing the first draft is assembling the raw material for your creation ... or maybe like building sandcastles. We talk about PROFESSIONAL PRESENTATION, and the importance of setting the right expectations with your packaging, understanding the cover design tropes of your genre, accepting that cover design isn't one-and-done, and ways indy authors can provide better quality than trad pub. And we talk about the three buckets of STRATEGIC MARKETING: email, social media marketing, and advertising.

Nick Thacker is a USA Today Bestselling Author of over 40 thrillers. He owns and operates Conundrum Publishing and Book Career in A Year and runs the write/repeat workshops and writing intensives. He is also the founder of Author.Email, the only email marketing platform for specifically for authors, and RadioWrite.com, the 24/7 writing inspiration radio platform, and he is the VP of Author Success with Draft2Digital. His passion is to help authors figure out what their plan is — not just the “what,” but the “how” and the “why.”

Episode Links

nickthacker.com
https://www.bookcareerinayear.com/
https://www.facebook.com/AuthorNickThacker
YouTube
https://twitter.com/NickThacker

Summary

This episode features a conversation between Matty Dalrymple, the host of The Indy Author Podcast, and Nick Thacker, a USA Today bestselling author of over 40 thrillers, owner of Conundrum Publishing, and VP of Author Success at Draft2Digital. Nick shares his insights on six keys to author success, emphasizing the importance of quality writing, professional presentation, and strategic marketing.
 
Nick argues that quality writing is foundational for an author's success, highlighting the necessity of continuous improvement, focusing on craft, structure, pacing, and outlining. He stresses that marketing efforts can only amplify the inherent quality of a book, advising authors to focus on their weakest areas for improvement.
 
Professional presentation extends beyond the manuscript to include book packaging, cover design, and overall aesthetics, which significantly influence reader and publisher perceptions. Nick advises authors to stay abreast of genre-specific trends in cover design and presentation to ensure their books meet and exceed market expectations.
 
Strategic marketing, according to Nick, involves a well-considered approach to advertising, social media marketing, and email marketing. He emphasizes the importance of building an email list from the outset and engaging with readers through social media. Nick also discusses the nuances of advertising, advising a gradual increase in ad spending to avoid overwhelming potential audiences and to allow for iterative improvement based on performance data.
 
Nick's overarching message is the importance of balancing artistry with market savvy, suggesting that authors should continuously refine their craft while also being strategic about how they present and market their books to readers. He encourages authors to view their writing career as a long-term endeavor, focusing on building a body of work that resonates with readers over time.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Nick Thacker. Hey, Nick, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Nick: I'm doing well.
 
Meet Nick Thacker
 
[00:00:08] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Nick Thacker is the USA Today bestselling author of over 40 thrillers. He owns and operates Conundrum Publishing and "Book Career in a Year," and runs the Write Repeat Workshops and Writing Intensives. He is also the founder of Author Email, the only email marketing platform specifically for authors, and RadioWrite.com, the 24/7 writing inspiration radio platform. He is the VP of author success with Draft2Digital, one of my favorite indie author platforms. His passion is to help authors figure out what their plan is, not just the what, but the how and the why.
 
[00:00:39] Nick: Hearing my bio from you, Matty, reminds me of all the things I have to catch up on. There are a lot of things that you said that make me think, "Oh, I forgot that I did that. I'm supposed to do that. I owe somebody for that."
 
[00:00:50] Matty: Is there anything that isn't included yet in your bio that we should know of?
 
[00:00:55] Nick: No, nothing you should know about, but there are other things. I'm setting up a web hosting service for authors and a printing company that authors can use for conference materials. But I just thought it was funny, hearing all that from you. I'm like, "Oh, okay, I owe somebody for that thing, and that thing, and oh, I forgot I did that."
 
[00:01:15] Matty: We should have some little automated thing that reads us our bio like once a week, so we can go, "Oh yeah, yeah."
 
[00:01:21] Nick: That would be really helpful. I should have ChatGPT do that every morning, just to remind myself what I'm supposed to be doing.
 
[00:01:25] Matty: Well, our topic today is six keys to author success. And Nick and I talked about discussing this topic, and I had asked Nick to provide me with six bullet points that he would like to cover. So, I'm just going to feed you the bullet points, Nick, and we will see where it takes us from there.
 
QUALITY WRITING
 
[00:01:41] Matty: Not surprisingly, the first item you put on your list is quality writing, which I think is sometimes overlooked as an aspect of a successful author career. So, what do you have to say about quality writing?
 
[00:01:54] Nick: You're exactly right. I believe this strongly. I actually just did a three-hour craft intensive on how to write and how to outline in genre fiction, specifically thrillers, because that's my area of expertise. I did this last week, and it was just a reminder of how important this is for us as authors. At the end of the day, nothing else matters if we don't have something good to show the world.
 
The reason it's often overlooked, I believe, is for two reasons. First, we might think, "This is who I am, I'm an artist, and this is my art." You might believe you can't get better or worse, which is a strange way to think about it. So we ignore it. Or secondly, improving our quality is not easy. If we acknowledge that we need to get better, the question becomes how do you do that? Growth requires practice and sometimes writing with the intent of never publishing, which is hard.
 
It's challenging because while we all want to improve, there isn't always a clear, easy path to betterment. So, quality is very important; it's the foundation on which we build everything else.
 
[00:03:08] Nick: You'll hear me say this in the marketing part too, but anything we do after writing is a force multiplier for what we're putting out as craft. If I have a bad book and then advertise that bad book, I'm just throwing money away to advertise something that's not very good.
 
So it's crucial to ensure we are doing the best we can in terms of artistry, craft, structure, pacing, outlining. It's not easy, but we cannot forget that's our ultimate goal. That's why most of us got into this — because we like to write, we like to be artists. It's important to constantly focus on whether this is the best we've got, if we can get better, or identify any obvious weaknesses.
 
As an example, I've focused on character development in my own writing over the last few years, as I felt that was a weak point for me. I study books on craft and character development and work on building better arcs. This is practice for maintaining and improving the quality of my writing. We'll see if it pans out, but the idea is to identify our weaker areas and improve them.
 
And just like when you build or improve a house, once you paint the walls, you might notice the trim looks bad. Once you fix the trim, the fixtures might stand out. So, you find the worst thing and improve that.
 
Balancing quality control with over-engineering
 
[00:04:50] Matty: I think there are a couple of seemingly contradictory pieces of advice, especially in the indie publishing world. In the early days, it was about having no gatekeepers, publishing anything one wanted, even if it was subpar. But as the industry matured, we realized the professional need to have others assess our work. Now, it's more standard for indie authors to realize they need an editor, beta readers, critique groups, and so on. It's not that there are no gatekeepers; it's that you become your own gatekeeper and usually need to hire professional help to maintain that role.
 
[00:05:45] Matty: Then there's the challenge of balancing quality control with over-engineering, like futzing with a book for another year to perfect the first sentence versus the advice to eventually just get it out there and move on to the next project. Do you have any advice for how to balance those two?
 
[00:06:10] Nick: Yes, there's a dichotomy. A career is never built by someone who constantly churns and improves their book but never releases it. You don't become a writer if you never release anything. However, you can still define yourself as a writer if writing is just for you and you're not looking to sell or make a career out of it. If you want a career, which implies making money and all that comes with it, you can't achieve that without releasing your book.
 
The goal should be to reach a point where you're comfortable releasing your book. Often, the hesitation isn't about the book's quality but fear—fear of putting ourselves out there and letting the world critique our work. If you're hesitating because you think it's not good enough, it's probably fear rather than a true lack of quality. Now, on the flip side, rushing through work to publish as quickly as possible for financial gain, like writing a book every two weeks and publishing the first draft, is equally problematic.
 
[00:08:03] Matty: Yeah, and I think that if you've taken all the recommended steps, like engaging a professional editor, or if that's not financially possible, at least sharing it with readers in your genre or people in your writing group, and you've done everything you can and you put it out there, then you can use reader reaction to decide whether your assessment of its quality was correct.
 
[00:08:25] Nick: That's true, and I highly recommend what you first said. Even if it's not feasible financially, do your best to find a professional editor, enlist their help, and yes, you'll probably have to pay them. If a full edit isn't an option, consider a proofreader or someone to give general feedback about whether your book is ready to publish. This isn't a new industry anymore, and it's not a secret what makes a book successful. There are still variables and luck involved, sure, but quality isn't a secret. We know that fixing typos can make your book better. We're also in the era of AI, with tools like Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and ChatGPT that can help improve the line editing of your book. I'm not saying these are alternatives to a human editor, but they can be that last push to ensure your quality is acceptable.
 
Usually, a writer who isn't brand new, maybe someone who's written a book or two, knows whether their book is truly good enough. If it's not, take the time to make it better, find an editor, and use the tools available to improve it. We're doing this because we want a career, which isn't just about making money. It's about building a long-term reputation and trust with our readers, who we hope will read us for the next 50 years or longer. Write for that person, for the reader decades from now, because that's where quality matters.
 
But on the other hand, don't spend 50 years trying to make your book perfect because perfection doesn't exist. I've read manuscripts from authors who worked on their books for five years and ended up making them worse. At some point, the book was good enough to release, and that's as good as that author could do at that time. They just ended up making it more watered down and less enjoyable to read. So there are definitely two sides to that coin.
 
Writing the first draft is assembling the raw material for your creation
 
[00:10:45] Matty: Yeah, there's a metaphor I'm working on. It's not quite polished yet, but to combat the idea of publishing your first draft, it reminds me of a beach my mother used to take me and my sister to. There was a spot where you could dig up clay under the sand. We kids would make little things out of the clay. This is a great analogy for a first draft. You dig through the sand, gather the clay, which is the raw material, and then you create something. But nobody would claim that the heap of clay thrown over their shoulder is a finished statue. It's just raw material for whatever you want to make.
 
But as I think about what you said, regarding manuscripts that get worse with every revision, it's clear that if you keep picking at your creation, eventually it becomes a formless blob. The trick is to find the perfect balance between polished and over-polished, engaging and bland.
 
Writing is like building sandcastles
 
[00:12:01] Nick: I love that analogy. It reminds me of something I heard on a podcast where an actor said he enjoys making movies because it's like building sandcastles, knowing the tide will eventually come in. He doesn't aim for the perfect sandcastle; he just likes building them. Apply that to writing: don't spend years trying to make the perfect book because there's no such thing. Write the book, make it good enough, release it. That's your sandcastle. It might be gone tomorrow, but you'll be working on a new one. You need to fall in love with making sandcastles. Over time, they'll get bigger, better, more polished, more intricate. That's how you improve your writing.
 
It won't work to perfect just one book, hoping everyone will love it. Especially if it's your first book, most people might not love it. It's more fun and rewarding to build multiple sandcastles, to keep writing books, and to get better with each one. This is the iterative process seen in startups. Get your unique selling proposition, your book to a minimum viable product, and then move on to the next one, improving each time.
 
[00:13:39] Matty: Of course, it all depends on your goal. If you're aiming to make writing a career, it's different from writing a passion project that you simply want to share. You're not likely to retire on the latter.
 
PROFESSIONAL PRESENTATION
 
[00:13:54] Matty: This leads us to the second bullet you mentioned about the six keys to author success, which is professional presentation. We've talked about the need for professional presentation in writing, but I believe this extends beyond the words on the page. Can you elaborate on that?
 
Setting the right expectations with your packaging
 
[00:14:12] Nick: Yes, this is about book packaging. You've written the book, you've got the content and the interior file. But when you release a book, it comes with certain expectations from readers, stores, and you as the writer about what your creation should look and feel like. All of this feeds into professional presentation. You're aiming to be a professional if you're serious about making this a career. It's not just about the manuscript but also the cover, the layout, what it looks like on the page, the editing.
 
Professionally presented books significantly impact the appeal to readers and publishers, especially if you're pursuing traditional publishing. Even if they may not use those materials, putting together a professional package demonstrates your competence. That will stand out in a query letter more than just another submission in the slush pile.
 
Understanding the market and the marketing levers we can pull is crucial. It's not just an extra if you have time; it's essential. The market is saturated enough that readers looking for something specific on Amazon, like "fast-paced action thrillers," will be presented with hundreds of options. They'll first see the cover and maybe the title, which must meet their expectations and fit within their interests.
 
If your book shows up in the wrong category, it won't attract the right clicks, even if it gets more visibility. A good book cover isn't just the icing; it's the cake itself. It's vital to ensure your cover positions your book correctly in the market. I believe a book cover's sole job is to prevent losing a sale.
 
[00:17:57] Matty: A recommendation I've made a couple of times before, which I like so much I use any opportunity to recommend it to people, is that everyone should be subscribing to some kind of email promotional service like BookBub for their genre. There's really no better market research than to open an email every day that has books in your genre that a bunch of professional book selectors have chosen as ones they think are going to be very popular. Look at the covers and read the descriptions.
 
I'm a huge cover design nerd, and I'm struck by how often there will be clear visual consistency across the covers, like a dark teal and gray background with large sans serif yellow letters. That's the thriller thing. You see one of those or, for a while, it was the woman in the yellow coat running away. I don't know why they all had to have a yellow coat, but they did. And now, for certain genres, it's the letters intertwined with a vine over it or something like that.
 
Even if you're not doing your own covers, this is another area where I recommend people get professional help. Even if you're going to a cover designer, it will help you interact more productively with your cover designer if you're familiar with what those tropes are.
 
And then I think also, from the point of view of cover design, getting a cover design done once, even if it's lovely and brand-right and genre-right and all those things at first, it should probably be revisited periodically because all those tropes that I just described, the BookBub emails would have looked quite different two or three or four years ago.
 
[00:19:35] Matty: Do you have a sense, like, do you have a schedule where you look at your covers to see if they're still current?
 
[00:19:42] Nick: I don't have a regular schedule, but I was a cover designer. I did all my own covers early on, and I was a graphic designer professionally.  So, dare I say it, I have a good eye for design, and I typically will wait until I get that inkling of a feeling that, hey, maybe these covers are getting out of date. And it's for the same reasons you just mentioned. I go to the airport and look at the very limited selection of books in that Hudson bookstore or whatever it is, and those books are there not because they're not selling well; they're there because the purchasing department decided these are the ones that are going to sell best. You can see those trends, and you can see exactly what other people in my genre are doing, up to the minute.
 
And so, if I get to the point where I'm like, "Oh, this is becoming really popular in the genre I write in," then I'm going to go back to my cover designer, who now does all this for me. He's observing the same trends, by the way, so sometimes he'll say, "Hey, you don't have to pay me for this yet, but I'm just saying this is kind of a trend and these covers no longer work in that genre."
 
But between the two of us, we'll decide, "Alright, this series needs an overhaul." And that may happen once every year. If we're lucky, it's not that often. I think for my main Harvey Bennett series, I've redesigned some of the earlier books maybe five times in total, and I'm hoping the iteration we're on now is one that I can keep for the next four years. But I don't know; I'm not in charge of setting those trends. I wish I were. But you're exactly right. There definitely is a time period where you say, "Hey, it's been a while. Let's do a deep dive into what's working in this genre in terms of cover design and do mine fit?" Be honest with yourself because it could mean more sales if you get it right.
 
All this to say, I don't think we should just chase trends blindly. Like you said, the intertwined text with the typography that's really big in psych thrillers and women's fiction right now. That's not what I write. So chasing that trend would be detrimental to the books' success because there's an expectation that's lost. The readers are going to open it up and be like, "This is not what I wanted. This is about bombs and Jack Reacher-type stuff. This isn't Colleen Hoover." So it is important to understand what these trends are, but specifically the trends within our genre when it comes to cover design. What we're trying to do isn't just gain more sales; we're trying to prevent people from thinking, "Ew, that cover's old and out of date. I'm not even going to bother reading what it's about."
 
[00:22:09] Matty: Yeah. You do yourself more harm by getting your book in the hands of someone it's not right for than you do good. You pay the price for that sale in unhappy reviews and so on. And I think that for both quality writing and professional presentation, we've talked about the importance of genre-specific knowledge and direction. It's important to have beta readers, an editor, and a book cover designer who specialize in your genre, not just someone who designed a beautiful cover but it was for a poetry collection, and you're writing horror. Although that actually might be a pretty good combination now that I think about it.
 
[00:22:46] Nick: That could work. I'd absolutely accept some horror Lovecraft style. But you're absolutely right. It is so important to understand that we're writing in a genre. Usually, I don't have to hammer this point home because if someone's writing in that genre, they're a reader and a consumer of that genre. They see the book covers, the descriptions, the keywords, the major trends, like sparkling vampires, because it's their favorite genre. It's not always the case, though. There are definitely situations where someone is writing in a genre that's not their usual, like myself currently working on a sweet hockey romance, which is not my genre. But I am doing the research. I need to make this my genre and understand the tropes, which are particularly crucial in romance.
 
It's important to know these things just by being a consumer and a lover of that genre. You'll pick up on these trends because Amazon will show them to you. They know what you like to read. They'll suggest, "What do you think of this category?" and you'll see all the covers. So paying attention to these things isn't as hard as we make it seem. It's really just a matter of reading in that genre, studying it, just being present there, and you'll get marketed to by other authors. It'll be pretty easy to find some of those trends.
 
[00:23:56] Matty: Yeah. I also think there's this kind of reverse engineering aspect. If you think you're writing hard-boiled thrillers and you subscribe to the hard-boiled thriller email newsletter, and none of it appeals to you, guess what? You may not be writing in the correct genre. Maybe it's actually a cozy. Sometimes you need a little reality check, and that kind of research can be a good way to do that.
 
[00:24:19] Nick: Absolutely.
 
[00:24:21] Matty: And the other thing I'll add is that I used to say early in my indie author career that indie authors can provide a product that's just as good as what traditional publishers can. But now, I really think that, in many cases, especially with ebooks, indie authors can provide a much better product. I'm surprised at how still print-centric traditional publishers are and how bad their ebooks can be—badly formatted, just a bad experience. So, there's no harm in setting the bar higher than what the big five, or the big four, however many there are these days, are putting out.
 
[00:24:56] Nick: You're absolutely right. Watching traditional publishing can be so frustrating because they make decisions that seem incompetent, but they're not. They're just in a whole different world. The way their economies work is entirely different from what you and I live and breathe every day.
[00:26:00] Matty: And it's exactly true with that. I mean, they're almost obligated not to reinvent the wheel when it comes to things like layout and formatting because it's somebody's job to do that. It's job security to make sure that they continue to do that work. They're on their own with Microsoft Word or InDesign, heaven forbid.
 
They're not going to use something like Vellum because that would make their job too easy, and then they wouldn't have a job anymore. So, you know, it's one of those things where you're right, you get a traditionally published book, and I just had this happen a couple of nights ago. I downloaded a new book from a big publisher, one of the big four, and I thought, "This is atrocious."
 
I just wanted to reach out and say, "Can I do this for you? Just give me the Word file." This isn't supposed to be hard. It's 2024; we're well past this being difficult. So it makes me mad, but hey, I'm a software guy too, so I understand some of the reasons why, but it does look like incompetence on their part when it comes down to what the consumer sees.
 
[00:26:08] Matty: It was interesting, a number of episodes ago, I interviewed Leslye Penelope, who has extensive experience in both the traditional and indie worlds. And we were talking, and she said, "Well, the one difference is that indie publishers' customers are the readers and traditional publishers' customers are bookstores." And that took me by surprise so much that I think I just had to take a beat because I had never thought of it that way. It was such a bizarre way to think about it, but obviously, she knows; she has experience on both sides.
 
And I think it's also true that it depends on the publisher. It's not just indie versus traditional; there's a huge spectrum. Early on, indie authors picked up many great practices from traditional publishers. Now, I think traditional publishers are picking up practices from indie authors, so there's a spectrum of--
 
[00:26:59] Nick: To the other. Yeah, absolutely. One informs the other for sure. And you're so right that a traditional publishing house is positioning books to be sold to the one purchaser for the company purchaser. If it's Barnes & Noble, there's one person sitting behind a desk looking at a catalog once a quarter going, "Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no," and deciding how many we want per store. They have 250 stores in the United States alone, whatever it is. And those are the books that will be stocked. So that's the person, absolutely. And it's mind-boggling that that's true, but it's absolutely true. That person doesn't necessarily know anything about the readership of the genre. They probably only read in one or two, maybe three genres, so they don't know what's happening in anime or memoir because they don't read those. They just look at what the publisher gave me, and this looks intriguing to me. So it's mind-boggling, but it's true.
 
[00:27:51] Matty: Yeah, it is mind-boggling.
 
STRATEGIC MARKETING
 
[00:27:52] Matty: So the next of the six keys to author success is strategic marketing. Now that we have quality writing and professional presentation, what would you say about strategic marketing?
 
[00:28:05] Nick: Make it strategic. There's no shortage of marketing activities, tactics, tips that you can try as an author. There used to be a shortage, but not anymore. There's somebody out there willing to take your money and say, "Let's try this; let's do that." And so if you don't approach this category with a strategy, you're going to spend more money than is necessary.
 
[00:28:50] Nick: And I'm saying that while also knowing that if you do something like advertising, which I think every author should do, you're also going to be spending more money than is necessary. That's how advertising works. You spend more money than is ultimately required to keep an ad campaign running because you want to test and gather data. You try and fail many times and iterate. So, you don't have that much money to throw at this marketing game in general if you're doing advertising while already spending a lot of money, right?
 
The three buckets of strategic marketing: email, social media marketing, and advertising
 
So the point is to be strategic about this. I break marketing for authors down into three buckets that I think every author should be involved in. Not necessarily start these at the same time, but they should be doing them if they're serious about this career. The three things are email marketing, social media marketing, and advertising, probably in that order. If you're brand new to this game and you only have one book out, it's probably not a good use of your time, money, and energy to be advertising that book.
 
There are many reasons we can dig into, but the point is, wait until you have 6 books out before you start investing advertising dollars because it's a force multiplier. If you have 6 points of entry to a series and you advertise the first one, you also have 6 products that you can sell to that person when they click through. That means you have more income; your ROI is higher than if you just had one book, right?
 
Going in order, email marketing is essentially free, not entirely because you need an email service provider, which costs money. Some offer free services if you have fewer than 2000 subscribers, but let's just say it will cost a little bit of money. However, it's a small amount. I run all my email marketing through [brand name], so shameless sales promotion here. It's $10.99 a month for up to 9,999 subscribers, and you can send as many times as you want. There are no restrictions. We allow autoresponders, segmentation, templates, and there are no feature gates in that way. Email marketing, in general, is very affordable, but the point is, you should be building a mailing list from day one, maybe even before day one. Say, "Hey, I'm going to write a book and launch it, sign up for my mailing list to find out more." This is something we should absolutely be doing from day one as an author.
 
Then, once we start building a small readership and developing relationships with individuals on that list, it might be worth our time and energy to start using social media because that's also free. You can get on TikTok, Facebook, or wherever your readers congregate, wherever that genre typically spends time online. Have some presence there. Be willing to say, "Hey, I'm going to spend an hour a week, no more, especially if you don't hate social media." Spend that time scheduling some posts, making funny memes or jokes about your content, or giving a behind-the-scenes view of what it looks like in your writing cave.
[00:32:39] Matty: Whatever it is, do something, because even though it will not be a quick path to success, it is so valuable over 5 or 10 years of doing this kind of thing at least weekly, if not daily. Like I said, I could talk a lot longer about that. That's probably the next big thing to do as an author. And then, finally, once you have the first two—writing good books, the craft is there, and you're presenting it really well—then you can start using advertising to multiply that force. Because it's now a force for the good of your career.
 
You can use advertising through Facebook ads, BookBub ads, and Amazon ads. Those are the top three, and they are pretty much the only three that I pay attention to these days, at least in terms of where most of my budget goes. Those are the ways to get people into the top of your funnel, into your world. At least they've heard of you now. Maybe they've clicked over to your website and seen your stuff. So there's that little cookie pixel on their computer now, so you can remarket or retarget them. Very simply, it's also a way to get people to go and see your books and say, "Hey, this is something I'd like to read, let me buy it."
 
So, advertising is a very powerful way to find new eyeballs who have never heard of you before, and a way to find people who have maybe heard of you but aren't quite sure, and then convert both of those people into a subscriber or somebody who's a fan of your books, someone who actually buys and reads them. Those are the big three. That's what I would say strategic marketing comes down to: email marketing, social media marketing, and advertising.
 
I just had an interesting experience on the advertising front that I kind of always believed, but this was such a stark example. I was at 20 Books Vegas, and one of the presenters was giving a presentation on Facebook ads. I was already working with someone in this person's organization on Facebook consulting. During the Q&A portion, somebody asked a question, and what came out was this guy was spending over a hundred dollars a day on Facebook advertising. She said, "Well, just stop doing that right away." And his feeling was, "Well, if I spend $100, I'm making this much. If I spend $200, I'm going to make twice as much." Or, you know, hopefully some multiple. And she was explaining that that really wasn't the case, necessarily.
 
At the same time, I was working with this consultant from this woman's group on my Facebook ads. I understand the theory behind it, but I hated doing it. So I get together with this person for one hour a month, for 50 bucks. It's $50 for an hour. And we go over my Facebook ads and she tells me what to tweak. Then I just do kind of like checking in for the next month and then we meet again. And it's working out really well for me, but the thing that really struck me about it is that I'd always spent like five, ten dollars a day on Facebook ads. She said, "Well, let's start at five and see how it goes." So we had an ad that was doing pretty well. So I said, "Well, should I put it up to 10?" Because for some reason, I always defaulted to going in increments of five. And she said, "Oh no, no, let's go to six." And I thought, I appreciate so much that someone's willing to say to me, "Don't go to 10. Go to 6." Like, don't, not only don't spend $100, but don't even spend $10 until we know that $6 is going to work as well.
 
[00:34:47] Nick: Absolutely. And I agree with that advice. A lot of times, the understood or often recited way to do it is by increasing a budget daily by 10 to 20 percent. So going from 5 to 6 makes perfect sense. That's 20 percent. And that's a good way to do it because it won't shock the system, whether it's Facebook ads or Amazon; they all work similarly. If you put too much budget into it too fast, it can freak out the system.
 
With Facebook ads specifically, there is so much data that has nothing to do with books but can be used to make decisions as to what people might like to click on. That's Facebook's job. When you have a $5 a day ad and it's working really well—your click-through rate is good, your purchase rate is up, your ROAS is good—you might think you're ready to scale. Let's say you decide to start spending $100 a day. It's not that Facebook is mad at you and wants to steal your money; it's that the ad will suddenly stop or stall or not work as well because it's doing its job. It's saying, "Okay, this worked, but now you're forcing me to find exponentially more people every single day." And I don't have any more who liked this particular thing that my algorithm found that led to them clicking when it was $5 a day. I've already hit those people. So it has to find new people that might click on your ad within 24 hours, and it's not going to get that right every single time.
 
The reason you scale slowly is because you want to make sure Facebook finds a little bit more people every day. And then, if that didn't work, tomorrow Facebook will try a different lever behind the scenes. Maybe people who like James Rollins didn't click the ad, but people who like Clive Cussler did. Or maybe people who watch Indiana Jones clicked it, but when it advertised to fans of Dan Brown movies, nobody clicked. Whatever it is, it all happens in the black box, and all we see is that our click-through rate went down today. We don't know why, but that's what happens behind the scenes. So if you scale really big, really quickly, you end up with no more information than before. You just know that you spent $95 more than the day before, and you don't have anything better to show for it.
 
So why not spend $6 for a week, then $7.50 for a week, and then $9, scaling up very slowly by 10 percent to 20 percent. And it's really hard to do because as authors, we think, "Hey, this works. I've got the images designed. I'm not a marketer. I don't want to do this all day. So I'm just going to jack it up to $100 and hope for the best. I'll check it two weeks from now." And then you've spent $2,000 and it didn't work at all. So, it is important to scale slowly when it comes to advertising, but it does work. It's definitely a game we should all be playing, iterating, testing, and doing all the things that are required within that.

Episode 226 - From Gatekeepers to Guides: The Evolving Role of Agents with David Morris

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David Morris discusses FROM GATEKEEPERS TO GUIDES: THE EVOLVING ROLE OF AGENTS, including the decline of gatekeeper roles in the publishing world; the agent business model and how it is evolving, including the emergence of an indie equivalent of the agent role; red flags to watch out for when seeking that support; and the role of hybrid publishers.

David Morris is a creative leader, content strategist, and accomplished professional with 30 years of publishing experience. He has worked for major publishers like HarperCollins and Guideposts Books at the executive level with both bestselling and debut authors. David is a literary agent at Hyponymous Consulting and the founder and publisher of Lake Drive Books, an independent hybrid publisher.

Episode Links

Author website: davidrmorris.me
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/davidrobertmorris
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/dvdmorris/?hl=en
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dvdmorris/

Summary

David Morris, a literary agent and independent publisher, discusses the evolving role of the agent in today's changing publishing landscape.
 
Morris describes his background, starting in inspirational publishing and later working as a publisher at HarperCollins. This gave him insight into traditional publishing deals, agents, and author personalities. However, the industry has consolidated considerably, with fewer major publishers and imprints remaining. This consolidation has impacted literary agents, raising the bar for the types of authors and deals they pursue.
 
Morris notes that a lot of old-school mindsets still prevail, valuing traditional publishing deals that get books into bookstores. But the reality is that most book sales, even for established authors, now happen online through retailers like Amazon. The gatekeepers who once controlled access to readers through bookstores no longer have that power. Authors are now expected to drive sales through their own platform and online presence.
 
The agent's role has shifted as a result. Agents today may need to take a more opportunistic approach, looking beyond just securing significant advances from major publishers. Morris highlights hybrid publishing as one area agents could explore, where authors pay upfront but earn higher royalties. However, he doesn't see many agents pursuing these types of deals currently.
 
Morris emphasizes the growing importance of an author's platform, particularly in nonfiction. Publishers want to see that authors have expertise, a strong online presence, and the ability to connect with readers directly. For fiction authors, a great book can help build that platform organically. Agents should advise authors on developing their email lists, social media engagement, and launching strategies.
 
The traditional agent model of taking 15% commission on advances and royalties hasn't changed much. But Morris sees his role evolving beyond just securing a publishing deal, into more of an "author coach" providing ongoing guidance across an author's career.
 
For indie authors seeking similar support, Morris suggests exploring services like Reedsy or directories from the Independent Book Publishers Association. However, he cautions against overpromising "magic bullet" solutions and encourages authors to develop authentic strategies for building their platform.
 
In summary, the agent's role is adapting as the industry shifts. Agents must now be more entrepreneurial, open to alternative publishing models, and prepared to advise authors holistically on developing their careers and connecting with readers in a digital world.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is David Morris. Hey David, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] David: Hey, I'm doing great, Matty. Thanks for having me here. Meet David Morris.
 
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you here. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, David Morris is a creative leader, content strategist, and accomplished professional with 30 years of publishing experience. He's worked for major publishers like Collins and Guidepost Books at the executive level with both bestselling and debut authors. David is a literary agent at Hyponymous Consulting and the founder and publisher of Lake Drive Books, an independent hybrid publisher. I invited David on the podcast to talk about the evolving role of the agent. And as we were talking about before I hit record, I'm just interested in among all the many changes that are happening in the publishing world, you know, the agent is such a key role, has been such a key role for so long in understanding how that role is changing.
 
The evolving role of the agent
 
[00:00:50] Matty: So, David, I think it might be useful just for you to describe, you know, as far back as it makes sense for you to go, what your evolving role has been, the biggest changes you're seeing, and especially how that would impact authors who are looking toward agents for help with their careers.
 
[00:01:06] David: Sure. Yeah, if I kind of rewind on some things a little bit, you'll have to just make sure I come back to the main question, you know, what's going on with agenting. Yeah, I mean, publishing is the accidental profession quite often for so many of us, and I thought I was going to be a psychotherapist. And so, I studied psych and religion, but I got into religion publishing 30 years ago. Actually, it was political science textbook publishing for starters, and I worked for a major inspirational brand that was magazine-based, so, it had a large mailing list, and we would use that mailing list to market to this captive audience, saying, "Hey, we like this book, we think you'll like this," you know, direct mail publishing.
 
It was a different kind of publishing business, but it also introduced me to all the different publishers out there because we would license things from other publishers. This is while I was at what was, what's called Guidepost Magazine or Guidepost books, a little inspirational magazine that's been around for a long time. It's not a newsstand, but it's got a very large, one of the top circulation numbers in the country. And then I ended up being the publisher at the Zovin division, HarperCollins, and that introduced me to really big book deals, the agents that came with that, the authors and the author personalities that came with that.
That experience really taught me what I came to like or dislike about literary agents.
 
And so, you know, my story is one of consolidated publishing consolidation. And so my position eventually was changed and moved to a different office. And I'm out on my own now. And I decided that, you know, corporate life maybe isn't what I need to do for the rest of my career, and so I decided that I wanted to help authors in a specific content area. I wanted to help them with the expertise that I learned in my publishing career apply it in new ways because the business really has changed. It's very different. So many people, I think you, you kind of know that intuitively, or you kind of know that from what you've observed, but you're not quite sure why or how, why it's happened this way.
 
[00:03:05] But there are reasons. Being kind of in the belly of the beast at a major publisher, having to be responsible for a multimillion-dollar publishing budget and working with a sales team and the executive suite, I got my finger on it, I think, or at least I got underneath it some, and it taught me a lot about what I want to try to do now.
 
You know, I think there's a lot of old school mindsets still in publishing, that, to be a real publisher, to be a real author with a real publisher, you've got to have a traditional publishing deal, and that's with a publisher that gets your book into bookstores, and that's just less and less a relevant idea, even though it's something I think a lot of people still hang on to.
 
I meet publishers, and they love to point out to me sometimes their large sales teams and all the great, amazing things that their sales teams are doing. And I'm thinking, okay, yeah, but I know a lot of entry-level authors and mid-level authors, and their book sales are still 90 to 95 percent online retail, most of which is Amazon.
 
[00:04:14] Matty: Yeah, it does seem as if the things that used to be maybe five, certainly ten years ago, pretty much hard barriers, there aren't that many hard barriers anymore. It's just that, how hard do you have to work to clear the lowering barriers? So, for example, I wouldn't put it past me as an indie author to see my books in a Barnes and Noble, but I'd have to expend so much time and so much energy in pursuing that that I've looked at it and decided it just isn't worth my time, but the black and white lines that I think were there for a long time are just not there anymore.
 
[00:04:46] David: I totally agree. One of the things I like to say that's just right in line with that is the gatekeepers aren't there like they used to be. You said barriers. To me, the gatekeepers in the past used to be the bookstores and funneling things through bookstores. The thing I like to say to a lot of authors these days is, publishers used to have the exclusive relationship to consumers, to the readers. And that was because they had the exclusive relationship to the bookstores, and the bookstores were actually a marketing mechanism for discoverability. So if you got a book deal, great, because that meant you're with somebody who has access to consumers.
 
Well, when people stopped showing up at bookstores or ordering books from physical bookstores in big numbers, in big percentages, they lost that relationship, and now suddenly they're reliant on the author to drive the sales, the author's platform, the author's readership. So, that just means that, you know, a lot of the need for the author to do all the work has shifted to the author. But on the other hand, it also is an opportunity.
 
You could conceivably get your book into a Barnes and Noble bookstore, especially lately, because they say that Barnes and Noble is more open to local authors and having events. I'm hearing that more from more than one source, but that doesn't mean you're going to get a national buy into all of their 600 plus stores, which is not as many stores as it used to be. Despite all the good news you keep seeing about BNN and NPW.
 
[00:06:17] Matty: Well, it does seem, the other thing we had mentioned briefly before we started recording was this idea that, perhaps it never was this cut and dry, but it seemed like when I first started exploring publishing in 2013, 2012, 2013, it was pretty much there was sort of the either-or choice.
 
[00:06:59] David: I think it's challenging, honestly, because for an agent to get enough authors and land enough significant book deals, and a lot of their income is, at least when you're starting out, it's based on the advances, but even still, it can end up being based on the advances quite a bit because the way publishing works, it's very speculative. They'll invest money in an author and a lot of authors in a given year, but they won't necessarily make their money back on each one of them. They won't, those authors don't necessarily see royalty checks. A lot of them don't see royalty checks after that, and it's speculative in the sense that you hope that out of all those that you've invested in 20 percent pay for the 80 percent of the business that you need to generate.
 
So, I think that some agent, like I talked to an agent a while back when I was first getting into this, and this agent is trying to do deals with all the major houses in New York City. And his view was he's got to sign authors who can get a six-figure book deal.
 
Well, that's a pretty big author. That's a pretty exclusive and rare space to be in. Just to warrant a six-figure advance, 100,000 advance, you've got to be able to sell 30,000 plus books in one year for the publisher to see it as a good financial deal, or maybe in 18 months to two years at worst, and that's, that I think is having an effect where, you know, probably there's fewer agents than there used to be. I just have to speculate on that. I don't know that for sure. I mean, there are fewer publishers. There's less variety of imprints. There's been so much consolidation that I have to believe that there are fewer agents who are making it work. And all those publishers who've consolidated, they've raised the bar on what they're looking for in terms of author sales.
 
So I think there's that pressure on literary agents. Now that doesn't mean for an opportunistic agent, which is kind of what I am, I guess, that there's some in-betweens. And, but I think I don't know very many agents who are operating and like doing deals with hybrid publishers, for example.
 
[00:09:12] Matty: Can you just, clarify what, when you're using the term hybrid publisher, what that means?
 
[00:09:17] David: Yeah. So a hybrid publisher is, sort of a spectrum of publishers that, basically the way I like to explain it is they work on a different financial model. They ask for money upfront from the author, but they also pay a much higher royalty. Now that might sound just like vanity publishing of old, but there's more aspects to that. One is, it's got to be curated and well-edited and designed content, not just like a service. It's got to have real distribution, which, what does that mean in this world today? Well, if you can get it on Amazon and all the other online retailers, that's basically real distribution. I subscribe to the, with my hybrid publishing, I subscribe to the Independent Book Publishers Association, standards for hybrid publishers, and you can look that up at IndependentBookPublishersAssociation.com, and they explain what hybrid publishing is.
 
It's turning out to be a pretty good option because there are some very skilled people who have come into that world. You still have to be careful not to spend too much money there. Don't get into a program where they're asking for this package, plus that package, plus another package, but it still can be pretty expensive. I had one hybrid publisher tell me that he tells authors that you've got to plan to spend around $10,000 because that's what it costs to produce a book.
 
In my experience, he's right. If I add in all of the macro edit work, the copy editing, maybe if there's line editing, the two proof passes, typesetting, design, interior, and cover, and all the labor hours involved in that. Just the freelance stuff that I pay for is at least half that. But if you add in all the labor hours around it, it's definitely a big investment. If a publisher is going to pay you in advance, remember that they may pay you in advance, but then they're also paying upfront for $10,000 plus dollars just to publish one book. So it's a big investment on their part. But that's what hybrid publishing is.
 
[00:11:17] Matty: And in that scenario, I think you were talking about the role of the agent with regard to hybrid publishing, which I imagine is somewhat different than the role of an agent with regard to traditional publishing.
 
[00:11:27] David: Yeah, and I don't know very many agents that are really doing it because there's really no advance involved. So they would have to be more of an opportunistic forward-thinking agent that could see that, oh, hey, maybe I can help my author into a hybrid publishing arrangement that's a good one, and if they're making that really much higher royalty rate, and it really is significantly higher, so if your book is going to work, you could earn your money back and pay an agent at the same time, and if it works in perpetuity, great. But for say for a fiction writer who's putting out a lot of different novels, it's probably not a great option, just because, you know, your sales aren't going to warrant that for any one book. It's a different strategy altogether. Yeah. So, I mean, I think in general. In my experience, if you want to go the agent route, you've got to be prepared to really want to hit it big, and that's rarefied air. It's just really tough to be, to find yourself in that position.
 
[00:12:25] Matty: And what are the considerations that differ between, fiction authors and nonfiction authors and the relationship that they could expect to establish with an agent?
 
[00:12:34] David: Yeah, I mean, I think it kind of comes down to platform and how platform relates to fiction writing versus nonfiction writing. In nonfiction writing, where I'm more experienced, platform is often related to what your day job is and. Do you have expertise and an idea that comes out of that expertise? And does the expertise in your day job structure give you opportunities to talk about your book, to get speaking going on, to build an, to build an online platform? So like, I tend to like wander into the self-help world a little bit more than most people. Let's just say a psychotherapist who gets a great podcast going, for example, or, you know, and really strong social media to support that. Now, having expertise as a psychotherapist with original ideas that are well articulated can help you build a following. An agent and a publisher can recognize the value in someone presenting a unique, significant concept.
 
However, in fiction, the challenge is more about originality within the genre you're writing. Literary fiction, for example, is a domain I'm not well-versed in, so I'll refrain from commenting extensively on it. However, there may be considerable agent involvement due to publishers' interest in this genre. The financial rewards, especially at the outset, might not be substantial or scalable. This isn't a judgment on the value of the work but a practical consideration of the scale and the potential for representation by agents in such cases.
 
The agent business model
 
[00:14:20] Matty: And can you describe just at a very basic level how the agent is making his or her money in different scenarios, and if that has been changing over time?
 
[00:14:30] David: Yeah, I don't know that it has changed a whole lot. I think that it's sort of like general market book royalties where, a standard offer for hardcover is 10 percent of List price, to a certain number of units, like 12.5% for the next five, 15% thereafter. I suspect agenting commissions are pretty much the same as well. I haven't heard, and certainly up until a couple of years ago when I was still a publisher, I haven't heard of very many agents deviating from that. And the standard agent commission is 15 percent of your royalties, which includes the advance, which is an advance against royalties. Plus, once you've earned out of your advance, you've paid for that advance with your actual royalty, accruals, you know, then they get 15 percent in perpetuity for that particular book that you contracted the agent for?
 
[00:15:27] Matty: And this is a really basic question, but I realize I'm not entirely sure what the answer is. So, would-be author, a writer would pitch the agent to have the agent accept them. It's an odd relationship because it strikes me as being, each is kind of the client of the other. So it feels like going to get a lawyer to go represent you somewhere, that probably not how to pitch yourself to a lawyer. You just go to the lawyer, you say, I want to hire you. And then, and now you have a representative to do whatever you need legal expertise for, as opposed to an agent where you're having to pitch yourself. But then once that relationship has been established, is the agent representing you to publishers in the same way that a lawyer would represent you in legal scenarios to third parties? Or am I misunderstanding the relationship between the author, the agent, and the publisher?
 
[00:16:24] David: Well, I think an agent really should be committed to the author. And maybe, you know, in more ways than one, they should be of like mind in terms of the topic of the writing. They should know the right publishers to pitch that topic to and have some, hopefully some relationships with some of them. I also see it sometimes as like a real estate agent too, kind of that, you know, some similarities there. You approach the agent with your blueprint of the property in a real estate situation, and they're going to want to see what your house is like. How good is it?
 
How many features does it have? Can they actually sell it? Are they going to make the commission needed to pay for their nice agent, literary real estate agent car? But I think with an author approaching an agent, it's still a similar thing because you're presenting an agent with your intellectual property. However, there really is a big difference; it almost gets back to the lawyer analogy. I talked about what I like about an agent and what I saw in agents that I liked. Those that didn't just help with a proposal, but also helped get the proposal in good shape, shopped it to publishers, assisted with entertaining offers, accepting an offer if you get one, and then negotiating a contract. It goes on much longer than that, really.
 
It almost gets back to the publishing environment today. I enjoy this part of agenting—author coaching. It's an ongoing part of the relationship. If my author needs to fix something on their website, I'm going to say something. If they're heading into the launch phase and haven't done a few steps in preparation, I'll start saying, "Hey, you need to get a launch team going," or "You need to work on raising your email list in the coming six months before your book launch."
 
Also, an agent should be an ongoing translator between the author and the publishing house. They speak different languages, have different expectations in the relationship, and the agent can help the author understand why the publisher behaves a certain way. They probably have good reasons. Sometimes the publisher needs help remembering why an author has certain expectations, and they probably have good reasons too. It's a careful relationship, more extraordinary than litigation or real estate brokering. Hopefully, you find the right agent if you're in that situation.
 
The indie equivalent of an agent role
 
[00:19:14] Matty: Well, I can imagine many indie authors would be very interested in someone who would point out the problems with their website and encourage them to start an email list and all those other things. Everything you just mentioned, except for negotiating with the publisher. I'm not even sure what that role would be, like a business manager for an indie publisher or something like that. Are you encountering any agents who are doing that or moving into that as the industry changes?
 
[00:19:44] David: It's interesting, I see people pitching their publishing expertise to everyday authors. Oftentimes, it's more about how to write a good proposal. Yeah, and it's not necessarily about helping you build up your platform, which I think is far underrated. People see it far too cynically at the same time. I don't know that I've seen a whole lot of it going on, but it's definitely something I'm committed to because I've seen, especially in my latter years in my position at HarperCollins Zonderman, I was seeing the authors that were working, and it didn't matter your creed, the color of your skin, your gender, your sexuality. It was like the authors who could connect with their audience online were making things happen, even on a subterranean level, with nobody really knowing why or noticing why. The authors with email lists were the ones that were working.
 
The role of the author platform
 
[00:20:42] Matty: We've mentioned the platform a couple of times, and I think that's a really interesting example of how things are changing because I've seen two flavors of the platform idea. One is that a traditional publisher is never going to be interested in an author who has established a platform, especially as an indie because they want someone they can start out fresh with. And then there's another flavor that is, if I attach myself to a publisher or an agent, then they're going to help me with my platform. And then there's the third flavor, I think, that is a publisher or an agent is going to be looking for someone with an established platform so that the author has illustrated that they can communicate effectively with their email list or that they have a compelling social media presence. Is that changing? Do you have recommendations on any of those fronts about an author and a platform?
 
[00:21:36] David: I still believe that it's the third option. Most publishers are in that space. If you've got the platform, then you'll be more attractive to where publishers are today. Publishers do a lot more celebrity books than they ever have. The ghostwriting business is up. From what I've heard, the thing about that's kind of cool though, is if you actually have original writing, and this kind of gets back to the old idea of, if it's great writing, it should work. You know, I shouldn't need a social media platform or an email list, but if it's great writing, then your social media and your email list should grow naturally too, right? And that can actually be fun. If your content's strong, and you're connecting with people, and they're interested in your stories and your ideas, you're going to find that your social media, your email list, and your website traffic are growing. And you're going to start establishing even a little bit of community.
 
What's cool today about all that online platform stuff is that you can now have a direct relationship with your readers more than you ever could before. I sometimes say, what would you rather have, 10,000 book sales with people that you hardly ever meet or 1,000 book sales with people who are reading your every newsletter and responding sometimes? It can be very gratifying, and publishing isn't always about the money. It's about the influence, the storytelling, and the fun.
 
[00:23:07] Matty: The other thing that I was thinking of when you were saying something earlier is that I was asking if there's basically a job title for someone who does some of those agency things for indie authors, except for negotiating contracts with traditional publishers. And I think that the way that's panning out in the indie author community is that it's up to the author to recognize the different areas where they may need specialized expertise, like developing an email list or establishing and then optimizing a website, paying attention to search engine optimization. This is all kind of top of mind because I'm trying to refine several of these things for myself.
 
And the challenge is that each one of those is an independent standalone thing. So I can spend time researching what a reputable and effective service or individual is to help me optimize my SEO or to optimize my YouTube channel or whatever it might be. It seems as if those people who combine some of those things together so that there's a more holistic look at all those parts of the indie author business other than the actual writing sort of get a bad rap, I think. Because, as you were saying earlier, there's this fine line between people who are doing that legitimately and the people who are just bundling together stuff in a vanity press package and saying, "Here are the 10 things you need." And I don't know that I'm hearing people talk about how to track down that expertise other than one person at a time. You find the person who's the expert at email list building, and then you follow their advice. But nobody who's kind of looking across it.
 
[00:24:43] David: I agree. I agree. I mean, you know, I get pitched all the time about, "Hey, your website could have better SEO." There's search engine optimization. There's a lot of schlocky stuff, actually, and there's a lot of overpromising going on about if you get the right keywords on your website, you're suddenly going to experience rapid growth. I don't think it's that simple, and yet people, I get pitches all the time about it. So I think it's one of those kind of churn and burn things where people are paying for it, but it's not necessarily panning out. But somehow SEO is seen as like a silver bullet.
 
I often like to say there's no magic. Try not to do magical thinking in publishing. Try to have a strategy, not magic. Even magicians practice a lot at what they do, and it's illusion. It's not actual supernatural magic necessarily.
 
Where to look for help and red flags to watch out for
 
[00:25:36] Matty: So if someone is looking for that kind of help that an agent in other circumstances would provide, do you have tips about where they can look for reputable options or what would be red flags for that one should steer away from?
 
[00:25:49] David: Yeah, I think one of the challenges is when you start looking for people to help you with an email list or website building, they don't necessarily have experience with book publishing or book authors. So I think that would be the thing to do would be to maybe go onto Reedsy.com, which is one of those online brokerage freelance brokerage firms that connect people with a lot of it is with editors and book designers, but there are marketers there too. And some of those folks know about book marketing for sure. What's the other one that's really Upwork is it?
 
[00:26:24] Matty: Yeah. I've used both of those. I really like Reedsy because I feel as if, well, Upwork is so general, whereas Reedsy is very much focused on author services. And I've found that, I mean, I've had pro and con experiences on both those, but I do feel like the Reedsy pool is a little more focused, and their contractors are a little better vetted.
 
[00:26:44] David: Yeah. I would also mention again the Independent Book Publishers Association. A lot of their members are author publishers—in other words, authors who start their own publishing enterprise, however big or small it might be. And I know I can think of at least one person, I won't mention that right now per se, but I know at least one person who's quite present to that organization and its folks. So if you join, or if you just get close enough to that organization, you'll probably start figuring out who those people are.
 
Selective rights licensing
 
[00:27:12] Matty: Okay, well, the other thing, I haven't had an opportunity to ask anybody about this, but some time ago, sometime last year, maybe even longer ago, I was interviewing Orna Ross of the Alliance of Independent Authors, and we were talking about selective rights licensing. I said, what I would love is to find someone who would take care of non-U.S. rights for me because I'm making a lot of money. Other than the fact that I sell my English language books into foreign markets, you know, I'm not doing anything to pursue translations or anything like that.
 
So, I would be willing to pay a big percentage of my earnings to someone who would say, you know, if I could say, take these books and whatever their area of expertise was, if they thought that my books would kill it in German, take my books, bother me as little as possible, and then I'll give you, I don't know, 75% of the royalties. I would be willing to give a lot of money to someone because it would be a matter of me earning a little bit of foreign language translations.
 
[00:28:12] David: Well, there's a very big international rights agency business out there. If you Google international rights agents for book publishing, I'm sure a whole bunch will pop up. People who attend the Frankfurt Book Fair and the London Book Fair and so on. So I would think that there's plenty to research, and there are people to make phone calls with. I don't know how much they take on of the independent author. That sounds interesting to me because I would imagine they're really trying to target publishers a lot of the time with their business.
 
[00:28:46] Matty: And I think that the impression I've gotten is that if you decide to actively go after foreign rights or translation rights or things like that, it's a research effort. And if you're going after it, you're in essence pitching yourself as you would be pitching if you were going after an agent for a traditional publisher. It's not like you can make a phone call and say, you know, I'll give you 75% of my sales if you find a way to get this into the hands of German-speaking readers in a German translation.
 
[00:29:18] David: My guess is they're going to ask for a pretty big cut anyway, so you just kind of want to get their attention first and then see how it goes. And maybe it would make it more attractive if you said something different than most publishers or other authors do in terms of offering a bigger royalty. But, yeah, that's interesting. Especially in the fiction market, I would think that in non-fiction, it's harder to translate into other, well, I'm speaking metaphorically, but it's harder for, you know, like American knowledge to be as interesting in Europe or else or more broad than that, especially in my area of religious studies, because it's just very different flavors everywhere.
 
[00:29:55] Matty: Yeah, I don't normally think about this except when I'm having conversations like this, but I do think there are these big swaths of opportunity where there is opportunity, but the terms of negotiation, the terms and conditions or whatever that aren't really firmed up, so it's hard to distinguish reputable people from disreputable people because there's kind of no history to judge it against. Like is $10,000 reasonable or not reasonable? You know, you have the background to know that in certain circumstances, it is reasonable, but then there are plenty of people out there who are charging $10,000, and you're not getting $10,000 worth of value.
 
[00:00:00] Matty: I always like to use the opportunity to let people know about Writer Beware. If people are not subscribed to Victoria Strauss's Writer Beware blog, they should definitely do that because it's a great place to learn about disreputable practices. It's a great resource.
 
[00:00:14] David: Yeah. There are some disreputable actors out there, without question, who are trying to take advantage of authors. I've seen it happen firsthand. One was impersonating Simon & Schuster executives. It was incredible. They even warn about this person on the Simon & Schuster website. I'm amazed they can get away with it, given Simon & Schuster's legal resources.
 
[00:00:42] Matty: I imagine people are missing legitimate opportunities because they dismiss an email as spam, but it's much more likely to be genuine.
 
[00:00:54] David: Publishing is very mysterious, and you want to make headway. Books are also very personal, so it's a mix of personal desires and hopes with someone making big promises. It's hard to resist.
 
[00:01:16] Matty: Are there any pieces of advice? I'm just lamenting the fact that I want this service and don't know how to get it. David, can you share some useful information for those listening who feel they need help with their author career? Are there steps they can take to position themselves for that?
 
The platform has come up so much that I think it's a good example. If people feel they don't know how to do it themselves or they're at sea, don't have time, or whatever it is, are there resources to help them?
 
[00:02:03] David: There are one or two outfits that help build author websites. R. R. Bowker, who handles ISBN numbers, is starting something like that. There's another affiliated with the Independent Book Publishers Association. Services like marketing people on Reedsy could help authors take the next steps.
 
[00:02:27] Matty: There's so much food for thought. There are ideas for where people could look for help, and if anyone is looking for a career in the indie publishing space, there's an unmet need they could pursue.
 
[00:02:46] David: I agree. If you've learned some things, you probably know as much as anyone else. A lot of the work is very rudimentary, like helping people with the basics of building an online platform. Because it just takes a lot of steps to start getting a website to start doing consistent social media posts to kind of get your head into it. To not be like, "Well, I got to set up a social media posting calendar." That's a lot of advice that you'll often hear, and yeah, that can be beneficial. But you also have to learn how to post organically and become acclimated to the medium. Then you'll have an internal motivation and a desire like, "Oh, it's time for me to post again. I haven't posted in a while."
 
If you could, you have to establish that sort of dynamic first for yourself before you can realistically start plotting things out on a calendar. People are wired differently, but to me, at a very basic level, having that internal motivation to know how to post on social media is probably the thing to figure out first. And then you can put more structure around it, like a calendar. So there are steps to it. I think anyone aspiring to this position you're talking about could get plenty of work just helping people with some of the basics.
 
[00:34:50] Matty: Yeah. So interesting. Well, David, thank you for humoring all my wide-ranging questions and for joining me on the podcast. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
 
[00:35:02] David: Sure, my literary agenting work is at hyponymous.com. You can also find me at lakedrivebooks.com. It's a road here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I am. It's a small indie publisher, more in religion and spirituality, but it's very progressive and kind of exciting stories going on there.
 
[00:35:29] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.

Episode 225 - Right-Timing Your Release Strategy with Kristina Adams

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Kristina Adams discusses RIGHT-TIMING YOUR RELEASE STRATEGY, including the creative price of too-rapid release and the importance of choosing your own “right-timed” schedule; the need for sustainability in an author career; the influence of the writing communities you join or create; distinguishing burnout from temporary boredom; the importance of keeping the writing sacred and the red flag of writing out of a sense of obligation; pursuing the trifecta of fun, energy, and money; deciding what to stop; and the creative value of stepping away from the work.
 
Kristina Adams is the author of 17 novels, 3 books for writers, and too many blog posts to count. She publishes mother / daughter ghost stories as K.C. Adams. When she’s not writing, she’s playing with her dog or inflicting cooking experiments on her boyfriend.

Episode Links

Kristina's Links:
www.kristinaadamsauthor.com
​www.kristinaproffitt.com
https://www.facebook.com/KristinaAdamsAuthor/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC60CK8JT885rHT2RSe_HCPA

Kristina's previous podcast episode: Episode 094 - Debunking Writing Myths with Kristina Adams

Companion episodes:
If the conversation with Kristina about her decision to bring her podcast to an end resonated with you, you might want to check out Episode 090 - Bringing a Creative Endeavor to an End with Michael La Ronn
 
And for anyone who, like me struggles with incorporating movement into a creative life, please check out Episode 129 - Moving for Creativity with Mike Kuczala

Referenced in the interview:
On "Quitting" YouTube - Marques Brownlee - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQAvce3MA44  

Transcript

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

Episode 224 - Secrets of Maximizing In-person Sales with Todd Fahnestock

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Todd Fahnestock discusses SECRETS OF MAXIMIZING IN-PERSON SALES, including the background of Todd’s less than successful early in-person sales experiences; his first success, and what he learned from it; how to find the opportunities, and the power of saying yes to everything (with some caveats); how to achieve a professional set-up, including advice on effective banner design, book displays, and use of QR codes; the four categories of readers, and tips for improving your changes of a sale for each; how to overcome the fear of being too salesy; options for a low impact approach when sales is not your main goal; the vital importance of understanding your goals and of knowing your numbers; and the importance of setting boundaries and conserving your energy.

Todd Fahnestock is an award-winning, #1 bestselling author of fantasy for all ages and winner of the New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age Award. He is a founder of Eldros Legacy—a multi-author, shared-world epic fantasy series—two-time winner of the Colorado Authors League Award for Writing Excellence, and four-time finalist for the Colorado Book Award for Tower of the Four: The Champions Academy, Khyven the Unkillable, Lorelle of the Dark, and Tower of the Four: The Dragon’s War. His passions are great stories and his quirky, fun-loving family.

Episode Links

Author website: https://toddfahnestock.com/
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/todd.fahnestock
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/todd_fahnestock/

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Todd Fahnestock. Hey Todd, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Todd: Hi, I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. This is great.
 
Meet Todd Fahnestock
 
[00:00:10] Matty: It is my pleasure to have you here. To give our listeners and viewers a little more background on you, Todd Fahnestock is an award-winning, number-one best-selling author of Fantasy for All Ages and the winner of the New York Public Library's Book for the Teenage Award. He's the founder of Eldross Legacy, a multi-author, shared-world epic fantasy series. He's a two-time winner of the Colorado Authors League Award for Writing Excellence and a four-time finalist for the Colorado Book Award for "Tower of the Four," "The Champion's Academy," "Hive and the Unkillable," "Laurel of the Dark," and "The Tower of the Four: The Dragon's War." His passions are making great stories and his quirky, fun-loving family.
 
I invited Todd on the podcast because I heard him talk at 20 Books Vegas about the secrets of maximizing in-person sales. This is something that was of great interest to me because, after a long period of weighing going to in-person sales and feeling like the time investment really wasn't paying me back in the ways I wanted to be paid back, I finally, at the end of last year, 2023, decided to rethink that, and I am focused much more on in-person sales now.
 
Todd's early in-person sales experiences
 
[00:01:14] Matty: I've already implemented a couple of the tips that you shared at 20 Books and will be sharing here. So, Todd, I always think it's fun to start out when someone has become an expert on a topic, as you have about in-person sales, just to make us all feel a little bit better. Talk to us a little more about your early experiences, maybe before you learned the lessons you're going to be sharing with us today.
 
[00:01:33] Todd: Yeah, I mean, I think it's funny that people are starting to call me an expert in this field at all. Like I'm still stumbling along and learning things and figuring things out. But there's definitely been some successes along the way. But I'll start with the opposite. Because one of the things I really enjoy talking about is my failures, my crushing failures over and over. So yeah, so it was, I believe it was 2017. And I'll back up a little bit. So I went full time in 2017. Not because all of a sudden I had the lucrative 6-figure contract or anything like that. But because my wife and I decided to swap places. She had been the stay-at-home parent for the first 7-8 years of the kid's life. And she's, you know, I would actually like to use my college degree, get out into the workforce, do some things, make my stamp there, and I'm like, you don't have to twist my arm, I'll go home, I'll stay home, I'll write. And so, we kind of switched places, and of course, I mean, that's probably a very skewed version. I had been wanting to get home and write for a long time. I didn't tell that part. I'd kind of been, like, hammering on her, I want to stay home and write. So we finally made that switch.
 
And at the time, I had just, in 2016, released "The Wishing World," two TOR books. And I was waiting for them to pick up the sequel because, you know, we hit the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Top 10 list right up there with names like Dan Brown and some pretty big names from a lot of promotion that I had done locally. And they didn't pick up the second book.
 
So what was going to kick off my going full time as a writer didn't happen. It's like the floor dropped out from underneath me, and you know that's a lesson. One should never count on getting another book contract unless it's a three-book contract or four-book contract or whatever multiple book contract to start, and I had relied on that, and it didn't come through. My goal was to make 20 grand the first year, 50 grand the second year, and then be off and running, having a replacement income for what I was doing. And that first year, I made fourteen hundred dollars. It was just so, so, I mean, I was lost. I remember in October running around to some of my nonprofit cronies, going, "Have you got a job for me? Because I may need a job in like about a month and a half."
 
But one of the things my fabulously supportive wife said to me is, "You know, I'm like, what do I do? What do I do? I'm writing novels, but I've got no connection between me and where I need to go as far as making money." And she said, "Just say yes to everything. Anything that comes along, regarding writing, if somebody wants you to teach a class on writing, you say yes. If somebody wants to come down and volunteer reading to kids at the library, you say yes." So I just kind of took that attitude.
 
When the Colorado Authors League reached out to all the members of the Colorado Authors League, of which I was one, I planned that and still am at this point, actually on the board of CAL at this point, but they reached out and said, "Hey, we've got a holiday market that we're going to. If you want to, you can pay $50, come down, you'll get two hours on Friday, two hours on Saturday, two hours on Sunday, and sell books." And I was like, "Well, that sounds horrible. I don't want to do that. I'm a writer. I don't want to be a salesman, right?" But I thought of what my wife said, you know, say yes to everything. So I'm like, "Okay, what else am I doing? I'm going to go down."
 
So I went down on Friday, and I tried so hard to sell books. I was looking at the other authors that were selling books, and the ones that were, like, getting out there were like, "Hey, come on over here. It's the Colorado Authors League. Find a Colorado author that you like, and you can get a book in any genre." And it just sounded so horrible to me. I didn't want to be some 1800s barker with a shoe slamming on the table saying, "Come on over, you know, get a box of popcorn if you buy a book." Whatever, right?
 
And I tried that. I felt awful. I sold zero books on Friday, went home completely dejected. Of course, I had two more slots, one on Saturday, one on Sunday. I said to Laura, "This sucks. This is not, you know," and she's like, "Well, at least you tried it, so I'll finish out the weekend." I went in on Saturday, and I'm like, "You know what? I got to readjust my attitude because I just, I'm hating being here. I need to not hate being here." Well, I love the holidays, right? And it's a holiday market, so there's Christmassy stuff everywhere. So I'm like, "You know what? I'm just going to get into the holiday mood a bit and just sort of relax."
 
I'm like, okay, I'm happy to be here, and I don't have to do anything. I don't have to slam my shoe on the table. I'm just going to sit here. I'll just wait it out until the end, and then I'll be done.
 
Todd's first success
 
Across the aisle, there was a Christmas store, a Christmas booth with wreaths and all kinds of other stuff. A mother was looking at a wreath, and a little girl, like seven years old, maybe six years old, was holding onto her mom's hand. She had turned around to look at my poster, my "The Wishing World" banner. I caught her eye, and she immediately went and looked away and wouldn't look at me. I just chuckled because, you know, at the time, my kids were close to that age, maybe a little bit older, and so I love kids. I thought, "Okay, well, this is something I can do. I can play with this kid who's looking over at the banner, then looking away from the banner."
 
Later on, she comes up, kind of scared to come any closer, looking at the banner. I asked her, "Do you like this kind of story?" She said, "Uh-huh, I do." I said, "Do you want me to tell you about it?" She said, "Yeah, yeah, you can tell me about it." So I started telling her the story. I'm a storyteller. I love talking about my stories. By the end of the day, I had half a dozen kids gathered around the booth, listening to story time. By the end of the weekend, I'd sold 33 books. All the Colorado authors were coming up to me, saying, "How did you do that? That was the most we've seen sold in a weekend here by one single author. How the heck did you do that?" I said, "I don't know. I wasn't doing any sales tactic or anything like that. I was just telling stories."
 
So that's what I went forward with—this genuine, heartfelt urge to tell my story. That was the first success. I did another one, and that one went okay. Some of them went better than others. Eventually, there were some leveling up, which we can get into as we go forward.
 
Say yes to everything
 
[00:08:09] Matty: Well, I have all sorts of questions that I want to delve into, but I do want to ask you one question that's not related to in-person sales. The "say yes to everything" advice obviously worked out really well for you, based on the stories you're going to be telling, but it also sounds like it could be a recipe for a nervous breakdown. On this other topic, just for a minute, can you talk a little bit about, did you have to moderate the "say yes to everything"? What made it more likely that it turned out well for you than it turned into a nervous breakdown?
 
[00:08:39] Todd: Absolutely. No, that is a very good point. The "say yes to everything" was certainly situational advice that my wife had given me because I had nothing to do. I was at home, I was writing, but I knew that to level up my career, I had to do more than just write books at home. Right? So I had to do something, and I didn't know what to do. So she's like, how about you say yes to everything? Any little opportunity that comes along until you find your feet. Of course, I mean, now I have to say no to all kinds of things, right? I can't say yes to everything because, like you said, there's not enough of me to go around, and I still do need to write books at home. So you’ve got to chunk out a certain amount of time for that. But I got to get out and sell at cons, so I got to chunk out a certain amount of time for that, plus conferences, writers’ conferences, chunk out time for that, plus family, plus all the different things, right? So, yeah, you can't continue saying yes to everything all the time.
 
But the problem that I had was that I had nothing to do and my career was kind of flat. Now the career is on a right trend, so it's like saying no to certain things and then making the judgment call of, okay, what's going to push the career forward, what's going to just waste time, those kinds of things. There's still an art form, I think, to what to say yes to and what to say no to, which is probably a completely entire other topic that I could go into for a very long time, but yeah, I didn't continue just saying yes to everything. Eventually, your dance card gets full, but that's what you want, right? I mean, that's the whole point of saying yes to everything in the beginning, is that you want to fill up your dance card, and then once it's full, then you're off and rolling.
 
[00:10:13] Matty: Yep. And you can pick the people you want to dance with.
 
[00:10:16] Todd: Exactly, exactly.
 
The importance of a professional set-up
 
[00:10:19] Matty: So one of the things you had sort of mentioned in passing is, well, one of the things you mentioned in your talk at Vegas is the importance of a professional setup. And it sounds like you started out with at least some of that because you had something at your booth that attracted the attention of a little girl. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of a professional setup?
 
[00:10:37] Todd: Yeah, so it seems to me that the biggest difficulty of selling face-to-face is breaking it down into four different categories of people, right? It's a matter of catching attention. So the setup is one way that you can catch the attention of people. Another one is talking to them, right? Another one is having a welcoming demeanor, right? Another one is what you're wearing, even, right? I oftentimes in my Conquering the Con, I talk about, you have an opportunity all over the place. Are you maximizing those opportunities? How do you set up the books on your table?
 
Tips for effective banners
 
[00:11:18] Todd: That's another opportunity. So the setup, I mean, to me, it has to start with the books, right? You've got books, and you're going to put books up, so that's one thing. But another thing is the banners. The biggest thing that attracts people to my booth from a distance is going to be my banners. That is the staple. I've seen all kinds of different banners, and I'm not going to call anybody out for the way that they want to decorate their booth, but my personal thought is the fewer words you have, the better you're going to attract people from a distance. It's important to have a couple of things on there, but man, you better choose your words carefully.
 
If you've got a banner that has prose going all the way down the front of it, I mean, who likes to look at that? We all love to read. Anybody listening to this podcast is probably an avid reader, right? We all love to read. But catching somebody's attention out in the wild, out in the world, is not the same thing, right? We are visual creatures from a distance. We're far more inclined. Now, I'm not speaking for everybody. I'm sure there are some people that are like, "Ooh, words," and they'll come closer, right? I'm talking about sort of this mainstream attitude of what's going to catch the most fish in your net.
 
There are lots of specifics that will catch very specific clusters of people. If that is your entire audience, then don't listen to me. Do what you know that cluster of people is going to be attracted to. But for my part, let me just speak about epic fantasy, right? So I do my epic fantasy banner, and I told my artist, and this is my big 8x8 banner that, and I've got three 8x8 banners at this point, but the one 8x8 banner that I take with me no matter where I go is my "Tower of the Four" banner, which I told my artists, I'm like, "Okay, I want this to scream epic fantasy."
 
Which means we need a dude with a sword, somebody with a sword's got to be on that banner. We need a dragon, right? And we need somebody working magic. If you're trying to capture the people who like that fantasy-esque feel of this exotic place full of beauty and danger, then a good-looking female protagonist on the banner, not a bad idea either. So that was everything that my banner had, right? Had to do with the sword, had a fierce female mage working magic, and it had a dragon, right?
 
So this image from a distance, you can see it from a hundred feet away. You can see the dragon. You can't really see the characters. Maybe you can see the guy drawing the sword, but you're definitely going to see this dragon that is crouching in over the whole thing. And I've had people come up to me and say, "Man, that thing caught my eye from way up the aisle, and I had to come over and see what this was about." Boom.
 
And I've seen other people do banners where, and this is to give advice to writers who are doing this. We want people to understand our work as a writer. I get that, right? But understand that we can't make somebody who's walking by a booth understand all of the nuance and all of the character development and the world-building and the originality of our work in five seconds. We can't do it. Nobody can do that, right? So, what we have to do is give them almost this, and this is going to sound horrible to some of the authors out there, this cheating illusion for a moment, right?
 
That it's just not what the book is about, but it sort of talks about the tropes, right? You just want to create a funnel, right? All I want is people that are vaguely interested in dudes with swords, girl working magic, and a big dragon, right? That's all I need to funnel the audience this way. Once I get them closer, then there are next steps. But for that first one, I don't want to make it complicated. Like I said, image over text. So, I've seen some banners where it's, "Oh, I want to make sure all of my books are shown," because part of us as writers is like, we want to feel worthy to be writers. Every writer I've ever met has imposter syndrome. Every single one. The successful ones and the non-successful ones alike, or the newbies and the successful ones alike. Everybody's got it. We wonder if we're really worthy to put stories out into the world that people are going to want to read, right? So, we want to prove to them our credibility.
 
I think this works really well in non-fiction books, but for fiction books, it's more important to get them pulled in based on what genre they like, based on the kinds of things that they're going to be interested in, right? When they get closer, then, like I said, you can start pouring on the layers. But for the image, don't put all your books up on a big 8x8 banner. It is, in my opinion, a waste of an 8x8 banner. You've got all this real estate, and you've put four images on. Guess what you just did? You just shrank your images a quarter of the size that they could be, and you put four of them up. So now, people aren't really looking at anything. They're looking at four books, you know? That's what they see from a distance is, "Oh, there are four books over there," as opposed to, "Whoa, dragon and magic," you know? I mean, that's what I want them to think when they're walking up to my booth.
 
[00:16:19] Matty: Yeah, I was inspired by your talk to get two banners of my own. I made them on Canva and then I ordered them through Canva, and there was only one retractable banner size. I decided I wanted to make them plain for all the reasons that you're describing and also so they wouldn't get outdated because if I put all my book covers on them, then the next time I put a book out, suddenly they're outdated. I didn't want them to get outdated because I doubt this is much in comparison to the 8x8 thing, but they were like 150 bucks apiece, so I wanted to make sure I was going to be getting my money's worth out of them. So one of them has, I have one for my nonfiction, one for my fiction, the one for my nonfiction just has my logo, my name, the writing craft, and the publishing voyage. That's everything that's on one.
 
[00:17:06] Matty: And then, the other one has my name and the two series titles. I have my name separating the middle, and I have the series title and the cover background of one at the top and the series title and the cover background of the other at the bottom. They turned out to be so big that, being 5'4, I'm not tall enough to hook them at the top of the little...
 
[00:17:29] Todd: Are they three feet by seven feet banners?
 
[00:17:31] Matty: I think they must be. But that was fun, and it does attract attention. Also, the other tip that I came up with was not putting anything too low that you want to make sure people see because if it's behind your table, then people are going to miss that, yeah. But it does make a nice backdrop.
 
[00:17:48] Todd: Absolutely. And here's another sort of hack that you can do. You can get a plastic bench at Costco or Walmart or wherever, and you can jack those banners up another foot and a half because those little legs on them, you can turn them so that they're at an angle and they'll still stay up. If you get a stiff breeze in there, they might fall over, but I mean, come on, you're in a con setting; probably there's not going to be any breezes going by. So yeah, you can do that also. I've done that before, where I have like a bench, and I jack up those 3x7 banners. So, that works too, to get a little extra visibility.
 
[00:18:22] Matty: Yeah. Another pro tip.
 
Finding the Opportunities
 
[00:18:24] Matty: So, there were other things about setup that I wanted to talk about, but I realized that we really haven't talked yet about finding the opportunity. Is finding the opportunity something you should be looking at first, or do you already have your setup, and then you look for opportunities?
 
Don't Knock the Small Events
 
[00:18:41] Todd: Yeah, so for me, it happened really organically. Like I said, I got invited to do this Christmas thing. And my advice to somebody who's just starting out in this is: Don't knock the small events.
 
I mean, the small events are where you can cut your teeth on your pitch and things like that, and there's not a lot of investment. At this point, I'm paying as much as $1,700 for a booth in certain areas. You don't want any piece of that unless you know you're going to make $2,000, $3,000 from that con. You'll never earn your money back.
 
But some of these local holiday fairs, like I started at, that I still go to—I still go to that same holiday fair; I've got my own booth now—but I mean, I still go to that holiday fair. It's one of the more expensive booths that I pay for, but it's totally worth it.
 
If you start small, you could go to a local farmer's market or something like that, get a booth for 50 bucks, and then you're not on the hook to sell 100 books. All you’ve got to do is sell 10, and you can go home saying, "Hey, I paid my booth cost back, and I got a little extra change on top of it, and I met some new superfans." My assistant actually just got a new book out, and she's starting to build her, in-person sales in Utah. She's setting up at this little atrium off of the symphony—people get out of the symphony, and they come out and they're buying books and things like that.
 
There are so many different places to sell books, and she's getting her pitch in shape, right? Because it only cost her so much money, and she's not on the hook to make a whole ton of money, so she gets to play around with the pitch. You talk, you know, you do a pitch to this one person, and they're like, "Ew," and they walk away like they smelled something bad, and you're like, "Okay, I need to adjust that pitch." So you get to try on the next person, and there's not a whole lot of pressure on you to really perform.
 
That's what I would recommend to start. So, any city's community calendar is going to have these types of local sales opportunities. And then, of course, there's the con circuit, the comic con circuit. For somebody who sells science fiction or fantasy, it's great for that. For somebody who sells mystery, it could work.
 
I mean, I've never sold mystery books, so I really couldn't tell you firsthand, but I know that the fans coming to a comic con are not completely plugged into that, though I'm sure there are plenty of them that would buy a mystery. So I'm not saying don't do it, but you make the call based on what you think is going to work best.
 
Know Your Numbers
 
[00:21:16] Matty: Setting aside the size of the event, any types of events, like I think you mentioned in Vegas that craft fairs turn out to be a surprisingly successful approach because it's not wall-to-wall books.
 
[00:21:30] Todd: Yeah! Yeah! So, I mean, you’ve got to kind of do the math on it. You go to, say, FanX, and FanX has 70,000 people showing up as attendees, but it also has, you know, probably 100 authors there, all in Artist Alley trying to sell their books, right? So let's say, you know, 10,000 of those 70,000 are people that are going to buy books, right?
 
And then, you know, so you divide that by, let's say there's 100 authors there. I'm not big on math, so if I screw this up, you got it, but I figure if I'm working with 10,000 and 100, I should be able to figure that out. So that's like 1,000 people per—is that right? I've already screwed it up. Anyways, you get my point.
 
There's a certain amount of people that you can expect will buy your book, you know, if they haven't already bought somebody else's. If you're at a small event, right, and there's a thousand people at this event, and you're the only author, and ten percent of that thousand people are going to buy books, they're all coming to your booth.
 
So you're going to make as much money there as you might at Comic Con, and it's going to be way cheaper for you to get into that booth, right? So that's something to think about. Just, I mean, I'm always looking at the numbers, despite the fact that I'm mathematically challenged. I use spreadsheets to help me out with that, right?
 
Because you have to know the numbers. You have to know them. If you're going to a con and you sold 300 books, and you're like, "Wow! I am making so much money!" But the costs to drive there, to put you up at a hotel, to eat food there, to get the booth, and that sort of thing, not to mention the cost of the books, you could be underwater.
 
You could have made $3,000 at that con, and you're $1,000 in the hole, you know, as opposed to this little con where you made $500 and you only spent $150, you made $350. Your net is higher at that small event where you only sold 30 books than this other event where you sold 300. I mean, you have to pay attention to that. Otherwise, your business is going to go down by the head.
 
[00:23:16] Matty: Yeah, I'm definitely not at a point where I'm planning on going anywhere that requires me to stay overnight unless I'm there anyway, you know, for other reasons, and there's an opportunity to sell books, but.
 
Tips for Displaying Your Books
 
[00:23:30] Matty: You had also talked about the setup of the actual books on the table. Can you talk about that a little?
 
[00:23:35] Todd: Yes. Okay, so everybody's got their way of looking at this, and some people really, like some readers, some customers, really like the idea of walking into a library, right? That's kind of what draws them, right? And so that's definitely an effective way of doing it. I've seen, you know, Barnes and Noble setups or tatter cover setups, where essentially they create a little library. You walk in, and you've got all the books lined up, or rather I should say a bookstore. You know, you've got the sort of typical racks and that sort of thing with the books facing out and that sort of thing, and some people really like that.
 
In an individual table, the way I like to go is clean and sparse, 25 books. I don't want a stack of books, every single one of my books, with a book on top of it. It's just so busy, right? I want one book on display, laid out in the series set. I've got several different series, and that is part of my selling structure as well. I separate the series, use little table banners behind them, and make it as clean as possible because with 25 books, it's hard to make it clean anyway, right? One book in the middle of the table looks lonely. Three books on a four-foot table looks clean. For two eight-foot tables, with 25 books, it's still getting kind of crowded, but it's definitely more crowded if you're just piling books on top of books, right?
 
Some setups I've seen, I just shake my head. Somebody has one book, and they've got 500 copies of their book on this table, with maybe two of them faced out. It looks like you can't sell books unless there's a line up to your table, and people are just buying that book and moving along. It looks like you can't sell books, and you don't want that impression. You want something clean and simple where people can come up and look and say, "Ooh, I like this cover" or "I like that cover." I can't tell you how many times, even at my table where I'm trying to make it as clean and simple as possible, people say, "I really want something with dragons," and they're looking at one of my series that doesn't have a dragon on the cover. Literally, 12 inches away is a cover that has a dragon on it. I'm like, "What about this one?" They're like, "Oh, ooh," like they just discovered it. They didn't see it because there's so much stimuli at a con like that, where there are images everywhere, and they tunnel vision on something. They're really doing everything they can not to look at everything else at that moment.
 
Even if you have it laid out simple, the odds are against you of somebody looking at exactly what you want them to look at. So, helping them also sometimes is good.
 
[00:26:13] Matty: I'm taking it you have one copy of each of your books out, and then somebody looks at, finds the one with the dragon, then do you have a little stash behind the table where you take out a different book, a separate copy of that book so you're not handing them the one on the stand and say, "You know, take a look, read the back cover or page through."
 
[00:26:34] Todd: Oh, of course. I mean, I go to something like FanX, or Planet Comic Con, or Fan Expo Denver, these are some of my heavy hitters that I go to, and I can barely belly up to the table for all the boxes of books that I have underneath the table. It's an issue. Some of them I have to sell a bunch one day and then bring in more the next day because I just don't have enough space underneath the table to fit all the boxes of books that I want. And yes, I always take out a fresh copy. I shouldn't say always. That is my method, but sometimes you get a reader who comes up, they pick up a copy, and they're literally clutching it to their chest. I'm like, "Well, I'm not going to take it away from them. That's the one they bonded with. They can buy it. I'll just put another one on the rack. It's fine."
 
A Low-Impact Approach When Sales Are Not Your Main Goal
 
[00:27:24] Matty: So, I had a little bit of a tangent, but I'm going to a conference this summer where I'm a speaker, and there's this opportunity to have a book sales table that's part of the conference setup. And I really don't want to go with any book. The idea I had was I'm not going to be able to bring my fancy banners or anything like that. It's basically what can I put in a knapsack or something like that. So I have ten novels now, and I don't even think I'm going to bring stands, but have the 10 books out, have one copy of each book, and then I was going to have cards with QR codes that would take the reader to either where they could buy the print book either from me or from a major online retailer, same for the ebook, which I realized isn't optimal from a sales point of view, but it's the best I can come up with in terms of meeting this requirement that I don't want to have any extra luggage or boxes or anything like that when I go to the conference. Can you talk about if that's worth it?
 
[00:28:30] Todd: Yeah, I've done that before. I've actually done that before because sometimes you sell out, right? And then people still want more books, and then you've got to figure out a way to sell them those books. So there's different ways to do it. One, the QR code that takes them to your Amazon page, or your website page, or your Nook page, whatever it is that you want to send people to. That works really well. I've got a lot of cards of those myself. Something else I do is if they want hard copies, for example, when I've sold out and have no more hard copies or in this case where you've only brought one of each and can't sell them hard copies but they want a hard copy, I will take their information. Usually, I work in tandem at the big ones. I'll ask my assistant to take down their information, say we want an email address, a phone number, we want your address so that because I had once where I took somebody's address, and that's all I took, and there was something wrong with the address, and I never could get them the book. You know, I kept waiting for them to email me and say, "You're never sending my book, you jerk!" and I'm like, "Oh, I'm glad you reached out to me. There was something wrong with the address, and it never went out." So, I collect all the information just in case something goes wrong. And then I mail them all out when I get home, you know, and some people prefer that. I did that at 20 books to 50k just because people were like, "Ah, my suitcase is full, I don't want to carry anything." I'm like, "Oh, I got you, you know, let's ship it to you." So yes, that can work.
 
I will say that it has a disadvantage. If you're comparing that to actually having the book there, it's a pretty big disadvantage because people get attached to material things when they get them in their hands. So, you can definitely sell them that way, but I wouldn't do that for an entire event if it was going to be like, "Oh, I want to make a lot of money at this event," but what you're talking about where it's like, "Oh, I'm going to this thing, and there's an extra thing." It's perfect. It's perfect.
 
Using QR Codes
 
[00:30:06] Matty: I've started experimenting with QR codes, and what I found is that I think so far I only had two QR codes. One was where people can go to sign up for my email newsletter and then some other one. I forget even what the other one was. But having enough text on whatever the material is that has the QR code on it to explain what it is without it being like a novel they have to read was kind of confusing. And then I've also seen people do the QR code where they almost have a binder. And it's like pages, maybe one page per book. And so if someone says, "Oh, I'd like this one," then they get out the binder and they flip to the page that has that stuff on it. Do you have any advice about the best way to execute on the QR code approach?
 
[00:30:54] Todd: The QR code is hit and miss for me. I mean, that's why, like I said, I usually write down their information. I charge them right there. I take their money right there, and then I'm on the hook to deliver the products to them. Giving them just a QR code and saying hit that QR code. I've even done that where I'm like hit that QR code right here at the table. They're like, "Oh, okay, great. I'll do this later." What are you going to tell them at that point? "Okay, no, do it right here. Do it right now." I mean, that doesn't work, right? So, you're taking the control out of your hands, and if you put time and energy into trying to sell them on the story, and then essentially you cut them loose with the QR code. Roll the dice, you know, I mean, they may buy it, they may not.
 
My experience with people who are like, "Oh yeah, I'll buy this later," 1 in 50 maybe that follow through on that. It's not high because I'm watching, I'm like, I give them the QR code that takes them straight to my website or whatever, and then I look for that sale or even look on my Amazon reports for that sale, and nobody bought a book that day or the next day or whatever, right? So, I'm not a big fan of that. It's certainly better than nothing, but if you're trying to make money and build superfans with it, it's a backup at best, I think.
 
When Sales Aren't Your Primary Goal
 
[00:32:07] Matty: Well, I'm realizing that I almost said yes to the option of having books in this author event because more as a resume builder, because otherwise, the people who are there hearing me speak aren't going to have any concrete evidence that I actually have the experience to know what I'm talking about. So if all I get out of this is people wandering by looking at my books and chatting with me, I will have met my primary goal of that event, which is to show them that I have books. My primary goal of that event, of course, it would be nice to sell books, but it's not really what I'm looking for, as opposed to a book sales event where that is really what I'm going for.
 
[00:32:48] Todd: Yeah, well, I think that brings up a very interesting point that for people who are going to do in-person sales, I recommend you have an idea of what you want out of that event, right? And to, so actually, curiously, my priorities are not making money at a con. Believe it or not, even though I'm being pretty successful at doing that at this point, my goal is to meet and talk to superfans, market my books, and my tertiary concern is trying to walk away with a profit, right?
 
Understanding your goal gives you resilience.
 
[00:33:18] Todd: Now, all those are humming at a pretty high level at this point for me, but it wasn't always that way. When I started, I wasn't looking to make any money. Breaking even was like, "Hey, I made back my booth cost and my gas cost to drive down to Albuquerque or whatever it was. I was feeling good about that. More importantly was I want to get my books out into the world." Going to a con, I think it's pretty important, especially for your frame of mind and your perspective while you're at the con.
 
Here's something my friend Katie Cross said about cons, and she's right. It's like a constant reassessment of yourself, every single moment, every single new person that comes up and either accepts or rejects you. Man, you’ve got to have resilience to pick yourself back up and go, "Okay, I'm going to put on a smile and sell to this next person after that guy just kicked me in the teeth." You really have to have that. So, knowing what your priority is helps with that.
 
If I don't make a sale and I'm like, "You know what? I'm here to meet superfans. If I meet two superfans at this event, it's a success." Then you relax a little bit. Your shoulders unclench, and you're like, "Okay, I'm looking for that superfan who wants what I do. That's the most important from this event." It keeps you clear, keeps you able to be resilient.
 
[00:34:31] Matty: Yeah. And I think that if you have a series, especially a long series or a long set of series as you do, then that makes reaching superfans all the more important because maybe you don't make your money back with the books you sell at that event. But if there are 24 more books in the series that they can go to, then you're improving your chances that over the long haul, that turns out to meet the money-making goal as well.
 
[00:34:55] Todd: Well, it's my take that fans and superfans, readers, it's the only thing that's important. At the end of the day, it's the only thing that's important. They hold the keys to your dreams. If you can impress, please, and put out a product that your readers love, you win. How can you not win? They're going to tell all their friends about it, and you're going to build your audience that way. I mean, that's the only thing that's important. There are lots of other things that are important, but if you had to choose one thing, it's pleasing the reader and making sure that they're going to want to come back for more.
 
[00:35:31] Matty: Yeah, I had sort of talked myself into getting back into the in-person events on the theory that as long as I was going to be with another author that I knew and liked and was going to enjoy spending the day with, it was going to be worth it because, in the worst possible case, the two of us or the three of us or the four of us or whatever would sit around and chat for the duration of the conference, and that would still be a good time. I think that was valuable to get me back into the mindset of doing it. But there's a trap that if that stays forefront in my mind, then I spend my energy on with my fellow authors, not on networking with the readers that come to the table. So I have to be careful about to what extent I lean on that.
 
[00:36:12] Todd: I completely agree. Being clear about why you're there is going to define whether or not you succeed at why you're there or not. I've seen a lot of people show up at cons, not just authors, but others, who came because they wanted to be in the atmosphere of the con and play. They got a booth, they'll sell what they can, but mostly, they'll run off to do cosplay and then come back. They'll have their friends sit at the booth, not interested in selling anything. They're there for a very different reason.
 
Me? I'm there for a very professional reason. I love cons and enjoy the atmosphere; it's one of my favorite places to be. But I'm not there to play. I'm there to work. I will only leave my booth for five minutes to go to the bathroom or grab a hot dog and run right back because I'm there to work. I paid the money to get in here, and I want to make sure I squeeze every ounce of what I came for from that. Honestly, authors sometimes come up to chat with me, and I will chat with them, but I'll give them a caveat. No offense, but if someone looks even vaguely interested in my booth, I will stop talking to you and go pay attention to them. That's what I'm here for, and everyone knows that about me at this point. I get real serious about social interaction when I'm at the booth. I'm as friendly as the day is long with customers, but when it comes to others wanting to hang out and have a beer, I say, "Nope, not during the con. Come see me afterwards. Let's talk when I'm done working."
 
[00:37:43] Matty: Yeah, that's great advice to set that expectation at the beginning of the interaction with that person.
 
[00:37:48] Todd: Yeah, I don't want to be rude, but that's what I'm here to do.
 
[00:37:52] Matty: I've found that's a benefit of being at a conference with other authors at the table because there have been times when I've rescued someone or someone has rescued me. Just tapping somebody on the shoulder who can't get away from a conversation and saying, "Oh, there's somebody over here who wants to look at your book or chat with you," and we help each other out that way.
 
The Four Categories of Readers
 
[00:38:12] Todd: Yeah, yeah. I don't know if it's on your roster of questions to get into my four categories of people at a con, but that's wrapped up in that.
 
[00:38:22] Matty: Yeah, please. I think this is a good entry to start talking about that.
 
[00:38:25] Todd: So, I break down the people at a con or a selling event into four categories. The first category is the one I wish all cons were comprised of. These are the people who came there for you. They know about you, want your latest thing, and make a beeline for your booth. You're their first priority. Alternatively, these are individuals who are really into what you do. They may not know specifics, but they see the dragon or the person with the sword and magic, and they're saying, "I'm buying that. I am buying that." Well, I don't care what it is; I'm buying it. They're your pre-sold customer, right? So, that's the first category.
 
Really, with those, I don't even pitch much. You stand back and don't get in your own way. Let them sell the book to themselves because they've already sold it in their mind. The only thing you can do is mess that up. So, I stand back. The second and third categories are what I call the bread and butter of the pitch.
 
The second one is people who would buy your book if they noticed you. These are the ones who say, "Oh, I saw your banner from a distance, and I had to go check this out. Maybe tell me a little bit about this. I don't know about this." They are perfect for the pitch. They're the best people to pitch to because they're going to get into what you're saying. Give them a chance.
 
Then there's the third category of people. They probably wouldn't buy your book. It's not really their genre, but they don't hate that genre. They just aren't really into it. Those are the ones where you're going to stretch a little bit. You're going to stretch your skills, pour on what you know about pitching your book and what you can do when you get into the excitement of your story.
 
Setting Boundaries and Conserving Your Energy
 
[00:40:07] Todd: And then there's the fourth category. It doesn't matter what you do. They don't want what you're going to sell. You're talking to a stone wall, and there have been times where they're just not going to buy a book for whatever reason. Either they don't like your genre or there are subcategories of that.
 
They want to tell you about their book. They're a writer who has never written a book before, but they're going to come up and take as much time as they can. As long as you'll listen to them talking about their book. Or you've got the guy who wants you to tell them every single pitch on the table, but they have no intention of buying because they have no money or aren't going to buy anything.
 
There are those guys that fit into that fourth category where they're not going to buy. The first subcategory of that, I will try and pitch them sometimes if I'm feeling saucy. It's okay; I know that guy's not going to buy anything, but I'm going to sharpen my skills as finely honed as I can and see if I can hook somebody like that. “Nope. I don't read fantasy.”
 
I'm like, "Well, do you want to start? Do you want to try?" I'll come up with some hook based on their demeanor, and sometimes they'll chuckle, and I'll be like, "Fine. Tell me." I actually had somebody buy a book that was like that. "Nope, I hate fantasy. I'm not going to read it." I'm like, "Well, do you want to start?" And he just laughed. He said, "You know what? Okay, fine. Tell me your pitch." At the end, he's like, "Okay, you convinced me. I don't usually read fantasy, but I'll give it a try."
 
That is, I think, pitching 2.0. You're not going to try that every single time, and in fact, a lot of times, it could be a waste of your time. One of the things I will talk about maybe later is how you've got to conserve your energy at a certain point. If you're wanting to sell a high number of books, you really have to pick and choose how much energy you're going to put into something.
 
But one of the things I did want to say, since we talk about people who come up and want to talk about their stuff to you, and to them, they're here to socialize and see all the cool stuff. They're sort of in the mindset that everybody's here to do that, and so they're thinking, "Well, you know, this guy's got nothing better to do than to spend 60 minutes talking to me about my book."
 
You want to be gentle with those people because they're the aspiring authors, right? They're the next generation. I always tell myself, "You've got a business to do here, but you also want to give a leg up to those that are coming behind you." So, I will tell myself, "Okay, five minutes. I will give myself five minutes with this person." And, in some cases, if someone has picked up a book across the table and they're looking at it like they want to buy, I'll say, "Give me just a second. Hang on. Hold on to that thought. Give me just a second." I'll go over, take care of that person because they're clearly a sale. Then come back and say, "Okay, tell me more. I'll give you two and a half more minutes. Tell me more about it." But as you said, I establish the boundaries. I'm like, "I'll give you two minutes to talk." Most people will be like, "Oh, wow. I'm sorry. I didn't realize. Yeah, you're working here." They didn't see it because they weren't thinking about it. But once they see it, they're aces.
 
Then you got the people that don't care. They're going to keep talking about what they want to talk about no matter what. Like I said, I'll give them their five minutes as well, but I don't mind being a total jerk if they're being a jerk to me. It's, "Look, I’ve got to go work now." Yeah, but there's this thing, and da da da. They want to keep talking. I'm like, "I'm going to go talk to this person over here now." Yeah, but there's, and then I'll stop talking to them. You know what? If you can't engage with me on a human level, then I got no more time for you. But, like I said, I feel that it's important to be kind.
 
They're there, and I would much rather inspire somebody to be the next great writer, you know, to get to the keyboard, to do their thing, than have them walk away feeling like, "Wow, he didn't care at all about what I'm doing."
 
But I mean, again, you got to balance that. It's just like those "say yes to everything" kind of thing. You get to a certain point where you can't say yes to everything, and you have to prioritize your time. But I do feel that it is a priority to give at least a few minutes, encourage them, and then set your boundaries and move along.
 
[00:43:55] Matty: Yep, that's great advice. I think that the whole thing that stands in the way of many authors doing in-person events is the idea of being too salesy. So, do you have tips you can offer that will improve your chances of actually making a sale but make it feel comfortable for people for whom that is not a natural state of being?
 
[00:44:17] Todd: Yeah, so there's a whole spectrum of this, and my first bit of advice, the most important bit of advice, would be to harken back to what I said at the beginning of the podcast: be a storyteller first. Find a way to get into your story and show them that. That's the baseline. There are lots of tips and tricks, kind of salesmany kind of tricks, that will heighten your ability to do that, both in terms of effect, dramatic effect, and in terms of speed and efficiency. Because if you're trying to sell 300 books over the course of a weekend, you kind of got to move it along. You can't spend 20 minutes with each person talking about a book. You've got to juice it up and move it along.
 
I think that if somebody doesn't ever want to do anything salesy, that's fine. That's totally their call. But you're probably only going to go so far, right? I mean, there are certain things that you, and that was a lesson that I learned in 2021. I met this guy at FanX, Lance Conrad is his name. And he fine-tuned his salesmany ability. Sometimes people were turned off by that, but man, he just jumped right back into the cycle and got the next person. It was amazing watching this guy, like watching a fisherman who knew exactly where all the fish were. He would just put his line in the water, haul out a trout, put his line in the water, haul out another one. I'm sitting here trying to pitch to people, and afterwards I walked up and I was like, "I sold 14 books today. How many did you sell?" He's like, "66." I'm like, "How did you do it? How did you do it? I'm falling on my sword here. I thought I was pretty hot to trot at this, and I'm nothing compared to what you just did. Tell me how you did it." And he was really cool, and he did.
 
The next day, I sold 77 copies. He came up, he's like, "How'd you do today?" I'm like, "77." He's like, "Way to go, man." I'm like, "How many did you do?" He's like, "84." I'm like, "Mother." But it was great to know. He kind of talked about how to pull them in and then how to do a pitch. I do it differently than he does at this point. I've developed my own system, but it was good to know. It was important to know that you do, at a certain point, you just, I mean, if you want to do this and never develop a thick skin, I don't know what to tell you, except that you're probably going to get your feelings hurt a lot.
 
One of my favorite stories about this, again, my assistant Becca, who was selling a book, there was this family, a mom and two kids, and I think the daughter was like 10, and the son was like 13. The son kind of gravitated over, and she was going into her pitch, and she got halfway into the pitch, and the little girl comes walking up and she's like, "That's enough out of you," and she grabbed the son and pulled him away. The mom said nothing. It was so, I mean, these are the kind of rejections that you're going to get. So we joke about that, "That's enough out of you."
 
[00:47:17] Matty: Can you share, if we're assuming the type of shopper who isn't there because they already know you and are planning on buying a book, it's that in-between person who's like, "Oh, this is kind of interesting," can you just give a sample pitch of how you would approach that person?
 
[00:47:32] Todd: Absolutely. Do you want me to give you a pitch from one of my actual stories?
 
[00:47:34] Matty: Yeah, that would be great.
 
[00:47:36] Todd: So, first thing I would do is be like, "Do you like fantasy? Are you a Lord of the Rings fan? Do you want to hear about a book?" Something like that. That's the hook. That's your hook phrase. And you've got to develop that hook phrase and figure out what works best for you, right? And that gets them to essentially look over at you, right, and have them say, "Yes," because you want that buy-in. You don't want to waste your time on somebody who has no interest in buying your book, right, that fourth category of people, right? You want someone that at least has a glimmer of, "Yeah, no, I will." So you want that buy-in to start, right?
 
"Do you want to hear about a book? Yeah, I want to hear about a book. Well, let me tell you about this one. This is my Threadweaver series, and it centers around these two main characters. And I've got a poster out in front of me that's got the two main characters on it, right? This one right here. And by the way, when I say Threadweavers, I want you to think magic user, think wizard. That's what they're called in this world. And like I said, it centers around these two main characters.
 
Eighteen-year-old Myrilla. Now, she's just a young woman in a small town and all she wants is a normal life. But that's not going to happen for her because she's the first Threadweaver to arise in a hundred years. A hundred years ago, there were lots of these Threadweavers, and they misused their magic, and they just about destroyed the world. Essentially, they created this magical nuclear war that did three things. One, it sucked all the magic from the lands. Two, it killed all the Threadweavers. And three, it destroyed 80 percent of the world. Everybody else, okay?
 
Now, the magic was taken and locked in this tower far to the north, and that's where it stayed all this time. So, fast forward a hundred years. The lands are dry, they're brittle, they are dying because of this lack of magic. And people hate Threadweavers. So, if the villagers in her town find out that's what Mirela is, they're going to kill her.
 
Cut to the second main character and the title character of the first volume. 1400-year-old demigod and legend known as Wildmane. This guy is an immortal hero who's been fighting for us and kicking butt for 14 centuries, but something happened to him 400 years ago and since that day, Wildmane wants to die.
 
Now here's what happened. During one of his many epic battles, the love of his life, this immortal woman who could turn into a dragon, got caught up in a spell during the fight that took her and put her into this gemstone, and there'll be a picture of the gemstone, right, and then the gemstone locked with a riddle that only Wildmane can solve. Now, if he solves it, the gemstone will open and she'll go free. But it's been four centuries, and he has not solved this riddle. He's languishing in a castle by the sea, and he wants to die. All very well and good for him. But Mirella needs to save the world.
 
Because the lands are dying, the only way to save the world is to go to that fountain far in the north, destroy it, and return magic to the lands the way it's supposed to be. But over the last century, that fountain has twisted, and now it is surrounded by these evil monsters one can't even imagine.
 
No mortal could possibly get through that, but Wildmane could. She needs to pull him from his self-imposed exile. She needs to save the world; he has to get her there. That's "Threadweavers."
 
[00:50:58] Matty: Fantastic. I wish people listening to the podcast would pop over to YouTube and watch it because what I appreciated is the physicality behind that description, which can play nicely in the environment of an in-person sales table or an event.
 
[00:51:20] Todd: Yeah, especially when you've got images to point to. I kept referencing the images I would point to. The drama of my finger coming down, you know, It's the gemstone, dun dun dun. I actually had one woman who I think was a dancer herself. She definitely looked like it. She said, "Wow, I love this dance we get while you're telling your story." So, yeah, I mean, again, these are opportunities, and everybody's got their talents. One of my talents is I enjoy talking to people. I'm extroverted enough that I really dig that. I was a dancer in college, so the big hand gestures and the flowing movements, I mean, I wasn't even really getting into it because there's only so much space in the frame here, but at the table, sometimes I will even take a step and point to my big eight by eight banners, you know, "This is the guy I'm talking about." That's an advantage. Wearing a Dungeons and Dragons t-shirt is an advantage. Mixing up the levels of your voice when you're telling your pitch is an advantage. Shortening your pitch, making it hit all the right things is an advantage. All of these things are advantages, opportunities you can grab to use, and you don't have to use them. You could tell your story in a monotone if you wanted to, and it might come off for a certain number of people, but for another group, it's not going to come off, and it's an advantage you're kind of leaving on the table.
 
[00:52:41] Matty: So great. Well, Todd, I could keep talking to you all day about this, but I don't want to press on your time, as we were talking about before. Thank you so much for sharing all these tips. It was great fun to talk to you and also to watch you give your pitch. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and your work and your books online.
 
[00:52:59] Todd: Yeah, absolutely. So ToddFahnestock.com. That's my website. Everything about me is there, and all my books can be purchased there. So yeah, that's the quickest one-stop-shop for everything I've got.
 
[00:53:16] Matty: Great, thank you so much.
 
[00:53:18] Todd: Yeah. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me on the show. Appreciate it.
 
[00:53:21] Matty: Oh, it's been fun.

Episode 223 - The Tolling Bell & The Story Hypothesis with JP Rindfleisch

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JP Rindfleisch discusses THE TOLLING BELL & THE STORY HYPOTHESIS, including the formula of Story Hypothesis (initial want + developing need + true need); the nine fundamental needs and identifying the driving needs; using the Story Hypothesis to create a resonating theme; the downside of how the concept of "theme" is usually taught; the power of a non-hierarchical approach; applying the Story Hypothesis to a series; and considering the driving needs of the antagonist (with a fun conversation about Hannibal Lecter).

JP Rindfleisch IX, is a writer, editor, and podcaster from Rockford, Illinois, who loves the dark, strange, and queer. They co-author NRDS: National Recently Deceased Services with Jeff Elkins and the Leah Ackerman Dark Urban Fantasy series with AB Cohen. JP also penned the cozy queer fantasy Mandrake Manor. They co-host Writer's Ink podcast with JD Barker, Christine Daigle, Kevin Tumlinson, and Patrick O'Donnell, discussing author interviews and publishing news. JP also leads a local authors' group in Rockford Illinois with over 60 members, dedicated to promoting, educating, and connecting writers with opportunities to enhance their careers and community presence.

Episode Links

Author website: https://www.jprindfleischix.com/
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/jprindfleischix/
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/jp_rindfleisch/

Summary

Introduction
 
Storytelling is an art, but behind that art lies the mechanics of creating a great story. Understanding the story's underlying structure can provide insights into why a narrative works and how you can improve your own stories. One such tool is the story hypothesis, a unique formula that can guide a story's structure, particularly the narrative's character arc.
 
The Story Hypothesis: A Synopsis
 
The Story Hypothesis, a tool crafted by J.P. Rindfleisch, mandates a formula connecting a character's needs throughout a story. This formula moves from an initial want to a developing need and finally to their true need, forming the character's journey. By identifying and focusing on these needs, writers can craft a more coherent, engaging script that resonates with readers.
 
This formula's advantage is that it does not need to be strictly chronological. The transformation of the wants and needs can occur in back-and-forth motion through the story, echoing the ebbs and flows of real-life expectations, disappointments, and triumphs.
 
Unpacking the Story Hypothesis
 
Examining the story hypothesis requires a component basis understanding. Rindfleisch primarily uses Max-Neef's fundamental human needs— nine pillars of human necessities that constitute the basis of a character's motivation. Ranging from subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, recreation, creation, identity, and freedom, these nine needs offer a wide spectrum of motivations for character actions.
 
Applying the Story Hypothesis
 
Examining an existing story through the lens of the story hypothesis offers the opportunity to understand its principles better. Let's analyze the dystopian trilogy, "The Hunger Games," within this context. If we use the Story Hypothesis formula, Katniss Everdeen's journey might read something like this: Katniss's quest for identity leads her to fulfill affection and protection (true need) by developing participation. Every step closer to embracing her true identity assists her in understanding herself and her surroundings, leading to genuine affection and love.
 
Such a formula doesn't just apply during the creation phase of a story; it can also be an excellent revision tool, identifying scenes which may need alteration to align better with the core story hypothesis.
 
In conclusion
 
The Story Hypothesis is not the definitive tool for creating or revising a narrative, but it serves as a guide, offering rich insight into the journey their characters undertake. It challenges the rigidity of other storytelling hierarchies and offers a more complex, nuanced way of understanding characters and their journeys. As every storyteller knows, understanding the mechanics of your craft is just as important as the creative elements. The Story Hypothesis is one more tool in the writer's kit — a tool that could significantly enhance storytelling dynamics.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is J. P. Rindfleisch. Hey, J. P., how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] JP: I'm doing well, how are you?
 
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little background on you, J. P. Rindfleisch IX is a writer, editor, and podcaster from Rockford, Illinois, who loves the dark, strange, and queer. They co-author "Nerds, Recently Deceased Services" with Jeff Elkins and the Leah Ackerman Dark Urban Fantasy series with A. B. Cohen. J. P. also penned the cozy queer fantasy "Mandrake Manor." They co-host the Writer's Inc. podcast with J. D. Barker, Christine Daigle, Kevin Tomlinson, and Patrick O'Donnell.
 
[00:01:05] Matty: Obviously, I haven't listened to the Writer's Inc. podcast for a long time. I'm going to have to get back to that, where they discuss author interviews and publishing news. JP also leads a local author's group in Rockford, Illinois, with over 60 members, dedicated to promoting, educating, and connecting writers with opportunities to enhance their careers and community presence. And I would like to thank Jeff Elkins, the Dialogue Doctor, for recommending JP for the podcast and for introducing us. So thank you, Jeff, for that.
 
[00:01:31] JP: Yeah, thanks, Jeff.
 
Using the Story Hypothesis to create a resonating theme
 
[00:01:06] Matty: And we are going to be talking about using the story hypothesis to create a resonating theme for your readers. And JP, whenever I talk to anyone who has thought carefully about a topic like this, especially around craft and written about it, I also like to ask, what did you see either in your own writing or the writing of other writers you work with that led you to believe that this was going to be a necessary piece of information to share with your fellow writers?
 
[00:01:31] JP: Yeah, so fun fact, I didn't know if I was actually going to write Story Hypothesis. It was just an idea I had, and it was something that I kept talking about, and people were like, if I don't get a book about this, I'm going to hunt you down until I get one. So I was like, fine, fine, I'll write one. But ultimately, I started this writing journey, meeting J. Thorn and Zach Bohannon, and I really view them both as mentors. I've used a lot of their services, and I ended up becoming a 3 Story Method editor through them. 3 Story Method is such a simple way of having common communication between two people about the story without having super big methods that people need to learn and understand. Like I can tell someone what the three-story method is in a sitting, and we can start discussing the story and figure out and break it down.
 
The downside of how "theme" is usually taught
 
[00:02:20] JP: This is where the story hypothesis came in because there's something that I felt was missing. So, when looking at what we're taught in school, theme was such a common aspect that was taught, but I did not like how it was taught. It was too broad. It didn't really help me as a writer, but at the same time, it's one of those things that everyone always talks about. Theme is so important to your story, and I'm like, yeah, but half the people don't like it. Half the people are unsure what their theme is, so they're just saying it's about love when really it's a tragedy. And so, I thought, well, what about if there was a simple formula that people could use that could help them guide through the story.
 
[00:03:24] This is something that I was thinking about. I was using it in the way that I was writing to really hit like a tolling bell or a resonation with a reader. It was a culmination of the theme, the golden theme, but it was this idea that there's an architecture or a structure behind the story that has this resonance behind it. So, you just needed a formula, and that's where the story hypothesis came in.
 
[00:04:12] Matty: And we may be addressing this as you continue talking about the story hypothesis, but I think theme is one of those words that not only do people kind of toss it around, but I suspect that because it's so common, people are bringing different definitions to it without being aware that they're bringing different definitions to it. Is that something you want to talk about right up front, or do you want to kind of tease that out as we talk about the story hypothesis throughout?
 
[00:04:47] JP: Let's dive right in.
 
[00:04:14] Matty: Excellent.
 
[00:04:15] JP: In general, a theme is a subject, a conversation, a topic, more or less. It's the root of a story, and at the end of the day, it's the thing that will convey the needs that will imprint on the reader. So that's really the highlight: need, character need, and character wants. It's your undertolling or underscoring theme of your story. It's what's driving the story. It's what does your character want? And that resonates with your readers.
 
[00:05:03] Matty: You had used the example of some people say their stories about the theme is love when it's really a tragedy. Can you mention a couple of well-known books or movies or just things that everybody's going to be familiar with and share what you consider the theme of those works to be?
 
The formula of Story Hypothesis = Initial want + developing need + true need
 
[00:05:03] JP: Yeah, I mean, so, talking about story hypothesis, I kind of want to take a step back to explain a couple of things before hopping right into that. But the formula for the story hypothesis is a character's need for their initial want leads them to fulfill their true need by developing their developing need. It looks at three things that develop throughout the story: what a character thinks they want at the beginning of the story, what's driving them forward, this underscoring development throughout the story, and then the actual thing they need to attain by the end of the story. I know that was a lot of information, and hopefully that will convey as we talk about this, but using a method that we'll dive into, we can look at stories like "The Matrix."
 
With "The Matrix," at the beginning of the story, Neo doesn't know what the Matrix is, but it's this thing that he has been dying to know about. We jump in where he's been this hacker, hearing grumblings about this thing, and he just wants to understand. Understanding is the need that he's been desiring. As the story develops, that need for understanding turns into a need of "Who am I within the Matrix?" Because as we learn throughout the story, Neo, an anagram for "The One," is basically a savior character. It's really a story about identity, answering the question of who am I and where do I belong.
 
[00:06:48] Those are the needs that really pull on people. It's the thing that resonates within the story: understanding the world around you and then understanding who you are in that world.
 
Nine fundamental needs
 
[00:07:26] Matty: You had mentioned the three questions or parts of the formula, the initial want, the developing need, and the true need, and then the other aspect of it that I thought was very interesting is this idea of fundamental human needs, and you're tapping into something called the Max Neef Nine fundamental needs. I'd never heard of that before. I'm familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which I think is probably what everybody learns either in college psychology or in some class in the corporate world. Can you talk about that idea of how the fundamental needs work in, with the story hypothesis and why you tapped into this Max Neef model rather than something else like Maslow's hierarchy?
 
[00:09:53] JP: So there's actually a whole chapter on how much I dislike Maslow, and at the end of the day, hierarchical structures are limiting factors when it comes to being a writer. When you look at something like Maslow's Hierarchy of Need, it's all about self-actualization, about a person hitting these levels of needs, moving up this ladder until they are an individual, self-actualized. Unfortunately, that doesn't represent all cultures around the world. Personally, when I was trying to use this hierarchical need in storytelling, I found that I was missing out on something if I wanted a culture that didn't represent this sort of thinking because I would have to shoehorn in how needs fulfilled.
 
Let's look at a culture that praises communal efforts. That's not self-actualization. That's not how a pyramid's going to work for them. So how could I do that? And this involved a lot of conversations with a lot of different author friends, but at the end of the day, Max Neef, it's nine fundamental human needs, none are really hierarchical of each other. The one you could argue as a base level need is subsistence, which is the need for food at the end of the day, that's what it is. Obviously, if you don't have food, you're not going to be able to have identity and whatnot, but what it does in terms of storytelling is it allows you to no longer have to fit your ideas and your thoughts of a character's wants and needs into a hierarchical structure, you can pull on different ones and create different stories. So you could write a story about a starving artist that is creating something gorgeous and wonderful and something that goes and transcends humanity because that's a way that these needs would function that Maslow's technically doesn't. Because that character is starving, that character isn't able to move up that ladder or pyramid because they don't have their basic physical needs.
 
[00:09:22] Matty: Oh, interesting. So I'm just going to read through the nine. I did a little googling before our conversation. So subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, recreation, creation, identity, and freedom. So when you're talking about the story hypothesis, do you think of that as mainly a structural approach to a story as opposed to a character development tool to use?
 
[00:09:53] JP: So I think of this as a way of having, one, a conversation with yourself with simple structures. When you can create a formula like, well, when I use it and I create a formula like this, it helps me ground myself and really look at the story in these simplified structure ways. So, I like to look at these nine as pillars to fit in how I want to tell a story.
 
[00:00:00] JP: With "Mandrake Manor," I really focused on it being a story that's basically Charmed meets HBO's "Looking." It's a romance where people realize they have magical powers. So, there are certain obvious things. If someone discovers they have magic, they begin a journey of understanding, a journey of identity. Why do I have this magic? What is this magic? Those sorts of questions. When we talk about romance, you're talking about affection, that's the story you'll probably be telling because romance will have affection either in the developing need or the final need, depending on the story you want to tell.
 
So, when I'm looking at these specific structures, it makes it easy if I just have nine to pick from. I don't have to think about special words and whatnot. I've got nine. And if I have nine, then I need to really use them efficiently.
 
[00:01:01] Matty: Do you have any guidance about when you're considering these nine? There's going to be a primary one, for example, affection in the case of a romance. Then do you check the story to make sure you're hitting all the other needs, or are you trying to hit all of them, identifying the driving needs?
 
[00:01:22] JP: Overkill. So, there are nine needs, and the story hypothesis for a standard novel has three that we pick from. Originally, it had two, but I really felt like there was this developing need, this thing that grows over time. As a person has it, they are rewarded with the other two needs. I'll explain what I mean by that in a second. These nine fundamental needs are what a person in society should have in different levels, representing how people live.
 
Max Neve created this as an economist looking at Chile, removing the concept of financials and focusing on the needs people would need fulfilled to be considered top of the line, in a culture and society we'd want to live in. If I could measure all these nine things separately, how can I determine if all are at 100%, or if we really need to focus on one in this economy, etc.
 
So, technically, a human being would have all nine in different meters. When we tell stories, if we overload readers with these nine needs, it's not a story that resonates. I personally use this to resonate with readers. Looking at something like "The Matrix," starting with Neo wanting to understand, his story ending in identity with his true need. What's the thing in the middle? It was participation. Whenever he got involved with others, he was rewarded with understanding, identity. When he pushed back, he was imprisoned, his understanding sometimes taken away, friends imprisoned or killed. There's this growth arc that happened. Obviously, the writers of "The Matrix" didn't think of story hypothesis, but looking at it through that lens, that's what I noticed. That's the formula I made.
 
[00:14:01] Matty: I can imagine that the number of needs that you reflect in a story could also be a function of how much material you have to work with. If you're writing a short story, then you probably are looking through this and saying, you know, this is going to be a story where the character is primarily focused on participation or primarily focused on identity or something like that.
 
Like identifying the one human need that the short story addresses is probably a good check. I can imagine, you know, I just read the latest Robert Galbraith book, the Cormoran Strike series. If you look through that series, you could probably pick out for each of the main characters because you have the wherewithal, you have the real estate, to delve into it. Someone working through a series might say, I'm on book 12 and you know what, I've never really talked about recreation or understanding. It might be a way of identifying a hole in a character where you do have that opportunity to delve into different needs.
 
[00:15:08] JP: Yeah, definitely. When looking at story hypotheses through a series, there are different things that we would pull on based on if you're writing to a genre or if you are a long-running series and you really want to pull on all of those needs as the story progresses. One series that comes to mind is "The Hunger Games." It's a story about a character dealing with an uprising and is at the forefront of that. The need or the tolling bell that the entire series pulls on is participation, rising up against oppressors, forming a community, and saying we won't stand for this oppression. We will participate together. You could argue freedom as another option, but it really focuses on this communal effort. The story starts with districts separated, communities broken apart, and they come together to face this bigger foe. The tolling bell for the entire story is participation.
 
Now, looking at the first book, Katniss isn't super interested in everyone else; she's more interested in not dying. But, she gets rewarded every time she participates. Her ultimate goal in book one is freedom. She says, come hell or high water, I'm going to get my freedom. I'm going to eat these berries, and I'm going to die, but that's going to be my freedom. That's what it takes. Participation grows throughout the story. Every time she works with someone, she's rewarded. Unfortunately, with one character, she's not so rewarded when that character dies, but it creates this growth arc for her. It's really when she wants to break those rules, and she wants to say, I have this community with me. My original District 12 Peeta is with me. We're the last two. I'm not going to kill him. We are doing this together. I'm full 100 percent participation. Then she gets her freedom. As the story progresses, I would say that the last book, her true need or whatever, is going to be the fulfillment of participation.
 
[00:17:31] Matty: Well, it's interesting because if you look at the first couple, there are the needs at the macro level, like you're talking about the ones that provide resonance for the reader. And then there are the needs at the micro level. If you look at, You know, just the first chapter or chapters of "The Hunger Games." So, subsistence, obviously. There's hunting, protection; she's trying to protect her sister for whom she feels affection, there's kind of an understanding, she comes to an understanding about her role in the games as a replacement for her sister, so she steps into participation. Not quite sure about recreation or recreation yet. You know, I think those ones become more, as you're saying, the macro ones are the ones you're talking about with identity and freedom and so on. But it's interesting to look at it at the micro and the macro levels.
 
So we've been talking about a formula, the story hypothesis formula, and there's also this idea, and we're going back a little bit now to the idea of the initial want, the developing need, and the true need about where in the story you expect the character to be moving from one of these to the other. Can you talk about that a little bit more from a structural point of view?
 
[00:18:41] JP: Yeah. So, let me just grab this really quick, because I did create something for "Silence of the Lambs," because I thought that would be fun to talk about, you know, as one decides. But, I think when looking at something like "Silence of the Lambs," we could argue a story hypothesis along the lines of Starling's need for understanding leads her to fulfill identity by developing participation.
 
Taking a step back, I think that we're in a state where Starling needs to understand the mind of a serial killer. That's really the kind of goal at the beginning of the story. Her identity is less of a who am I as much as am I good? Am I good enough? Am I a good cop? Am I, you know, all of these sorts of questions.
 
And then developing participation. I think in terms of this story, it's participation with a level of wariness, agreeing to be involved with working with a serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, in this sort of participating with what he wants without giving too much. If she gives too much, she runs in danger. So much danger. In many cases, but we can see this throughout the story, and I have some different types of scenes, like a resistance scene at the beginning; she's hesitating to engage with Hannibal Lecter, she's worried about those dangers that are going to happen, and because of that, because she's not participating, he's not going to give her answers.
 
She's not going to understand. So you can see how by her not participating, she won't understand. That's that core need. That's that initial want that she has. She has some failures because of that, because she's struggling with how much does she participate? Sometimes it's too much, sometimes it's too little. And so we see these failures that develop throughout the story. And then she starts to, she has maybe a misunderstanding where Lecter's clues lead Starling astray from the investigation because she's misinterpreting what he is trying to tell her, and then we have these transformations.
 
So, Lecter is reshaping Starling's understanding of Buffalo Bill and his capabilities. That's when she has a breakthrough in her understanding, and now she needs to shift her focus to her true need, which is to be the good cop she's meant to be, even when she faces pushback from other cops for working with Hannibal Lecter. Despite their objections, she insists on pursuing the answers she needs.
 
In the way the story is told, when we have the ultimate ending, if this was a story about participation, especially with other cops, the twist where Buffalo Bill hears knocking at the door, and we see the police knocking at a door, is significant. The twist is that it's actually Starling at the other end of Buffalo Bill's door. If the true need were participation, we would have seen something different – her bringing the cops with her. However, since her true need is identity, the twist works well because she's alone, fulfilling her needs.
 
Looking at a revelation or confrontation, such as the climax scene where she has developed the skills through participation and understanding, and is now ready to confront and prove herself, we see that resolution at the end where she truly becomes a competent FBI agent.
 
So that's how I would use these scenes or how I would expect to see a story flow, using those three needs for Hannibal Lecter or for "Silence of the Lambs."
 
[00:22:40] Matty: Well, it is interesting, as you were talking, any conversation about "Silence of the Lambs," I think, brings up the very interesting consideration of Hannibal Lecter as a character and this idea that you can pick someone who's objectively speaking the worst person ever, and yet, the author makes him compelling, even empathetic sometimes. Is there a different spin that you take if you're assessing the villain against the human needs? How would you apply the needs to Hannibal Lecter? We could make funny subsistence comments right off the bat.
 
[00:23:17] JP: Yeah, so this is something I haven't explored in this first book, but it's a conversation that's started to come up. There's this negative aspect to these needs or how they may function in this sense. One thing I really like about storytelling is how villains inside characters form as shadows and reflections of your main character. In the sense that Starling has a need for understanding and identity, and participation, Hannibal Lecter has corrupted versions of those. He wants to understand Starling, less about himself, but more, he has this weird desire to pick people apart.
 
It's both physically and mentally, like one of his strong desires is just to know how other people function. You can see it's this sort of understanding of other people's identities. It's less about him and more about other people. I don't have a full answer, but I think it falls within the lines of these corruptions of the needs or these other versions of them.
 
An example I can think of that isn't exactly for "Silence of the Lambs," but whenever looking at things like Rising Up Stories, Hunger Games, where we have participation as a form of good, participation can also be a form of bad. If you're looking at participation as participating in a community where you have a voice in that community, what's a negative aspect of that? Being a dictator, leading a cult, all of these things where you might be fulfilling your own need, but you're absorbing the need of others because you are this nexus of that need. So I think there's a fun thing to play with in there that I just don't have fully set yet.
 
[00:25:25] Matty: I'm going to ask one more question about Hannibal and the human needs. So one of them is freedom. On a very obvious level, freedom is a need that he has. It's a goal he achieves. Would you consider that as applied to Hannibal Lecter, that freedom is, in fact, the primary human need, or is it one of those where it's only superficially the human need and there's a more meaty, so to speak, need that he has achieved by the end of the movie.
 
[00:25:59] JP: I wonder because I see this underlying need for freedom, but at the same time, I feel like everything's kind of a game, you know? So what if he's in prison? He'll get out eventually. It's less of a he's just waiting for the opportune time to really show his mastermind. I think his desire or need is to prove that he is what everyone thinks he is. That almost makes me think that his need is identity. All the time. It's a corrupted form of, "I am the monster that you think I am," sort of thing, and using that identity as a means of manipulation to get what he wants.
 
[00:26:47] Matty: I do kind of feel as if there's a part of Hannibal that, that is so, does he end up on the beach at the end of the first movie, or is that a later movie?
 
[00:26:54] JP: I think it's the, I'm pretty sure it's the first movie, but I haven't seen it in a while.
 
[00:26:59] Matty: So at whatever point he ends up on the beach, spoiler alert, there's a part of me that thinks that he's kind of missing having his visits from Clarice, like the upside of prison for Hannibal Lecter is he's going to get to talk to the most fascinating people. Whereas, on the beach, you know, he can drink his drink, he can look at the water, but what's the fun there?
 
[00:27:20] JP: Exactly, which leads me to question, is freedom the true need, or is that just the thing that happens because he's fulfilling these other bits?
 
Looking at "House of the Cerulean Sea," if that works for you, we have something like Linus's need for identity leads him to fulfill affection by developing understanding. So those are taking the three needs of identity, affection, and understanding. We really start off this book with Linus not fulfilling his identity.
 
He's really unhappy, just doesn't like his job. He's going through the motions or the expectations of everyone. The book starts off with things being very drab, gray, and dark. It's not a very happy place that he's in. His true need in this story is affection. He meets somebody that he's investigating, more or less, but by the end of the book, it's really about this drive to have love, not only from the main head of this orphanage but also the children that are there as well. It's a sense of belonging and love and affection. It's this understanding of his role as a person throughout the story.
 
[00:28:46] JP: So I like to write out the formula, and then I like to reshape it into something that makes sense to me or something that I actually want to use as a mantra. If I were to be writing "House on the Cerulean Sea" and I had developed a story hypothesis at the beginning of the story, I might say something like, "By embracing our true identity, we begin to understand ourselves more, paving the way for genuine affection and love." So, I can use a mantra like that to really have it somewhere.
 
When I was writing "Mandrake Manor," I had it on a whiteboard over here, and I would just see it every day. I didn't really stop, pause, and think. It's just something I saw, and then I would just be like, oh yeah, that's why I'm writing this. Because I'm trying to tell a story about affection, more or less. And so if I were writing this one, and I was looking at this, and I was saying, every time that Linus gets closer to his true identity, he understands himself more. And then he can open himself up for affection and love. So as I'm writing the story, I need him to hit these little notes where he's getting closer to himself, understanding who he is, understanding the people around him and not really imposing judgment on them. And then all of those steps along the way will get him closer and closer to affection and love. There's going to be downfalls because that happens. Stories aren't linear. They're jumpy and that happens. But, that's kind of why I use this mantra as a tool to kind of set aside and just think about as I write the story.
 
[00:30:20] Matty: Got it. So, do you think that writers should go into writing a story with the idea of their formula in mind? Or might writers eventually get to the same endpoint if they start writing, and then they look back at a first draft and they say, oh, I see what's going on here and then they use that formula to, what's the word I want, solidify what they're trying to achieve?
 
[00:30:45] JP: 100%. So I used Story Hypothesis when I was drafting "Mandrake Manor," but I used Story Hypothesis when I was revising "Nerds." I hadn't used it before, and then I looked at it and I questioned what our hypothesis was, and I just kind of made sure that certain scenes, you know, were a little bit shaped in the hypothesis that I wanted it to be in.
 
I've had a couple of clients, which is where Story Hypothesis came from. These were conversations where I reviewed their work and provided my interpretation of it. Most of the time, I was hitting those notes that they wanted for their story. For example, if they were trying to embrace their true identity, but in a particular scene, the character was doing something cruel, it led me to question if the scene matched their intended hypothesis. We would then have a conversation to explore if there was a different choice the character could make in that scene for better flow. In revising, especially through conversation, Story Hypothesis proves to be a useful tool. It can be applied whenever, making it effective for various scenarios.
 
[00:32:54] Matty: Well, I think I'm seeing also why you object to the idea of a hierarchy because I think in a hierarchical structure, all the stories would be going from a lower level to a higher level. They start out starving, but when they're done, they're all self-actualized or whatever. You could shoehorn "The Hunger Games" into that, I think, but it limits you. You can imagine a story where you want to go from participation to protection or something like that. I don't know that the storyline always has to go from more foundational to more actualized or whatever. Is that part of why you don't like the idea of the hierarchical approach?
 
[00:33:39] JP: Yes, so I was actually doing a scene-by-scene analysis of "The Road" that may never see the light of day. We'll find out, but regardless, "The Road" is an apocalyptic story by Cormac McCarthy where a father and son are traveling down a road to find something better. In this world, starvation is the primary concern. There's no life anywhere, so they have to find canned goods. I was using Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but there were certain scenes where they were starving, yet making decisions that seemed higher up on this hierarchy.
 
And I had to almost continuously justify to myself, well, of course, they're starving, but we need to move the story forward because he loves his son so much. I'm like, well, emotional love is like four steps higher in the hierarchy, but they're outside in the rain, and they're going to die. But it just begs the question, does that hierarchy work all the time? Especially in Western culture, where the focus is on self-actualization, the hierarchy works well. However, in certain stories, it just doesn't. You don't have to use Max Neef, but I think the intent of using Max Neef and the chapter about my opinions about Maslow is just to think about your structure and maybe break apart from the hierarchy.
 
[00:35:14] Matty: Well, JP, thank you so much. This has been so interesting. I'm going to have to listen to it a couple of times and let it simmer because I just see all sorts of great ways to apply this to my own writing and reading. I think it's going to be fun to read books and watch movies with this kind of thing in mind. Believe it or not, I've never seen "The Matrix," and it comes up so often on the podcast that this evening, that's my assignment. I'm going to go watch "The Matrix." So I'm not just nodding like I know what I'm talking about. Thank you so much, and I know everybody's going to be interested in finding out more about Story Hypothesis. Please let them know where they can go to find that out.
 
[00:35:50] JP: Yeah, so I tried to make it as easy as possible, www.storyhypothesis.com. It redirects to my main site, but there is a page about it, so that's probably the easiest way.
 
[00:36:01] Matty: Great, thank you so much!
 
[00:36:02] JP: Thank you!

Episode 222 - Perfecting Your Story's Trajectory with Mary Carroll Moore

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Mary Carroll Moore discusses PERFECTING YOUR STORY'S TRAJECTORY, including the value of having a visual map of your story's structure; the importance of understanding the triggering event that generates the crisis and the turn from outer to inner crisis; the power of considering how the question posed at the beginning of the story maps to the answer given at the end of the story; adjusting a plot to meet genre tropes; the often overlooked arc of setting and avoiding setting cliches; and using a storyboard to check for cause and effect.

Mary Carroll Moore is the author of 14 books in 3 genres, including the Amazon bestselling novel and Hot New Release, A WOMAN'S GUIDE TO SEARCH & RESCUE, and in fact, I met Mary when I interviewed her about that book as part of my WHAT I LEARNED video series. She’s also the author of the PEN-Faulkner nominated novel QUALITIES OF LIGHT. She has taught storyboarding and writing craft for two decades at writing schools around the U.S., including Grub Street in Boston and the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

Episode Links

Author website: https://www.marycarrollmoore.com
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/marycarrollmoore/
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/marycarrollmoore/
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marycarrollmoore/
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MaryCarrollMoore

Summary

When crafting a compelling narrative, one significant task every writer must grapple with is creating a believable, engaging plot and characters, all while setting the scene flawlessly. This article serves as an enriching guide, based on a podcast conversation between Matty and best-selling author Mary Carol Moore, to creating powerful script arcs focusing on character, setting, and plot development.
 
Understanding Narrative Arcs
 
According to Mary, the trajectory a character takes from the start to the end of a book constitutes a narrative arc. Mary underlines the importance of making sure this trajectory isn't just about the character but includes the evolution of setting images and plot progression. To effectively harness narrative arcs, Mary advises intertwining character progression, plot development, and setting evolvement.
 
Plot Arc: The Compelling Question and Answer
 
Mapping your plot arc begins with identifying a central question for your story. This question forms the heart of your plot, and its resolution often provides the climax of the tale. Effectively, the crux of the plot lies in the systematic detailing of how the question asked at the beginning of the story gets answered at the end.
 
During the conversation, Mary stressed the importance of breaking that initial question up into a secondary question that comes up midway. A new challenge or crisis in the middle of the narrative can provide the necessary traction to keep the reader hooked.
 
Character Arc: Personality Development Matters
 
Similar to the plot arc, character arcs are structured around the evolution of the characters, displaying their personal growth throughout the story. They present in stages, allowing for character evolution at every step.
 
As put beautifully by Mary during the discussion, "Characters present a certain way, even in literature, and they think they're this way, and then something has to happen to make them more vulnerable, more revealed to the reader." Her conversation with Matty revolved around how an underlying event in the middle of a story can reveal a deep part of the character, prompting readers to connect more intensely with them.
 
Setting Arc: Unveiling the Story World
 
A commonly forgettable yet crucial part of the narrative arcs is the setting. For many readers and writers, the setting evolves into a character of its own. Whether it is the beautiful depiction of trees or the desolate portrayal of an abandoned city, the stage forms the canvas for the events to unfold.
 
Mary highly recommends writers to consider the setting as an essential tool to increase tension in the narrative. Going contrary to typical plot setups like 'a dark stormy night', exploring opposite scenarios, such as having intense scenes on a sunny, beautiful day, can make the experience even creepier and create thought-provoking reactions from the characters in response.
 
Ending Notes
 
Building a story is more than stitching events together. Whether you are a writer who starts with the plot, focuses on the characters, or begins with the world their characters inhabit, mingling these three elements- plot, character, and setting, remains crucial. Despite the challenges involved in arranging these elements of a story, doing so gives writers control over their narrative world and, hence, makes the process remarkably satisfying.
 
Remember, if you wish, you can find more about character, setting, and plot arcs as well as other writing techniques on Mary Carol Moore's YouTube channel. For a weekly dose of writing tips, you may also subscribe to her free Substack newsletter - 'Your Weekly Writing Exercise.' Stay tuned to more such enlightening conversations on our podcast, and keep exploring the wonderful world of writing.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Mary Carol Moore. Hey, Mary, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Mary: Hi, great to be here again.
 
Meet Mary Carroll Moore
 
[00:00:09] Matty: Yes, it is great to have you here. And to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Mary Carol Moore is the author of 14 books in three genres, including the Amazon bestselling novel and hot new release, "A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue." I met Mary when I interviewed her about that book as part of my What I Learned video series. I was so intrigued; I had to read "A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue," which was wonderful, and I can highly recommend.
 
It had two of the things that intrigue me either personally or vicariously—aviation. We talked about that earlier; I took flying lessons for a while, and my husband's a pilot. So the aviation aspect was fascinating. Also, my husband's the front man in a band in the Philadelphia area. So I also enjoyed the band-related aspects of "A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue."
 
Mary is also the author of the Penn Faulkner-nominated novel, "Qualities of Light." She has taught storyboarding and writing craft for two decades at writing schools around the U.S., including Grub Street in Boston and the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.
 
I invited Mary on the podcast to talk about narrative arcs. So let's make sure we're all coming at this from the same perspective.
 
How does Mary define narrative arcs?
 
[00:01:19] Matty: How do you define narrative arcs?
 
[00:01:22] Mary: It's a great question because there are different ways to define it, depending on what writing books you read or classes you take. For me, a narrative arc is the trajectory or the path through the story that the character takes—how the character evolves from the beginning of the book to the end of the book. I also use narrative arcs to refer to the evolution of setting images and plot. So, for me, the narrative arcs weave in three ways, and I think that's what we're going to be talking about today.
 
[00:01:55] Matty: Yeah, well, let's dive right in about what those three aspects of the arc are.
 
Having a visual map of your story's structure
 
[00:02:01] Mary: Okay. So when I've taught storyboarding at different writing schools, people come to me with the big question of structure. Many writers are confused about structure. We know how to flow things; we do NaNoWriMo or get all those words out on paper. When we come to actually analyzing the draft for whether it holds together structurally, this is often the biggest problem. When I worked as a teacher and a coach, I found that many manuscripts had a beautiful story, setting, and characters, but there weren't many solid structural elements. Readers kind of got lost. We're talking about creating a deliberate structure that you start with, and then you can go into your writing, which is flow writing or free writing, but you always have this visual map to come back to.
 
[00:02:55] Mary: And so, the easiest one to start with is plot. When people are used to doing all kinds of plot outlines, like "Save the Cat," and storyboards, there are just so many different ways to do plot outlines. I use a W storyboard because it has an up and down movement, and that is the thing that plots usually forget to do, like the middle. There needs to be something happening in the middle that really pulls the reader into a second reveal, a second crisis. We have the starting crisis that's usually in the beginning chapter or early in the book, and then we have a middle crisis that develops that original one, makes it even harder, worse, and then that will lead us to the place where things are resolved. A character has to face themselves or something has to change for the plot to be resolved. So that's, in a nutshell, how this particular approach to narrative arcs works. Yes.
 
[00:03:53] Matty: A question about that because you were saying that the plot arc is the good one to start out with. Do you find that the stumbling block that writers are facing is that they have the idea for that arc but they're forgetting about that secondary one that keeps pulling the reader through in the middle? Or is it just that it's missing, or is it just ineffectively constructed?
 
The triggering event that generates the crisis
 
[00:04:17] Mary: Well, that's a really good question. It's often missing, but if it is constructed, it doesn't tie back into the first one, so that the first one has to generate what I call the triggering event. It has to generate the crisis that runs through the first half of the book. But then there's a place in the middle of the book where things have been resolved to some extent, but something new has to come up. Some new crisis has to come up, new information. Oftentimes, this is where there's a double-crossing or a betrayal or something that you thought was true is not true, and oh my god, there's another big problem to solve. So this problem-solving has to be in, I feel, in stages. If you dump it all on the reader at the beginning, which many writers do, they think, okay, we're going to blow up a city and that will create the entire story, but it's not really true for the character part of it because characters evolve, and they might have solved that first problem, but what happens to the problem inside themselves? So having a second crisis often in the plot allows the character that evolution that you need to create the character's arc, the character's narrative arc.
 
[00:05:25] Matty: So what that made me think of, and I think because you mentioned blowing up the city, and I didn't think about this ahead, so listeners, bear with me, but what it made me think of was the Will Smith movie that was, I think it was called "I Am Legend," but it was at least based on the book "I Am Legend." It's where Will Smith is in the sort of post-apocalyptic world and is trying to escape the zombies. And what I thought of was the scene where, spoiler alert, his dog gets bitten by a zombie or wounded by a zombie. So now the dog is going to turn into a zombie. And that's both, I think, kind of that secondary hook that's going to keep the reader interested, but it's also very revealing of the character's personality. Is that actually an example of what you're talking about? Or is that an example of something different?
 
[00:06:17] Mary: No, that's a great example because what you're looking for in that second crisis is something that will reveal a deep part of the character, something that hasn't been shown yet. Because characters present a certain way, even in literature, and they think they're this way, and then something has to happen to make them actually more vulnerable, more revealed to the reader, so the reader can actually get behind them.
 
And this is a big part of literature today. We used to go for action stories that didn't really have to reveal any character, but then action stories, thrillers, started to reveal character, and then that started to be part of our culture as readers. We have to understand a person and who's behind this event and get to know them, and even if we don't like them, there's somebody that we are connected to by the end, and I think that point in the middle, in my particular narrative arc storyboards, that's where the reader gets to know the character. So, yes, a great example, Matty.
 
[00:07:14] Matty: Yeah, the example of character arc, this is an example that I think comes up each time, is the James Bond character. Like, I think if we were having this interview, I don't know, five or ten years ago, James Bond was always the example of the exception, the proof of the rule that James Bond has no character arc. Yet, I think as time went on, the screenwriters or the writers added that because I think it was something that current audiences would have been disappointed not to see.
 
[00:07:43] Mary: Yeah, I'm really intrigued by this. So I'm reading an older thriller that I love that's called "The Dog Stars" by Peter Heller. He's a literary thriller writer from Colorado, and he's won all sorts of awards, and he's very prolific. But this "Dog Stars" was his first book, and I was kind of preparing for this talk today with you, and I wanted to look at a book that I love and find out why I'm so invested in the character. And it turns out that he has a crisis right at that point of the mid-book, where something personal happens to him, and it causes him to make all these decisions that he wouldn't have made before. So he actually takes the risk that he had talked himself out of because he's lost something that was incredibly valuable to him.
 
And I thought, wow, what a great structure, you know? He's got that plot point in the middle that causes the character to face something. The end of his world, so then he has nothing to lose. He can go ahead and move forward into this huge risk, which of course creates the second half of the book and turns out really good in the end. But I think all these good writers, you know, the really good ones, you can kind of take their books and analyze them and find that second point.
 
[00:08:55] Matty: So I sort of took you from plot arc to character arc, but is there more you wanted to talk about with regard to the structure of the plot arc and what writers should be looking for to assess the plot arc in their own work?
 
How does the question posed at the beginning of the story map to the answer given at the end of the story?
 
[00:09:07] Mary: I think one of the best techniques I gave to my students when I was teaching was to see if there's a question asked at the beginning of the story, like, will this world be saved? You know, the blowing-up city thing. And then what kind of answer is given at the end. Yes, it's going to be saved. No, it's not going to be saved.
 
We're all going to colonize the new planet, whatever it is. So take those two points, the beginning and the ending point, which on the storyboard would be point one and point five because they're five points on a storyboard. And then consider point three. Take your question that you begin with, "Will this city be saved?" and see if you can twist it. What happens if this city is not saved? And then what other question would evolve from that? For instance, would we leave this city, or would we try to save it? So that there's kind of a new question asked at the center of the book. That seemed to help people, just to start with a question, figure out the answer at the end, and then break that question up so that you have a second question at the middle, and that's the thing that you can base your plot point on or your character change on.
 
For instance, in this Peter Heller book, we have the question seems to be, am I going to survive this terrible situation that's happened to the world? You know, what will my life be like? Will I ever find love again? Can I stand living with this person that I'm living with who's the only other survivor that I know of? And then in the middle, the question is, how will I live without this thing that I've just lost? So it becomes more personal. It's almost like there's an individual question or a limited question in the beginning and then that evolves into a more universal question in the middle. And that seemed to help my students sometimes just to think of it as first in terms of questions and answers and then a midpoint question.
 
[00:11:43] Matty: Yeah, I like that idea of applying sort of like the rules you learn about writing a newspaper article, the who, what, when, where, why, and how, and say, and the middle point say, well, is it a good question, how is this going to happen, or is it a good question, why is this going to happen, or to whom is it going to happen, or whatever.
 
[00:11:17] Mary: Yeah, that's a fantastic way to approach it. Yeah.
 
[00:11:20] Matty: I was talking about Alien with someone, and I was trying to apply that, I'm trying to think in Alien, because Alien seems to me to be sort of at one level, at least a very straightforward, you know, there's a monster, are we going to get away from the monster kind of plotline. And I'm trying to think if there was that moment in the middle, in the way that there was that moment with the dog in “I Am Legend.”
 
[00:11:43] Mary: Think about the character. Like is there a question that the character asks in the middle that's different? So, are we going to get away from the monster? But is there something that becomes more personal than just the escape? Or am I going to be able to save someone? For instance, is often people take it out of just the initial crisis into something more personal.
 
[00:12:08] Matty: Yeah, I guess the only thing I'm thinking of is that, and I finally remembered where I was talking about this was a patron event with Jeff Elkins, the Dialogue Doctor, that there's this romantic interest that I think was inserted late in the game. It seemed like the kind of thing that was probably slapped on there at the end because they decided they needed a romantic relationship. So there was this kind of twist that all the characters weren't equally important to save, that's kind of, you know, there were people that I think the viewer wanted more to survive the encounter with the alien than others, the captain being one when it became clear that there was this relationship between Ripley and the captain, and some of the other characters were sort of odious and you didn't really care when they got eaten up by the monster.
 
[00:13:00] Matty: So I keep, keep taking off on these little sidetracks. Maybe I'll keep this in just because it's fun.
 
[00:13:05] Mary: I think it is.
 
[00:13:08] Matty: Yeah, so are there other examples you can think of in addition to the Dog Stars, where there are these questions? Because I've never heard anybody talk about structuring quite this way with this question in the middle that provides the impetus for drawing people through. I think it's worth some careful examination.
 
How Mary inserted the twist in A WOMAN'S GUIDE TO SEARCH AND RESCUE
 
[00:13:26] Mary: Well, can I use my book? “The Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue”? Okay. So, this book, I had to structure really carefully because I was working with the same dilemma that I had a woman who starts off with a plane crash. She escapes from the law, and she crashes her plane, and she has to meet her estranged sister. So, I thought, okay, well, that's a great start. It all, you know, all works.
 
But what am I going to have in the middle? Because, she's injured and she's stuck in a cabin in a blizzard, which is the worst kind of plot point you can imagine to work out of. You know, you've got someone stuck in a room or a cabin or anything. It's really bad news for structure. So I had to figure out what would happen in the middle that would change everything. And so what I thought was, what if her sister discovers her there and she decides to first turn her in and then decides to help her.
 
So that, it was about the two characters coming together, and the middle of my book is a fight, basically a fight scene with the two characters. They've decided that they're not going to collaborate, they're not going to be sisters, they're not going to be family, and the sister that finds the hidden sister, so Kate is the search and rescue pilot, and Red is the one who's escaped, and so Kate finds Red on her property, endangering her own daughter, and she's got to make this huge decision about what she's going to do.
 
A turn from outer crisis to inner crisis
 
[00:14:54] Mary: So that was my second plot point. And I decided to put that kind of in the middle of the book so that there would be not just the story of the search and rescue outwardly but the search and rescue inwardly. So that is what turned it from the outer crisis of the fleeing and the crime being investigated and Red being wanted by the law into something that's more important to me in this story, which is about the unity of the two sisters and how they're going to come together. And at first, of course, they can't. So the crisis is, oh my god, Red is in danger, she's come all this way, and she can't get help. So that was the point where she lost everything.
 
And Kate also, in a sense, lost everything because, you know, she's been lonely all her life, and here's the chance for her to have a family, and she says no, you know, but just because of her own rules and her decision to be somebody, you know, I would never help somebody who's slightly shady, you know, suspected of a crime.
 
So that was kind of my example of what I could do. So that changed everything, and now if Kate's going to help Red, then all of the rest of it comes together. Suddenly, they're a team, and Kate uses all her skills. She goes out to the woods again, and she finds the missing item that will exonerate Red.
 
So, all of the things that happen later are the things that will actually create the rest of the story. So, not to just point at my own work, but that was an example of me struggling for years trying to figure out, well, how do I get her out of this stupid cabin in a blizzard? You know, what can I create here? Well, what if her sister finds her and then refuses to help her? So that would be like the bottom, a moment of, you know, nothing is worse than this. So I guess that would be an example.
 
Adjusting a plot to meet genre tropes
 
[00:16:45] Matty: Yeah, well, I'm glad you brought that up because I did have a question, and we're sort of giving spoilers away for lots of things, but I don't think it would deter anyone from actually getting “A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue” based on our conversation, but one thing I was expecting that didn't happen, and it didn't lessen my enjoyment of the story, which I thought was wonderful, but did make me wonder, is that I was expecting that the, the bad guy, Cotton,
 
[00:17:09] Mary: Billy, Billy Cotton. Yeah, good.
 
[00:17:12] Matty: is, so there's the sort of flashback aspect of Red and Billy's interaction before the story takes place that sets the stage for what happens later, and then there's the altercation with Red and Billy, I think, kind of in the middle of the book, maybe a third over the way or three or something like that. But then I was expecting Billy to show up at the cabin because what I thought it was building to was going to be, the big climactic confrontation where Red was going to save her sister and her niece from Billy, who shows up in this seemingly safe place.
 
Mary: Well, I had that in there. I did.
 
[00:17:53] Matty: So can you talk a little bit about how you made the decision there?
 
[00:17:58] Mary: Well, I had him come back and burn the cabin down with them in it. And I thought that was great. So that was like the last, you know, big conflict scene. And, the feedback I got was, it's too much. It's, it makes it more thriller than women's lit. So I'm really interested in the women relationships in this book. I think that the whole idea of women heroes and found family and all of those aspects, those are the things that really do it for me.
 
The thriller part, I'm not really a thriller writer. So my feedback was, you know, you've got too many murders, too many things happening here and you've got to tone it down and we don't really need Billy again. We really are invested in the sisters. So I reluctantly took that out and that's going to be an outtake. I'm going to surely do something with it. Cause it was a fabulous scene. And, Alex ends up shooting Billy and he dies in the cabin fire. And I thought, oh, this is great.
 
[00:18:55] Matty: So he doesn't actually burn them with them in it, and then they all die except Billy.
 
[00:18:58] Mary: No, he sets it on fire and they, and Red is alert and found, finds him and goes out and tries to talk him into, you know, anyway, there's a whole thing where she manages to get him into the cabin and then she and Alex escape and he's drunk and he's basically a mess and he lights the cabin on fire and burns in it.
 
[00:22:38] Mary: So that was when I was, you know, trying to figure out how to simplify. I had actually given the manuscript to a beta reader, who said, you know, it was really great, but she said, I had to go to work the next day, and I couldn't put it down. So you know, you've got to fix that. And that was the feedback I was looking for. I thought, okay, I really want to fix that.
 
I really want to fix it so that you could read it in three days and really enjoy it. And so that was, you know, looking at the plot and cutting things out and then, and then making sure that the character was a continuous evolution. And that was, it was hard. It was really hard because the book was really all over the place. It was a mess.
 
And so I had to go back and cut and cut and cut. And then the editor, when I got the editor that I hired to help me with the plot, she suggested a couple of scenes in the middle, that were, where the characters were sitting around, and she just suggested I take them out because they weren't really evolving the plot.
 
They were just kind of interesting but a side road. And, that was a big revelation for me, you know, how plot can be, and it was fascinating because it really made the book much tighter.
 
[00:23:43] Matty: Yeah. So I'm also curious about the decision to tell the story out of chronological order because there's the initial plane crash that sort of sets everything in motion, but then you cut to what is the, you know, the big climactic confrontation with Billy before it actually happens, and then it happens.
 
And then there's the interaction between, Red and Billy before the story started. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided to structure it that way?
 
Playing with timeline and tension
 
[00:24:11] Mary: Oh, I love playing with time. I do. I do it in all my books. So that's a really good point. I think, I think that, I don't know, it was probably five or six years ago. I went to see a play in New York and it was called Constellations. And it was the same, the same thing, but it was so beautifully done.
 
I just remember thinking, you know, I've got to try this sometime because what they did was play with the timeline and the two characters met each other over and over again. It was just a couple, but they met each other over and over again in different times and different places, different situations. So I really wanted to try that.
 
And in this book, it really worked because I wanted to give the reader kind of the bottom of the story. So, Billy, at the end, when the climax is there, is he's getting his due. You know, I really wanted him to get what he deserved, because he was just a really despicable character. So, I thought, well, what if I show that scene in the beginning, because I want the reader to know, that it's coming. I want them to be, you know, really wanting that to happen. So that was kind of the first, you know, the first thinking about it. And then I thought, well, what if I show how it actually happens? So I give them the bottom, and then I start working up.
 
[00:25:22] Mary: And then, you know, what happened before that that could, you know, lead to that. And then what happens before that? And I just kind of keep building it so that there's a climax, a climax, a climax, and then the big climax at the end. And that's what, you know, was really kind of fun for me to do and fun for me to read because I didn't know, you know, I didn't know what was going to happen. It was, oh my God, this is just so much fun.
 
[00:25:48] Matty: And it really, I think, sets up that, and I know I've talked about this in previous episodes, but that desire, not just to know what happens, but how does it happen, because you've set up this situation that I think you know, the reader is wondering, well, how are we going to get from where we are to there? Because it's not obvious.
 
[00:26:04] Mary: Right.
 
[00:26:05] Matty: So it really does drive you through the book in a way that I thought was just super clever and worked really well.
 
[00:26:13] Mary: Good, I'm glad. I'm glad it worked for you. Yeah. And it was fun. It was really fun to do. It was not easy, but it was fun.
 
[00:26:21] Matty: Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm glad that you did it because I do think that it really set up that sense of, you know, I got to keep turning pages because I need to know, you know, we're working our way up to the climax and I need to know how this is all going to, to play out.
 
[00:26:34] Mary: Yeah, it was, it was good. It was good. It was a good writing experience.
 
[00:26:38] Matty: Yeah. So, any other thoughts on narrative arcs before we sign off here?
 
[00:26:43] Mary: No, I think, I think I covered it. I just think that the three narrative arcs, the plot, the character, and the setting, if you can
 
So, she helped me because I had to go back to my strength and my entry point, which is characters. When I went back to characters, I realized I had enough plot to form the story, to make the structure work. The characters were the heart of it; that's where my strength is as a writer. We all have to know where we enter the story and how not to transform ourselves into something we're not.
 
That was my lesson, a costly many-year lesson, but I'm glad I worked it out.
 
[00:23:57] Matty: I think that's also a great example of when you're picking the people from whom you're going to accept critique, be sure that your expectation, their expectation, and their expertise are aligned. There's a lot of conversation about the importance of having a professional editor look at your work if you're independently published. Still, there isn't as much conversation about vetting the person giving advice. Every person brings their preferences and expectations, and it could lead you down a path you don't want to follow, as you were describing in your case at first.
 
[00:24:36] Mary: I'm such a good student. Somebody I respect says, "Add another murder here," I'll do it. Even if it's not my strength and the thing I really want to do, I'll go ahead and add the murder. Then I'll say, "Oh my god, I have taken this way far from who I am." Now I have to cut back, come back to the core of the story that is me. I'm happy because the book came out the way I wanted it to, even with the missing outtakes. The book is what I want, and people comment that they don't want to end it because they don't want to leave the characters. That's what I really wanted from my readers, that they get so involved in the characters they don't want to stop reading them.
 
Character arc across a series
 
[00:25:18] Matty: The people who are very interested in characters often go the series route. Now you have book after book where you can delve into those characters' arc in a more complex way than you can in an individual book.
 
[00:25:34] Mary: The second of a series, Qualities of Light, was the prequel. I do have a whole outline for the third book.
 
[00:25:42] Matty: Nice.
 
[00:25:43] Mary: If I really want to do it, where Kate and Red go to find their father. The missing piece for their relationship is that the father who's betrayed them both has another family and has a daughter he's taught to fly, who is now their half-sister. That may come up for me. I don't know. I have another book coming out next year that's not about this group of characters. It's a different book, but it's also a novel. I don't know that I'll, I have to take a break for a while, then I'll come back probably and consider what do I do with the characters of "Women's Guide to Search and Rescue" and their missing father because that's like a question mark at the end of the book.
 
[00:26:26] Matty: It's interesting because if you decide that you don't want to pursue that, your next book comes out, you're meshed with that. Maybe that takes you into a different direction. Then you have to have made sure that if someone only reads "A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue," or reads the prequel or any combination of those things, the character experience they have is satisfying.
 
[00:26:57] Mary: I remember running into that when I read Philip Pullman's books, "The Golden Compass" and all of those. They're children's fantasy books that I loved. I remember them creating the movie for "The Golden Compass," and they left it with this huge bit of hanging story. There wasn't that feeling of completion that his book had. I was so mad as a viewer and reader that the movie didn't have that sense of closure. So, those question and answer techniques that I gave earlier, if the writer can answer that initial question and at least give the reader some satisfaction that something has been wrapped up, then I think a series works really well as standalone too.
 
But if the ending of the book is so dependent on not resolving that question that we asked in the beginning, either I would suggest that the writer rethink the question or somehow give the reader enough material, enough change, enough sense of satisfaction, so that they don't have that frustration that I had with the "Golden Compass" movie. Otherwise, you'd lose me completely. I need to have some closure at the end of a book, even if it's part of a series.
 
Adjusting secondary arcs to serve the primary
 
[00:28:13] Matty: Thinking about this in terms of my own two series, the Ann Kinnear suspense novels are more standalone. You can read them in order, and there's some benefit to doing that, but you could pick them up in any order, and that would be fine. The Lizzie Ballard thrillers are definitely a very obvious overarching arc. There are three books out now, and the fourth one is coming out in January 2024. That will be the first of, I'm anticipating, another set of three that will have a continuing but self-contained arc.
 
For all the books, I only have the most general possible idea of what the overarching arc is going to be for the second trilogy. Fortunately, so far, it's worked out. I'm really pleased with the arc as represented in the first trilogy. I feel relatively confident that the arc of the second trilogy is going to work out. But I can imagine getting to book five and going, "Oh my God! I don't know what's going to happen next." There are people who plan out their 10-book series ahead of time, which I just think would be so difficult because you learn so much when you're writing the book. You might get to the end of book three of your 10-book series and say, "Oh man, this person really wouldn't do what I thought they were going to be doing in the next X number of books."
 
[00:29:29] Mary: I'm so behind that. I really agree. I've never been somebody who could plot that much. The writing process for me, I'm more of a pantser than a plotter, but I tend to grow the book as I write it. I don't know what these characters are going to do. Since I'm a character-based writer, it's very hard for me to say, "By the end, she's going to do this and this and this." Maybe I'll have a sense that by the end, she's going to have a certain level of satisfaction about this question being answered, like found family. Do I have a family or don't I have a family? As far as what happens to the person in getting there, that's the stuff that evolves as I write.
 
I didn't know Red, for instance, was a self-centered person in the beginning, but she definitely is. She doesn't think about this family that she's fleeing to and what danger she's going to put them in. The fact that I had no clue about that until I had completed the draft and then realized, oh my god, she's changed by the end. She's now aware of other people, aware of the dangers she's brought, and she's willing to make amends for that. That was a big deal for me to learn as a writer. But how do you sit down and figure that out ahead of time? Maybe if you're a plot writer, you don't have that problem. But for me, as a character writer, that was—I'm with you Matty—I just can't know that ahead of time, I have to evolve it.
 
[00:30:56] Matty: Yeah, I think there's probably the consideration that forms the foundation of what you want to achieve across a series, and then you can tweak the other aspects accordingly. So for me, the arc of what I anticipate will be the second Lizzy Ballard trilogy will be mainly around the relationship of the protagonist and the antagonist, having it start with them very much at odds but evolving so that in the second book, they, in some way, would have to join forces against an even bigger evil. In the third one, in some way, one of them makes the sacrifice, decides to sacrifice herself for a greater good.
 
Having that as even that general idea, just knowing that, I feel like, okay, that's enough. I can proceed with this series knowing that that's enough structure. And I know that because that trajectory is based on the characters, then I can adjust the plot to accommodate, as opposed to a trajectory that's based on plot, and you would adjust the characters as needed to achieve that.
 
[00:32:08] Mary: That's exactly it. So I adjust the plot. I create the plot based on what the characters need to learn. Exactly. And I find that very satisfying as a writer. I don't like doing it the other way, although when I studied with the thriller writer, that's what he taught me how to do, you know, basically have your plot be the most important thing.
 
[00:32:28] Matty: Well, I think that, yes, we're talking about it. I'm thinking that basing it on plot—and I'm saying this as someone who's basing the trajectory on character—it would be more difficult to base it on plot because you have to keep coming up with new ideas to keep it interesting for yourself, not to mention the readers. Whereas with characters, if you've created characters you really love, then I think just naturally, you want to spend more time with them and then you find ways to put them in situations that enable you to spend more time with them.
 
[00:32:55] Mary: Right, right. Right, exactly. And they generate the ideas of, okay, I ask myself, what does this person long for? And what have they lost? And then from those two questions, I can go into, oh, they long for this and this. Then I can create the plot points based on that longing. And then what have they lost? Then again, I have a list of things they've lost. And then I can create plot points based on, well, what if they reclaim that in some way? So the character, for me, always drives those plot points. It's fun. You know, it's a really great way to approach writing.
 
[00:33:29] Matty: Well, when I talk to authors who are writing especially in a series, a lot of times the conversation is around, I need to have this happen plot-wise. What can I get the characters to do to enable that to happen? And I think, oh, that seems really backward. But then I'll read the resulting book. And I'm like, well, whatever they did, it worked because this is a great story. It's a great plot. It's great characters. It's a successful result.
 
Whereas for myself, I hold the plot up to. So, one of my little sayings for my craft is, you need to be able to explain everything the character does by saying, "She did this because," not "She did this despite the fact that." So, she went into the dark basement when she heard the mysterious sounds because the rabbit hutch was down there, and she had to make sure the rabbit was okay. Versus, "She went downstairs despite the fact that she had just heard on the news that a crazy person had escaped from the local mental hospital and was known to hide in people's basements when he got out." One of those works and one of those doesn't, but that's because I'm looking at it from a character-centric point of view.
 
[00:34:41] Mary: And I think that works for me best. It's great.
 
The arc of setting
 
[00:34:45] Mary: I was just going to talk about setting for a moment because that's the third arc that people often forget about, especially writers that focus on plot. They think the setting is not really important, and they get bored by it in other books. Long descriptions are not their thing. I would propose that the setting, and you probably heard this before, is a character. One thing you can do is look at the weather and chart the weather for the different plot points that you're going to be doing and see if the weather can become a problem in those plot points. Then you have an extra element of tension that both the characters and the plot have to deal with.
 
So I find setting to be really a fun and tricky thing. I actually chart the setting, you know, what it looks like and the temperature and all these things by day in my novels. I find that I can really use that, not to be cliched about it like a dark and stormy night, but the idea that a setting is going to create more problems for someone might give them an injury, for instance, or might make them lose something, or they're forced to stay in a place that they want to escape from. You can't really do that completely with plot. You have to have other elements. So I just say to all those plot writers out there that hate setting, you know, this is a possible addition and a positive for your narrative arcs.
 
[00:36:08] Matty: Well, I like that because I have a standalone that's coming out next year, and the weather plays a very strong role in it. With both plot and character, you want that kind of ebb and flow. You want to give the reader a little rest between the more exciting or emotionally intense parts. But it's interesting with setting, I think you can have sort of a straight line. In my story, the temperature gets colder and colder over the course of, um, some of the parts of "A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue" reminded me of this. It's a straight line from the beginning of the book to the end of the book in terms of the falling temperatures. It creates a ticking time bomb because you kind of know, oh, if I follow this trajectory, we're going to get to a problem at the end. You don't necessarily need to have those same kinds of ups and downs in a setting arc. Do you concur with that, or does that seem weird?
 
[00:37:04] Mary: I do. Yeah, I do. And I just wanted people to know that it could be a really positive element in creating tension. And it doesn't have to be cliched. Like yours, getting colder and colder, that's definitely going to force the characters to do stuff. That'll force the plot to be some way, you know, so it's a very important, to me, it's a very important element. So it's part of your world-building. People buy into worlds now. It's really important in literature for me, at least. The world is like something that I relate to as a character. If the world is built well and the world changes as you go forward, then I'm really hooked.
 
Avoiding setting cliches
 
[00:37:40] Matty: Yeah, I'm a big fan of probably more description of setting than I think is fashionable to advise these days. If somebody goes into the bar, I kind of want to see what the bar looks like. I'm not happy with just, "She went into the bar and sat down and ordered a beer." I think that thing about what you said about cliches is really important because I'm just buffing up a chapter at the end of my fourth Lizzie Ballard book, and it's where the big physical altercation happens. I look back on my other books, and I'm like, "Yeah, there's one that happens, like, during a sleet storm, and there's one that takes place during a big storm in an Adirondack cabin."
 
I'm like, I don't want to keep going back to that, so I'm having it be like a beautiful sunny spring morning. But then you say, despite the fact that it was a beautiful sunny spring morning, it was still creepy and horrible. But you don't want it to tap into a dark and stormy night. Any tips there for how people can get around relying too heavily on the dark and stormy night.
 
[00:38:43] Mary: I think, I'm going to follow your lead, and I'm going to say, what if you did the opposite? Because that even makes it creepier. So if it happens on a completely beatific day, and the weather isn't a factor of negatives, then that's even more, you know, what if you can play with that? I like that idea. Yeah.
 
[00:39:06] Matty: And you could even, I mean, it offers some nice opportunities for character development because you can say, you know, how come despite the fact that it was a beautiful balmy morning, she was still miserable, or what about it set her teeth on edge, or how come, you know, she's complaining about the sun being in her eyes when she shouldn't. The character's reaction to the non-traditional setting can be illuminating.
 
[00:39:29] Mary: And what if you took that another step and asked about the memory? So the character's got all this backstory, right? Things happen at certain times and certain kinds of weather, and they have memories of setting, and then you can pull the memory of that setting in. It can be something that will enhance the miserableness. So you want to make your characters as miserable as possible so they'll be forced to act, right? So mean!
 
[00:39:57] Matty: The things we do. Rubbing our hands together and cackling evilly.
 
[00:40:02] Mary: I know, it's one of the few places we feel like we have control over our world here.
 
[00:40:06] Matty: Yes. Mary, I took us pretty far afield. Was there anything else about narrative arcs, plot arcs, character arcs, setting arcs that you would like to cover before we wrap up?
 
[00:40:18] Mary: One small technique that I have suggested, and by the way, listeners can look at my YouTube channel, and I have three different storyboarding videos, tutorials there, so you can check out how storyboards are built from those YouTube channels. But the one thing that I'd recommend is, once you have a draft that's pretty solid, that you're pretty pleased with as far as the plot points, I personally take each plot point, major and minor, and put it on individual index cards or sticky notes. Then I'll put them on my wall. I have a wall in my office, and I'll try to see if there's an effect from each thing. So, I'll try to, it's not going to be, you know, I think I heard once, you don't do this happened, and then this happened, then this happened. You do because of this, this happens. So I'm looking for cause and effect.
 
And so I have all these plot points that I've decided, and now I'm going to see does the second plot point connect to the first one? Does the first one create the second one? Does the second one create the third one? You can check your cause and effect for your narrative arc that way really well. I find when it's all written in a manuscript and it's on my computer, I can't separate out in my mind the different plot points. This physical storyboarding on my wall really helps. You can do that again with the character arc as well to say, okay, the character makes this decision in Chapter 3, do I set that up well in the previous chapters? So, does their state of mind or state of being create that decision point? Then, does that decision point create their next change?
 
Basically, you're analyzing the character arc that way too. That would be another kind of technique that I've used, and I've felt very successful with it because it really catches my blind spots and my, you know, this happened, then this happened, then this happened, or the character does something, and it's not earned out. So when I get feedback from my writers group or my agent, it's like, yeah, she does this decision, but there's no reason for it. I don't believe she'd do it. So this will catch those and keep you honest, I guess.
 
[00:42:30] Matty: Yeah, I love that. So much fun. Well, Mary, thank you so much for this great conversation about arcs. And you've given the listeners and viewers one place where they can go to find out more information about that topic, but where can they go to find out more about you and everything you do online?
 
[00:42:46] Mary: marycarolmoore.com. You got the spelling of my name there, two Rs, two Ls, two Os. And on that, I also have my link to my weekly Substack newsletter, which is your weekly writing exercise, where I give these techniques in a little essay every week. So that's free, and people can sign up for that if they'd like to get a little boost to their writing every Friday. I also have my books listed on that page on my website, but they're all over the internet too. Any bookseller, you can go and look for "A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue."
 
[00:43:17] Matty: Which I can highly recommend.
 
[00:43:19] Mary: Thank you, Matty. I love that.
 
[00:43:22] Matty: Thank you, Mary.

Episode 221 - Leveraging Your Tribe of Influence with Stephanie Chandler

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Stephanie Chandler discusses LEVERAGING YOUR TRIBE OF INFLUENCE, including the power of tapping into your existing tribe and of expanding beyond that tribe; the value of beta readers to address the problem of obscurity; the downside of promoting outside your target audience, of selling to other writers, and of relying on the "rented real estate" of social media; the importance of creating a reciprocal relationship and exhibiting professionalism; tips for pursuing aspirational contacts; and how each new contact opens a network of others.

Stephanie Chandler is the author of several books including The Nonfiction Book Publishing Plan. She is CEO of the Nonfiction Authors Association, a vibrant community for writers, and the Nonfiction Writers Conference, a live event conducted entirely online since 2010. A frequent speaker at business events and on the radio, she has been featured in Entrepreneur, BusinessWeek, The Writer, Writer’s Digest, and Wired magazine.

Episode Links

Author website: https://nonfictionauthorsassociation.com
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/nonfictionauthorsassociation/
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/nonfictionassociation/
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniechandler
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@nonfictionauthorsassociati6015

Summary

In a recent conversation on the Indie Author Podcast, Matty, the podcast host, invited Stephanie Chandler, author and CEO of the Nonfiction Authors Association, to share valuable insights on how authors can leverage their existing tribes, or communities, to boost their book launches.
 
A Warm Welcome
 
The podcast kicked off with warm greetings between Matty and Stephanie. As an author and a staple in the publishing industry, Stephanie’s insights were welcomed with much anticipation.
 
Background on Stephanie Chandler
 
Before diving into the heart of the conversation, Matty elaborated on Stephanie's background. As a renowned author, the CEO of the Nonfiction Authors Association, and the brainpower behind the Nonfiction Writers Conference, Stephanie was portrayed as a trusted authority for indie authors.
 
Stephanie's perspective about authors having an existing tribe, or an audience, was particularly mentioned, emphasizing that authors often underestimate the potential of their current networks.
 
Leveraging Existing Tribes
 
During the conversation, Stephanie gave real examples of how she leverages her network when launching a new book. Recognizing the importance of her personal and professional contacts, she emphasized the significance of authors exploring beyond industry circles. Your tribe could consist of old school friends, neighbors, or even coworker relations in different industries – all of whom could become cheerleaders for your book.
 
Meeting Your Readers Where They Are
 
One aspect of our conversation centered around the transition of an author's tribe. From people who support you because they like you to people who genuinely enjoy your book and stay for the content. It’s essential to recognize this shift and expand your reach beyond your initial group of supporters.
 
Your Community and Your Tribe
 
The conversation then segued into beta readers, a vital part of the book publishing journey, particularly with an eye for building a loyal tribe. Matty underscored the need for beta readers to improve the manuscript and identify the core group of people invested in the author's work. Stephanie added that beta readers could serve as your initial launch team, promoting your book within their networks, thus expanding your tribe.
 
Aspirational Tribe: Beyond Your Immediate Circle
 
Finally, the conversation reached its peak, discussing the importance of identifying the "aspirational tribe," those key influencers and figures in your genre you wish to engage with. Stephanie suggested that showing professionalism, understanding your target audience, and crafting your pitch in a way that offers value are steps towards engaging with your aspirational tribe.
 
Final Thoughts
 
In conclusion, the podcast episode underscored the centrality of building and leveraging your tribe in the book-writing journey. The conversation between Matty and Stephanie shared practical advice for burgeoning and established authors on identifying, growing, and maintaining their tribes.
 
The podcast inculcated the concept that growing your author tribe is not an isolated task. It's about connecting with your network, meeting your readers where they are, and continuing to expand your reach beyond those initial circles. And above all, it's about nurturing relationships that matter, to your book, to yourself, and ultimately to your tribe.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Stephanie Chandler. Hey Stephanie, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Stephanie: Hey Matty, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.
 
Meet Stephanie Chandler
 
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you. Stephanie Chandler is the author of several books, including the Nonfiction Book Publishing Plan. She is the CEO of the Nonfiction Authors Association, a vibrant community for writers, and the Nonfiction Writers Conference, a live event conducted entirely online since 2010. A frequent speaker at business events and on the radio, she has been featured in Entrepreneur, Business Week, Writer's Digest, and Wired Magazine.
 
The Power of Tapping into Your Existing Tribe
 
[00:00:33] Matty: And I invited Stephanie on the podcast because I heard her speaking on the idea of leveraging your existing tribe of influence. Listeners to the podcast know that we often discuss what you can do once you've identified the group of people you want to reach out to. What I really like is Stephanie's perspective that you probably have a bigger tribe than you already realize and that you're not starting from zero. You already have a pool of people to tap into. So, Stephanie, I'm really just going to open it up with that introduction, and we'll see where the conversation takes us in terms of realizing who your tribe already is.
 
[00:01:12] Stephanie: Great, I love that. So yeah, this is something that I do every time I launch a new book. I'm going through it right now. I have a book coming out in January, so I will sit down and think about who do I know, and maybe people I haven't connected with in some time. You and I are busy people, and we have lots of friends in the industry. I make a long list of people that I know, and I go through my emails. I look through my social media contacts because we forget when we lose touch with people.
 
Another thing I'd like to recommend to authors is beyond your own industry. Who do you know in your own circle? This could be people you went to school with, former coworkers, neighbors, people that you coached your kid's soccer team with 10 years ago. Let me just say that these people who have been friends or acquaintances in your life, when you have a book coming out, that's really exciting, especially to people who haven't written a book. Letting them know that this is happening, they want to support you, they want you to be successful.
 
I think about how I come from Silicon Valley, and if I wrote technology books, you can bet I would be reaching out to all my former coworkers who are now at 25 different software companies. They've moved on in the last 20 years, but I'd be reaching out and saying, "Hey, do you want to buy books to give away to your staff? Do you want to buy books to give to your customers? Can you bring me in to do a speaking engagement? Can you put me on your podcast? Can I contribute to your blog or your company magazine?" That's the point of this exercise—spend some time digging into who you know and how they might be able to help you successfully launch and promote your book.
 
[00:03:07] Matty: Yeah, I know that when I left the corporate world after a couple of decades, I had hundreds and hundreds of LinkedIn contacts. There was a period of time where I wasn't tapping into them at all because I just thought, oh, well, that's from a different life, and they don't need to know what I'm doing now. But, I changed my mind about that for all the reasons that you just said.
 
The downside of writers selling to writers
 
[00:03:25] Matty: And I think the other thing that's really interesting is that I realized during a book launch or two ago, I was comparing the book launch, which was just like, hey, everybody, I have a new book. It was the world's most pathetic book launch. When I think back to my earlier book launches, I would have a happy hour at a local bar and do it up more. I realized that part of that is when I was launching my early books, my pool of acquaintances were all non-writers. So, as you were saying, if you write a book, it's big news with that group of people. Whereas now, my pool of acquaintances is mainly writers, and if you say, "Oh, I'm launching a book," we're like, big whoop because, they all launched a book, like, yesterday.
 
[00:04:36] Stephanie: One of my pet peeves is writers trying to sell to writers. Whenever I go to speak at a local writers’ group or a writers’ conference, writers are constantly trying to sell. That is just missing the point to me. With marketing, you really want to know your target audience and explain what's in it for them to read your book.
 
So when you're promoting your book to fellow writers, unless we read the same genre, to me, that is not your best use of your time. Then there's that crossover between those people. Like I said, my former coworkers are in Silicon Valley. I write books for writing, nonfiction publishing, and marketing. Most of them probably aren't interested in that, so they're not my main tribe. I'm focusing on people who can potentially support the book in some way, are interested in the book.
 
One coworker comes to mind who now works at Google. Google has a speaker series. So guess what? I will be reaching out to him because, there's that old statistic that we don't know where it came from, but it says that 80 percent of people want to write a book. So that's always something I could lean on for that.
 
Expanding past your initial tribe
 
[00:05:33] Matty: I think that writers early in their careers, when you launch your first book, chances are you're going to sell it to your mom, your neighbor, and your college roommate. I think there's also a transition to understanding that your tribe changes from the people who know and like you to the people who want to buy your book because they are interested in your book's topic and the genre. Maybe you don't want to keep hammering that initial tribe if you've graduated past mom, your neighbor, and the person you went to school with. Is that a mindset shift about understanding the tribe?
 
[00:06:13] Stephanie: Well, yeah, and expanding your reach, right? I think this is maybe somewhere that authors struggle because you've got your initial community of people that know and love you. But then what happens after that? So how do you keep your momentum? Because book marketing isn't about the first 30 days. It's about the next five years. So you want to create that long game strategy, which means growing your tribe of influence. It means finding your target audience. Where are they spending time? How can you connect with them?
 
I'm a huge believer in building your own email list, getting involved. For example, does your target audience participate in any trade associations? If so, can you go and participate in those trade associations? Maybe you write books about dog care. There are lots of associations for dog lovers, dog owners, and dog trainers. So what events do they have that you could participate in, or could you write for their blog or their newsletter?
 
Can you get involved and get to know them? And who else is influential in that space? How can you connect with them? So yeah, there's definitely that next step where you're expanding out from your smaller circle to try to create bigger circles.
 
The value of beta readers for marketing
 
[00:07:36] Matty: I think that's a real plug for getting beta readers even early on. Most authors I know who actively use beta readers are authors who are later in their career. But I think it would really behoove a first-time author to tap into that beta reader pool and understand the differences. You may love dog care, and you've done a lot of research and have a lot of experience in it, but you're not spending all your time with that community of people. You have to expand your community of people to encompass your new and expanded group of people. I think beta readers can not only help improve a book but can also help identify where that pool is.
 
[00:08:15] Stephanie: I agree. I love beta readers for a whole bunch of reasons. Finding that pool and asking them, what other groups do you belong to? What online groups do you participate in? That's a hugely underutilized opportunity, I feel, for writers. I happen to be a widow and I'm involved in a number of online widows’ groups. Now imagine if I ever wrote the widow memoir, right? I've been involved in these groups for years; I immediately have access to thousands of people, and I've made friends with the admins. I can say, "Hey, can I do a call for beta readers? Do you want to do a book giveaway?" Finding your community and getting engaged somehow is a huge step in creating that long game with your book marketing strategies.
 
[00:09:04] Matty: Yeah, I think that really paves the way to starting to understand your marketing before you launch your first book. I know a lot of writers who finish their first book, and they've kind of been working on it in isolation, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. Then they're ready to start promoting it, and they don't know where to go. But if they've been building that community, the online community, or the associations or all those things that you mentioned, then they're ahead of the game. It probably improves their book too because if they're immersing themselves in that community, it can only be a benefit to the content they're producing.
 
[00:09:35] Stephanie: Absolutely. Just to dovetail off the beta reader thing, right? So, I get this question a lot: how many beta readers do I have and where do I find them? Well, it depends on what your goals are with your beta readers. A lot of writers want editorial feedback on their work.
 
I personally really value beta readers for marketing. If you give early access to your manuscripts to a bunch of people and they like the book, they're going to be incentivized to want to share it when your book is launching. So, it's a matter of starting with your smaller circle and maybe even asking them, who do you know who would enjoy this book? Who do you know that's in this sphere, that's in this target audience that we could invite to be a beta reader? I'm of the belief that you should get lots of beta readers. Two or five or ten is a very small number, especially when it comes to getting support with the marketing. So I like to suggest lots of beta readers, and then I see all the authors kind of recoil because that means I'm giving my work away.
 
You can view it as creating fans, so getting the most eyeballs on your work is a great marketing strategy. Those people will go out and tell their friends about it. During my last book launch, I was pleasantly surprised by how many beta readers turned out and bought the book anyway, even though they had already read it—that was just a show of support.
 
So, it's those things to think about when you're starting your tribe of influence exercise and figuring out who and how many people you're going to give that early access to.
 
The problem is obscurity
 
[00:11:28] Matty: Can you give any guidelines for someone launching their first book? How many people should they be comfortable giving it out to? Maybe how that number changes over time as a person accumulates more books and more followers?
 
[00:11:42] Stephanie: I always think about Seth Godin. He has famously said, "Your problem is not that people are going to steal your content; your problem is obscurity." A lot of authors fear that people will steal their work and share it. When I do my beta readers and I put out a PDF, it says in there, "Feel free to send this to a friend." I want as many eyeballs as possible. I don't view that as lost sales but as a way to gain sales.
 
My personal feeling is the more, the merrier. I had 400 beta readers on my last book launch. You'll be lucky if 10 percent of them actually write a review and follow through. On social media that day, I saw many of them sharing. It was an incredibly valuable experience on various levels. The more, the better. The same goes for review copies sent out prior or during your book launch. I have a plan to send out physical copies to fellow influencers and people I know will support the book—leading to more sales.
 
[00:13:16] Matty: I'm curious what tool you use. Do you have something like BookFunnel to send those out?
 
[00:13:21] Stephanie: Yes, we use BookFunnel. It's a great tool, really worthwhile, helping control the process and making it easy for everybody. I'm a big fan.
 
[00:13:32] Matty: That's interesting. I've always thought that two to ten beta readers were not enough, but I've never thought about 400. I have a book launch coming up. I'm going to rethink that because I think that makes a lot of sense.
 
[00:13:46] Stephanie: Initially, I thought of having a hundred beta readers, but I had 400 applicants and didn't want to turn anybody away. I'm really glad I accepted them all.
 
[00:14:06] Matty: That's interesting. I think different people bring a different interpretation to beta reader. Can you describe a little bit what you're thinking of when you say beta reader and how you're using them beyond what we've already talked about?
 
[00:14:17] Stephanie: Yeah, so, I think a lot of people seek editorial feedback from beta readers. Let me be clear, I wouldn't want editorial feedback from 400 people. That's too many. I viewed them as my launch team, getting early access, following along with the process. Here's the release date. It was creating a community with my beta readers, not seeking editorial feedback. It depends on your goals. If you want editorial feedback, maybe 20 or 30 people in your target audience or those you trust for feedback. Then a separate group of beta readers specifically for marketing support.
 
The impact of release frequency
 
[00:15:22] Matty: Yeah, that makes sense. Do you feel as if the way you tap into your growing tribe of followers differs depending on release frequency? If someone's releasing a book a month, they'll retain interest because there's no long downtime. If someone's releasing a book every year or two, do you recommend a different approach to keep your tribe engaged?
 
[00:15:57] Stephanie: In my nonfiction space, authors usually release one book a year. Regardless, ongoing connection with your readers is crucial. I prefer content marketing, like blogging, creating videos, or doing a podcast. In fiction, you have to get creative to engage your audience. For example, a romance writer giving dating tips or a mystery writer getting involved in the literary scene of the book's setting.
 
Don't rely on the "rented real estate" of social media
 
[00:17:21] Stephanie: We're always looking for ways to continue connecting with potential target readers and ultimately bring them into the email list. I think we've been oversold on social media. Some people have influencer status and a really engaged social media audience. Personally, I prefer email over social media because social media is like rented real estate.
 
We learned this the hard way with our Twitter account for the Nonfiction Authors Association—it literally evaporated overnight, losing 70,000 followers. We never found out why, despite not violating any policies. We spent months trying to restore it, but it disappeared. However, our email list is owned content and data. Even if the email service provider goes away, we still own the content and contacts, so we can transfer them elsewhere. Be aware that putting all your eggs in the social media basket can be risky.
 
[00:18:37] Matty: Yeah, I think there's probably never been a time where the social media environment has made it so clear that no one should rely on it to keep in touch with anyone. Of all the advice I've ever heard, the one thing everyone agrees on is the importance of an email list. Every opportunity to emphasize that advice is great.
 
We've talked a bit about not leaving behind the tribe you bring into your writing life. Assuming people are moving from some other work or have built a community in another way, are there any people you should explicitly exclude? Not try to bring forward into your tribe? For example, when launching your first book, you might avoid asking your mom, neighbor, and college roommate to buy it, to prevent odd also-bought associations on Amazon. Are there other downsides to trying to bring people forward from a different community?
 
[00:19:54] Stephanie: I would never turn away a sale. If my mom wants to buy my book, she can. However, you have to be careful about reviews. Avoid situations where family members write glowing but unrelated reviews. When promoting, it's crucial not to target outside your ideal audience. If family members buy the book along with your target audience, it's fine. To avoid issues, focus on expanding your audience beyond people you already know. Grow your tribe of influence to include fellow authors, influencers, and podcasters in your field.
 
Don't waste time promoting your book to the wrong readers. I don't read some of these types of books, and I don't review books either, so spending your time and money sending books to people that aren't your target audience. Now when someone sends me a publishing industry book, I absolutely pay attention. and that may get, lead to them being interviewed on our blog or our podcast or whatever it is. So just know your audience is so critical to building that community and that marketing strategy.
 
[00:21:54] Matty: When someone is reaching out to someone who's one of those influencers, do you recommend, let's say they have a new non-fiction book, and they've located the pool of people who might legitimately be interested in it, do you recommend that they try to establish a relationship ahead of time, or is a book that shows up in your office about a topic that you're actually interested in, is that intriguing? Is it off-putting? What would your recommendations be on that front?
 
Create a reciprocal relationship
 
[00:22:22] Stephanie: I think you have a much better chance if it aligns. And I love to include a personal note. So, really enjoy your podcast. why haven't you written a book yet? something like that. So I don't think that's off-putting at all. What is off-putting to me as somebody who gets a ton of solicitations is the solicitation. Like, somebody sending me a message saying, hey, I have a new book out. why don't you put me on your podcast?
 
[00:22:50] Matty: What can you do for me?
 
[00:22:51] Stephanie: right, what, yeah, and it's not about my audience. Like, tell me how you serve my audience. I've had a, I got a pitch just last week from a speaker and it was all about him and how he speaks on leadership and he's a great leadership speaker and if I have a conference or event coming up, I should really contact him because he's a great speaker. He's now sent this to me twice in I don't know how he's getting booked because that had nothing to do with how he would serve our target audience.
 
Meanwhile, someone like Ann Janzer, I love her. She writes great books. she creates great content. So she'll come out and say, hey, I created this new, I had a great successful book promotion campaign. Would you be interested in doing a webinar on how I did it? Heck yeah, I would. That's interesting to my audience. She's a non-fiction writer. She figured out how to do this. It landed 50 more reviews on her book. So knowing your target audience and putting that value proposition in when you're pitching or when you're reaching out. podcast. or blog. Reach out and ask to interview that person before you ever try to sell them anything or give them your book or, make it something in it for them to create that reciprocal relationship.
 
[00:24:18] Matty: Yeah, I think that some people take the opinion that, if they send an email to a thousand podcasts, then they're going to piss off. 990 of them, but they might get 10 placements, but, I would also warn them that, you're building bad karma, and I remember, like, I have a list, and if people are spamming me with that kind of thing, even if they come back later and they have a good, I'm not even reading the pitch after a while if I know that this is somebody who's been, annoying me in the past with inappropriate, not inappropriate, but, misaligned pitches.
 
And I do think that anyone who's ever submitting something or pitching themselves to some, to someone or something should, have the experience of being on the other side of the pitch because I know I never fully appreciated, I was probably one of those people who would have complained about like, oh, I sent this to an agent or I said, sent this into a contest and, they didn't even like give me a review.
 
And having been a contest judge in several short fiction contests now, I'm like, oh, man, if you see it from the other side, you know what's going on. I think everybody should have an opportunity to be in that position every once in a while. great point.
 
[00:25:16] Stephanie: And following the directions of a pitch, right? Because a lot of times, podcasters have specific requests or answer these three questions, and then people don't do that. we have a call for guests for our podcast, and it's very specific. How does your, topic Help authors in some way.
 
And then we get pitches on like mental health and medical things and it's like, what does this have to do? how are you going to tie this into writers? Because we're not doing it for you and it's not there in your pitch.
 
Pursuing aspirational contacts
 
[00:26:05] Matty: yeah, exactly. we can all clip this out and have it as like a little, tutorial on our websites about if you want to pitch to us, here's what you should keep in mind. so we've talked about, a little bit about, bringing forward your existing tribe, how to, just a couple of ideas about how to support and cater to your, your evolving tribe.
 
I'm wondering if you can also talk a little bit about, like, the aspirational tribe. like, I have, so on my tickler list, Stephen King, if you're out there on my tickler list, is that someday, when I have the perfect question to ask, I'm going to get in touch with Stephen King and ask him to be on the podcast, because he seems like the kind of guy who might say, Isn't this cute? A person with a podcast! I think I'll do this just as a lark. I haven't done that yet, because I haven't come up with a question I might ask yet. But do you have recommendations for how people can identify the appropriate aspirational tribe members they want to engage and then how they should go about doing that?
 
[00:27:01] Stephanie: So I'm one of those people that believes you have nothing to lose from asking, right? So let's even put this in the context of getting endorsements for your book, because those can be tricky, right? But so here's how I've gotten endorsements, especially earlier on when I didn't even really have much of my own community, I Messaged a lot of big-name authors on social media and they answer their own messages.
 
And those pitches weren't, Oh, my first book is coming out and I'm self-publishing it and I, gosh, I would really love it. And here's what it's all about because I get those pitches too. And they're like nine paragraphs long. No, if you want to look like a pro, it's no more than two paragraphs. It's this book is coming out. I love your work. You know. Pay a compliment and I was amazed at how many well-known authors I got to endorse my books simply by contacting them through social media.
 
The other thing is once you start to build your platform, so I'm thinking for, we run this nonfiction writers conference every year, and back in 2010, we were doing it by teleseminar, remember when that was a thing, before we were using Zoom and all these great visuals, but I started with My Tribe of Influence, our opening speaker the very first year was Dan Pointer. He was a wonderful, mentor to a lot of us in publishing. He wrote self-publishing books and then each year as my sphere grew, I was inviting people and then I started getting really brave and inviting people I didn't know and that's how I got Julia Cameron, Anna Quinlan, Cheryl Strayed, Seth Godin, Don Miguel Ruiz, Martha Beck, Dan Millman, I just started asking.
 
So once you're able to show some platform as well, that also really helps. And so I tell our community, let that be your motivation, right? Your motivation for building your audience, because the fact is, the bigger your audience gets, the easier it is to get yeses from podcasts and influencers and things like that.
 
Matty: And I think the more you can demonstrate your professionalism, the better. Professionalism doesn't necessarily equate to experience. More experience makes professionalism easier, but it's not a necessity. Writing a pitch, and I'm trying to frame this carefully, so I'm not suggesting that you lie about your experience. Framing a pitch as if you've been on a million podcasts and you feel confident in what you have to offer without making any claims beyond what you actually have to offer.
 
The story, I've told this before, but I think it's such a good illustration of this. I was contacted by someone who wanted to be a guest on the podcast because he had his first nonfiction book coming out, and it would be his first interview. So he didn't have any other interviews to point me to, but he recorded an interview specifically to pitch me for the podcast. It was him talking on video for a couple of minutes about his book, very specifically to me. This wasn't a generic thing. He had created this video for me.
 
So I could see he knew his topic. He was comfortable on camera, all the things that I would look for in a guest. The fact that he had never been on any other podcast didn't make a difference because he had proven that he had the professionalism, even if he didn't have the experience. I think that can go a long way if you're aiming for those more aspirational connections.
 
Each new contact opens a network of others
 
Stephanie: One more tip too, like with the endorsement thing. Let's say you get your very first big-name one because this is how I did it, right? So when I sent my pitch, I'll say, "You'll be in good company because here's what Michael Gerber had to say about the book." And then this influencer goes, "Oh wow, she got Michael Gerber. I totally need to do this." So leverage your tribe, especially if you can get an introduction. With fellow authors, we know people, right? Can someone introduce you to a well-known person that you can then get your first endorsement and then show that to others? So you're right, all that professionalism really does help.
 
Matty: I think in any of those, like I was thinking back to the social media message in order to get a blurb. I think a sort of, nothing's foolproof but saying, "I think that this book would appeal to the people who follow you because ...” If you can fill that in, you're halfway there. Because you're illustrating that you're serving yourself, but your intent is to serve the people that the person you're contacting wants to serve too, their own followers, and that you're looking out for them, you're not looking out for yourself."
 
And that's certainly true for podcast pitches. I'm sure you've found this. If somebody says, "Here's a topic that I think will be especially meaningful to the people who listen to your podcast," then your ears prick up.
 
Stephanie: I wish I could remember the author's name, but she had written a real-life memoir based on a story that Judy Blume had written about. Judy Blume is one of my favorite childhood authors, but she wrote a number of adult books. So she had written a book about this actual story that happened to this woman who wrote her memoir. Well, she reached out to Judy Blume, and guess what? Judy Blume asked for the book. She wrote about it on social media. I mean, they actually created a connection over that. Somebody that is such a major, beloved author, and she created that connection. So you're absolutely right. Don't be afraid to reach out. That's what I say. It all starts to kind of create this snowball effect.
 
[00:32:55] Matty: Well, there can't be a better story than that to end our conversation about expanding one's tribe of influence. Stephanie, thank you so much. I appreciate you entertaining my wide-ranging questions about tapping into one's tribe of influence. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
 
[00:33:12] Stephanie: Yeah, thank you. Check us out, NonfictionAuthorsAssociation.com. We have a huge community of active writers at all stages in the process. We have our upcoming Nonfiction Writers Conference. That's also NonfictionWritersConference.com. Then I have a new book launching in January, the Nonfiction Book Marketing and Launch Plan. It's actually an eight and a half by eleven workbook, book, and planning guide, 250 plus pages. It's not full of blank pages. It's a really, really meaty. It's my favorite thing I've done so far. So I'm looking forward to that and appreciate you having me here today.
 
[00:33:49] Matty: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Episode 220 - Podcasting Playbook: Navigating Guest Opportunities with Michelle Glogovac and Special Guests

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Michelle Glogovac discusses HOW TO GET ON PODCASTS, including pitching to a podcast is similar to or different from other pitches in a writer’s life; the importance of pitching not just the book but the person behind the book; finding good podcast matches, both by finding your niche and by pushing the boundaries; the differences between fiction and non-fiction pitches; whether repetition of a story a problem; the dangers of following a script; a behind-the-scenes glimpses of a podcaster's life; the vital importance of repurposing; the pro tip of making a Spotify playlist of your podcast appearances; and the value of sharing freely (you won’t cannibalize book sales).

As a bonus, I solicited advice from previous podcasts guests about their tips for excelling once you land the guest appearance, and you’ll be hearing from Michael La Ronn, Jerri Williams, Melissa Addey, Frank Zafiro, and Emma Dhesi.

Michelle Glogovac is THE Podcast Matchmaker™, a podcast publicist, and host of the award-winning podcast, My Simplified Life. She works with entrepreneurs, authors, and experts to hone their storytelling abilities, grow their businesses, and elevate themselves as thought leaders. Michelle is a wife, mom of two, stepmom of two, and a fur mom. She has her B.A. and M.S. in Law and is the Founder and CEO of The MLG Collective®.  Her first book, HOW TO GET ON PODCASTS, debuts in January 2024.

Episode Links

Author website: www.michelleglogovac.com
Facebook profile: https://facebook.com/michelleglogovac
Instagram profile: https://instagram.com/michelleglogovac
LinkedIn profile: https://linkedin.com/in/michelleglogovac
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLXE_Hs6IFerBiqj1Y1IEVQ

Summary

Are you looking for ways to stand out as a guest and successfully land interviews? Look no further! Michelle Glogovac, a renowned expert in guest pitching and interview techniques, has just released her latest book. In this blog post, we'll dive into the key insights shared by Michelle and explore why her book is a must-read for anyone seeking to master the art of being a great guest.
 
In her book, Michelle emphasizes the importance of going beyond a generic sales pitch. Instead, she encourages readers to share their knowledge and expertise authentically. Michelle knows that simply saying, "I've got this book and it's launching, buy it!" is uninspiring and lacks substance.
 
To captivate your audience, Michelle suggests taking a different approach. She encourages you to share everything that's in your book, highlighting the hard-won knowledge you've gained over the years. Michelle believes that by demonstrating your expertise and providing valuable insights, you can hook the listener and motivate them to take action.
 
One of the most valuable lessons shared by Michelle is the art of pitching yourself effectively. She provides practical advice on how to craft a compelling pitch that grabs the attention of interviewers. Michelle's strategies will empower you to present yourself confidently and concisely, increasing your chances of landing that coveted interview.
 
If you've ever wondered how to position yourself as an expert and secure interview opportunities, Michelle's book is a must-have resource. She delves into the nitty-gritty details of what it takes to excel as a guest, from understanding the mindset of interviewers to mastering the art of storytelling.
 
Whether you're an entrepreneur with a product or service to promote or an author launching a new book, Michelle's insights will guide you on your journey. Her book is a comprehensive guide, offering step-by-step techniques and actionable tips to help you navigate the world of interviews and maximize your impact.
 
Don't miss out on the chance to learn from Michelle Glogovac. Arm yourself with the knowledge and strategies she shares in her book, and you'll be well-equipped to conquer the interview circuit. Get your hands on "How to Be a Great Guest and Land Interviews" now and take your guest pitching skills to new heights!
 
In this conversation, we explored the key takeaways from Michelle Glogovac's latest book on becoming a great guest and landing interviews. Her emphasis on providing valuable insights and crafting compelling pitches sets her book apart from traditional sales-focused approaches. Don't wait any longer – grab your copy of "How to Be a Great Guest and Land Interviews" and unlock the secrets to interview success!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Michelle Glogovac. Hey, Michelle, how are you?
 
[00:00:05] Michelle: Hi, Matty. I'm so good, so happy to be here again. Thank you.
 
Meet Michelle Glogovac
 
[00:00:09] Matty: I am happy to have you here. And to give our listeners and viewers a little background on you, Michelle Glogovac is the podcast matchmaker, a podcast publicist, and host of the award-winning podcast, "My Simplified Life." She works with entrepreneurs, authors, and experts to hone their storytelling abilities, grow their businesses, and elevate themselves as thought leaders. Michelle is a wife, mom of two, stepmom of two, and furmom. She has her BA and MS in Law and is the founder and CEO of the MLG Collective. Her first book is "How to Get on Podcasts," which debuts in January 2024.
 
[00:00:54] Matty: I had Michelle on the podcast back in episode 137, discussing using podcasts to support your book launch. But I wanted to delve into the specifics a little more on how to get on podcasts.
 
What was the inspiration for Michelle's book "How to Get on Podcasts"
 
[00:01:08] Matty: Michelle, I'm just going to ask you to talk about what the inspiration was for feeling like this was something to capture in a book and what lessons you carried forward from your experience as a host to feed that.
 
[00:01:08] Michelle: It's been a journey, and there's so much. I've tried to put it all down in one book, and along the way, I'm like, you know what, I could do more. There might need to be a sequel. The inspiration really came around. It's twofold. I always wanted to write a book, period. I wanted to be an author. I am an avid reader, and to have my name on the cover of a book that people actually read was definitely an inspiration.
 
I had a book coach on my podcast, and we started talking about me wanting to write a book. Her opinion was that you should write something that you know about and that you're known for first. And I went, well, I know podcasts. That's what I do. It's what I'm known for. So I will write "How to Get on Podcasts." It's a book that is not out there; it has yet to be published. So I really felt the need to get this out as quickly as possible and to make sure that it contained everything that you would need to know. Not only how to get on podcasts but also how to create your speaking topics, how to create your media kit, how to be a great guest, how to repurpose all of your interviews into greater marketing content.
 
So it is all of that along with what is the host up to along the way. Because I found that a lot of guests don't understand what the host is doing, how much work, time, and money goes into producing a single episode. I wanted to pull back the curtain for readers to understand how much work is going into it while they simply show up for 30 minutes. And that's also why it's not okay to just say thanks with a 24-hour Instagram story of tagging the host, but why you should be thanking them even more profusely.
 
[00:02:55] Matty: Well, I have to say I love that. One thing that I thought of as you were talking is that I think authors are used to pitching themselves in certain circumstances. Certainly, people pursuing a traditional publishing path pitch themselves to agents and themselves in their books. You're pitching yourself to other promoters who can get the word out about your work. Are there certain things that you think are common lessons that authors can apply, whether they want to get on a podcast or any other available promotional platforms? In what ways is pitching for a podcast unique?
 
The importance of pitching the person behind the book
 
[00:03:34] Michelle: Absolutely. I think that we often pitch the book when we should be pitching the person behind the book. I get press releases all day long about a book coming out, but what is it about the book that will resonate with my listeners and myself? I want to know the person who wrote it. So, you should be pitching yourself—the person. Share your journey, what brought this book idea to you, the story behind the plot, the characters, and the parts of you included in the book. I find that truly fascinating—learning those behind-the-scenes aspects that only the author can share. What part of themselves did they put into it? What did their writing journey look like? When did they decide to become an author? Was it a lifelong dream, or did they add it to a full-time corporate career? How did they find the time to do it all?
 
I believe we need to pitch more of the person, the journey, and connect that to the book if possible. As readers, we often don't get to know the author unless we attend a book signing. Even then, they read from the book, you get your signature, 30 seconds with them, and then they move on. However, in an interview, connecting with the author allows the reader, the listener, to fall in love with the author and ultimately purchase the book because they want to know more or buy the next book to learn more about the author and the story.
 
I've seen this with my clients, especially with one in particular whose second book is coming out. After reading the first one and getting to know her, when I picked up the second one, I knew right away, "Oh, she included this because she's an artist. Oh, this is because she's done this." I really felt the author in the book, and I believe that's crucial and something unique that we haven't had in the past.
 
[00:05:37] Matty: One thing challenging for people is that if someone has written a fiction book, let's say, an epic fantasy or a murder mystery, something intrinsically intriguing, unique, or gripping, and then you ask them to talk about not that but themselves, their response might be, "I'm a former corporate wonk who is now retired," or "I'm a mom with three kids." It's hard for people to see what's interesting about themselves that they could use to engage people. Do you have any tips for how people can look past what may seem normal to them to recognize things that will be interesting to listeners or viewers?
 
[00:06:24] Michelle: I love that you brought up, what if you're a mom with three kids at home writing some murder mystery thing? How did that come about? I want to know more about how the mom with three kids is writing a murder mystery. What research did you take to create these storylines? So often, a lot of research goes into writing these books, and I want to know how you came up with this. What was the research, and how did you know where to look? That's all part of your story. I also have a whole list of questions in the book, like, what's your personal journey like? What have you done? It might not be interesting to you, and after talking about it a hundred times on podcasts, you might get bored with yourself.
 
But trust me when I say, just repeat yourself because as listeners, as human beings, we want to hear people's stories. They allow us to resonate with the person being interviewed. We get to know that we're not alone. There's a message of hope that if we are in a corporate career or we are the mom of three at home, we can also write a novel that others want to buy and read. So really think about your personal journey, your career journey, and your writing ritual. What do you do? These are unique to you, and what's unique to you is what others find special and intriguing and want to hear more about.
 
[00:08:19] Matty: And does this emphasis on selling yourself as the person in addition to your book apply both for pitching to a podcaster and presenting yourself during a podcast episode that you land? How do you balance that without making it a pitch that says, you know, "I started writing when I was seven," or something like that?
 
[00:08:42] Michelle: It depends on the podcast you're pitching to. There are tons of literary podcasts that focus on your writing journey, how you sold your book, how you published it, and the host will guide you through those questions. On the other hand, there are different kinds of podcasts. I suggest authors pitch to more than just literary podcasts because your readers are listening to other podcasts. It's not necessarily that authors want to hear from other authors about their books, and those are your ideal readers. You want to branch out to who is your ideal reader? Who's reading your book at home? Is it the mom with three kids who wants an escape or loves true crime? What kind of podcasts is she listening to?
 
You need to search out those podcasts and, in doing so, you're talking to the host so that it's not just about one aspect. It allows the listener to get to know you, the guest, with the questions that the host is going to ask around a certain topic. Focus on sharing your message, sharing your knowledge, and make that your main focus. If you do that, it's not going to come across as selling yourself and talking about me, me, me.
 
[00:10:21] Matty: Yeah, I like that idea that you're implying of thinking of it not as facts you're sharing, but as stories you're telling. If you're telling a story, then you're serving the audience. If you're just sharing facts about yourself, then it just sounds goofy. Recognizing that you're there to entertain people, people are always entertained by stories about individuals when they're told by that individual.
 
[00:10:44] Matty: So, I took us right into the middle of that conversation, but I want to step back a moment and ask, when you're looking for the podcasts that are going to be a good match for what you want to share, how do you narrow that down? And then, is there any way you can expand that pool a little bit looking slightly differently at your topic? If you've written a book about growing tulips, maybe you look for all the tulip clubs in America or something like that. Is there a balance of targeting a specific niche and also maybe pushing the boundaries a little bit? How do you go about identifying what those podcasts are?
 
[00:11:24] Michelle: I love that you bring up tulip growing podcasts because from tulips, you could go into gardening, from gardening into hobbies, and possibly into midlife. Is it retirement? Who are the types of people who are gardeners? So really expand in that way of who is it that I'm searching for? Start small and then continue growing.
 
Look at Apple Podcasts as a great start. Whether or not you have an iPhone, you can still Google it. It's going to come up. Scroll to the bottom of a podcast you like. There's a heading that says, "more like these" or "something you might like," and there will be a list of more podcasts. Click on those, and then scroll to the bottom for more. It becomes a rabbit hole.
 
Look at Instagram, search hashtags like #gardeningpodcasts or #podcastsforwomen. See what posts come up because podcast hosts promote their episodes on social media. Check if they take guests, if it's a solo episode, if it's recent. Move what you find on Instagram to Google. Use platforms like podchaser.com for searching. Use Spotify with keywords filtered by podcasts and shows. Also, consider listendotes.com. Simply put "gardening podcasts" into Google, and you'll find lists already made for you, like the top 100 gardening podcasts.
 
[00:13:24] Michelle: I also utilize Spotify to make playlists for every client, including myself. You can upload cover art for your playlist, and I use a headshot of my client. I will use their font and their colors to put their name and then put in the title, you know, "Michelle Glogovac Podcast Interviews." In the description, you can put "The Podcast Matchmaker, CEO, Founder, Michelle Glogovac of the MLG Collective, Podcast Interviews featuring her." Add them to the playlist so they're all in one spot. Use the link to share in your pitches and on your media kit. Some clients put it on their LinkedIn profiles, and that way everything's in one spot.
 
[00:14:07] Matty: That's really nice. I just made a little mental to-do note for myself to follow up on that. Is there any different advice you would give in terms of finding podcasts to pitch or pitching yourself as a person as well as your product between fiction and non-fiction authors?
 
[00:14:26] Michelle: For nonfiction, you already have the topic outlined. Mine is "How to Get on Podcasts," so obviously, I'm talking about how to get on podcasts. For fiction, you can be more about the person, whereas nonfiction, you already have your subject matter to speak on. So for podcasts, I can talk to entrepreneurs, nonprofits, authors—all about how they can get on podcasts. For fiction, look at what you're doing, who you are, and how you can relate to your ideal reader.
 
[00:15:43] Matty: It's interesting to think ahead to when a person has made a name for themselves enough that they're not only pitching podcasts but being pitched by podcasts, asked to be a guest. I've had the experience sometimes where someone will get in touch with me, and on the surface, it looks like it's a weird connection. My first tendency is kind of to self-deprecatingly say, "Oh, no, no, I'm not the person to talk about that." But almost always, there's often a legitimate way you can tweak a topic you're used to talking about in a way that's interesting to almost any audience. So keeping an open mind in both those scenarios, both who you pitch and what pitches you accept.
 
[00:16:56] Michelle: I love that. Absolutely.
 
[00:16:58] Matty: That makes me think of something else you had mentioned before about the idea that you have a spiel. In a push, especially if someone is doing podcast appearances to support a book launch, you might be doing one interview after another. Do you have any tips about whether it's important to keep it fresh, and if so, how? If you feel like you're saying the same thing over and over again in different podcasts, giving the same stump speech, what advice do you have to offer there?
 
[00:17:42] Michelle: Remember that the listeners are all going to be different, and you're not speaking to the same audience over and over again. If you say the same thing repeatedly, chances are the same people will not be hearing it. Not every host has the same group of listeners. So don't feel like you're repeating yourself. Treat it as a lesson to really hone your story, correct yourself if needed, and let it come out differently each time. You're talking to a new host every time, and the conversation and questions will be different. It's a unique, intimate conversation between two people, so you'll have differences in every interview.
 
[00:18:58] Matty: I can imagine some people thinking they're going to write a script and just have it next to their monitor when they do these interviews. Any tips about the dangers of relying on a script?
 
[00:19:10] Michelle: I have a client in marketing who, for years, worked for a corporation that wouldn't allow her to use the word "change." When I interviewed her, she neglected to mention this, so I brought it up, and afterward, I told her it's crucial to explain why she uses the word so much. Stick reminders on your monitor for important points or stories you want to include. People won't see it, but it'll trigger your memory during the interview.
 
[00:20:14] Matty: I think people can even be really overt about that. That's sometimes kind of charming. Like someone could pick up their index card and say, "This is so important that I've written this word, 'change,' on this index card." Those kind of behind-the-scenes glimpses, I think viewers and listeners enjoy seeing that. They don't expect, nor do they necessarily want, a perfectly polished presentation. They want a conversation, and those things can make it more conversational.
 
[00:21:40] Michelle: Absolutely. I love when people truly come out as themselves. You know, I've had where the kid walks in, and someone might go, "Oh, I'm going to edit it out." And I'm like, "Who cares? You're a mom, you've got kids," and I've had the dog barking. Well, it sometimes happens. We try not to, and obviously, that's in all of our best tips to make sure that everything's silent and your phone's in airplane mode, and the dog's not barking. But what happens if the mailman comes? Well, I already said that I was a fur mom, so chances are that it could happen, and that's okay. It's part of life, and I think it makes you more personable as well.
 
[00:21:40] Matty: I was curious. You had said early on about how one of the reasons you wanted to write the book was to give that behind-the-scenes look into the podcaster's life. I'm wondering what a couple of things are that you feel, maybe if you shared them with early readers of the book or just people among the audience that you wish to reach with your book, what were some of the things that were most eye-opening to them about you? The life of a podcaster.
 
[00:22:40] Michelle: I think how much time goes into a single episode. My editor and I, there was one point where I said, "You know, I want you to track every minute that you are spending. I'm going to track every minute that I'm spending for this 30-minute episode to go live." And it took us four hours. I think it's mind-boggling that people don't know this. Listeners don't know this. Guests certainly don't know this. That four hours of work, and this was a professional editor who has this whole mixing area, and me who has templates and processes and everything still to plug things in. It took us four hours to put together a 30-minute episode. I think that's really important to know.
 
Also, how much planning goes into it. We're not just having an interview today and you're going, "Oh, it's going to go live tomorrow. That's it, done." It's four hours plus you're scheduling it to make sure that it's going to fit perfectly here, or is the person I'm interviewing, do they have their book coming out, and when can I slot it in and make the dates all work?
 
[00:23:16] Matty: Yeah, I think that one thing that authors, even if they're very early in their career, I've spoken to guest after guest who's emphasized the importance of having your own website, that you're owning your own little piece of the online world. You're not relying on Facebook algorithms or Instagram algorithms to maintain your home base.
 
And having one of the pages be your bio. Your headshot and links to your social media will make your podcast host's life much easier. When they ask you for that, and you can send them one link, saying, "Yeah, everything you need is here," you're going to win a friend for sure.
 
[00:23:55] Michelle: Yes, I keep a Google Doc for everybody so I can copy and paste it to send to the host along with the headshot. If you're not providing it upfront, now they have to go check it and find it. Which link did you want included? All of that stuff. If you have it readily available, it makes life easier for everyone.
 
And my whole goal is for you not to give the host homework. If you give a host homework, then it's a no. It's a no from me if I have to go Google you. If you give me everything I need, then you make it an easy yes.
 
[00:24:31] Matty: And I think that page is even nice, having that as part of a website, as well as perhaps an auxiliary document that you send to people is nice. Just because if someone who has nothing to do with podcasts is on your website and is looking around. It's a really nice professional-looking presentation of yourself for them to see, "Oh yeah, they've got it together enough to be having this resource available for all the people who are interested in them."
 
[00:24:55] Michelle: Yes.
 
Share freely (you don't cannibalize book sales)
 
[00:24:55] Matty: One of the pieces of advice you offer in your book is the idea of sharing yourself freely without resorting to sales tactics. Can you talk a little bit about that?
 
[00:25:05] Michelle: Yes, I tell everyone never to go into a pitch or an interview with the intent to sell your product, your book, or your service. It comes off as the slimy salesperson. If you are going in with the intent to share your knowledge, to motivate somebody, to inspire someone, and to educate them, then you won't come off as a salesperson. You are truly sharing your story, your gifts, and your knowledge. And that's what's going to resonate with people.
 
Nobody wants to go to the car salesman. We went to the lot, bought a car in September, and it was like, "What are you looking for? What do you need? Oh, what do you want to drive?" It was right away that I want to sell you a car versus, "What is it that you're looking for? What's your family like? What can I help you with?" Then we'll work together to find that perfect car.
 
There are two different scenarios, and the same goes for podcast interviews. If you could come on and say, "I've got this book, and it's launching, and it's fantastic, and it's a bestseller, and you should buy it," that's boring. Versus, "Let me tell you everything that's in the book because I worked so hard to gain all of this knowledge over so many years of how exactly it is to be a great guest. How can you pitch yourself and land that interview?" To take that perspective instead is what's going to not only hook the listener but then make them want to buy whatever product, service, or book you have to offer.
 
Because you've given of yourself. It's kind of like that mutual, "What's in it for them too?" Well, now they can go find you more. They want to search you out on the internet, follow you on social media, and ultimately want to either work with you or buy your product, your book, or whatever it is.
 
[00:26:51] Matty: I think it's especially important for nonfiction writers to realize that you could say everything there was in your book in your set of podcast interviews, and people will still buy your book. Don't hold things back because you're like, "Oh, but they won't have any reason to buy it if I tell them everything." No, surprisingly, people will still buy it even if you've told them everything. So you can be super generous with what you share and not worry about undercutting their sales.
 
[00:27:19] Michelle: I completely agree, and I can take it one step further that you can also write everything you know and what you do in a book, and you will still get clients who will pay you to do exactly what you do.
 
[00:27:30] Matty: Exactly. It's a virtuous cycle. They want more, but they just want it in a different medium. I'm going to use that as an entree to my last question, which you mentioned earlier about repurposing. I'm totally behind that idea. If you give it to them in a podcast, they'll be willing to buy the book. If you give it to them in a book, they'll be willing to pay you to consult about it. I think it applies to repurposing as well. Can you talk about that a little bit?
 
[00:27:57] Michelle: Yes. The repurposing part came with my passion behind my own show. I want to get this out in as many ways as possible. If I'm spending four hours on one episode, then I need to make it work for me. With a podcast, you're going to get some social media assets, hopefully from the host. But you can also create templates that match your brand for yourself. Have posts with the cover art announcing the episode. Posts with quotes from the interview to promote yourself as the thought leader. Create your own blog posts, like the show notes on the host's website, put it on your website. Ask for the embed player link from the host so your visitors can listen directly without leaving.
 
Utilize Pinterest, do different videos, create a TikTok. Put it on LinkedIn. It should be on your media press page. Just as you have a page with your bio and headshot, also have a page listing every interview and feature, clickable for visitors to see where you've been. It's a big thank you to the host for interviewing you. Creating all these different ways to share is repurposing, and as I say in the book, it's a way to thank your host.
 
[00:29:37] Matty: Great. Michelle, it's always lovely to talk. I love talking meta podcasts with podcasters. It's always lovely to speak with you, and I love all your tips about getting on podcasts. Thank you again, and please let everyone know where they can find out more about you, your book, and everything you do online.
 
[00:29:53] Michelle: Thank you so much. I love always getting to chat with you. It's so much fun. You can find me at michelleglogovac.com or themlgcollective.com. That's the podcast PR agency. "How to Get on Podcasts" is sold everywhere books are available—Amazon, Barnes and Noble, bookshop.org. It is out on January 17th. You can also listen to me on My Simplified Life. It's out every Tuesday, and I'm on all the social media platforms I've mentioned as well.
 
[00:30:22] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
 
[00:30:23] Michelle: Thank you.

Episode 219 - The Productive Power of Organization and Procrastination with John DeDakis

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John DeDakis discusses The Productive Power of Organization and Procrastination, including organizing content and research material and the value of compartmentalizing; organizational approaches with Excel, MS Word, and Scrivener (and alternatives to each), including pairing a draft document with a journal document; creating a synopsis as you write; tapping into AI for synopses and sales descriptions (a nice follow-on to last week's discussion with Kaylin Tristano about STORY BIBLES AND HOW AI CAN HELP); managing your writer business relationships, including a Dropbox tool for obtaining virtual signatures; not letting the (organizational) tail wag the (writing) dog; the power of percolation; and the value of procrastination.

John DeDakis is an award-winning author of five mystery-suspense-thriller novels, a writing coach and instructor, a manuscript editor, a former editor on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer," and a former White House correspondent. In his spare time he’s an amateur jazz drummer. John is also the host of the video podcast ONE-TO-ONE. His latest book is FAKE. In fact I got to talk about FAKE with John on my video series WHAT I LEARNED.

Episode Links

https://www.johndedakis.com/​
https://www.youtube.com/@JohnDeDakis
https://www.facebook.com/john.dedakis
https://twitter.com/johnDeDakis
https://www.instagram.com/dedakisjohn/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-dedakis-4b09a34/

Mentioned in the Interview:
John's conversation about his book FAKE in my WHAT I LEARNED video series
"Tools Cruise" with PLOTTR

Summary

The Indie Author Podcast hosted a riveting session with the versatile and award-winning writer, John DeDakis, shedding light on how he handles organization for his writing. As the host of the show, I had the chance of delving into John's writing journey, discussing his organization techniques, and exploring the value of procrastination in the writing world.
 
Practical Organization for Writers
 
One of the main topics of our conversation was how writers can maintain an effective organizational regime. John shared his experiences from working in "The Situation Room" at CNN, discussing the importance of organization in such large-scale, information-rich environments.
 
In his writing life, John applies the principles of file organization he learned at CNN to his working approach. Each of his six novels has its dedicated folder on his computer, which are further divided into drafts and research sub-folders.
 
John emphasized the importance of having a dedicated draft folder, as every writer will go through multiple draft stages during the writing process. He also maintained a 'journal of the book', tracking the progress and history of each of his works. This practice came in handy, notably when he returned to his fourth novel, "Bullet in the Chamber," after a break of three or four years.
 
Understanding Your Writing Approach
 
Our discussion also revolved around understanding one's writing style. As John revealed, he doesn't maintain files of ideas, as his are typically embedded in his subconscious, always at the ready when he needs them. This approach may vary from writer to writer. The goal of an organizational system is to aid, not hinder, your productivity and creativity.
 
John also highlighted the effectiveness of keeping project-specific research folders. For his upcoming political thriller, John maintained research folders on various topics, housing extensive information on subjects from abortion to White Christian nationalism.
 
The Issue of Procrastination
 
A crucial aspect we touched upon is regarding procrastination and organization. As John noted, procrastination can be beneficial to writers as it allows ideas to ruminate and mature before they are put on paper. An immediate response or output isn't always necessary, where taking time to ponder and allow your subconscious to process things can lead to better, more refined outcomes.
 
Conclusion
 
Every writer has a unique organization style that works best for them. Whether it's keeping meticulous files and folders, as John does, or using advanced software and AI tools, mastering your organization process can significantly boost your efficiency and productivity, leaving you more time for what matters the most – the writing. As John DeDakis succinctly puts it, these tools and techniques ultimately serve the purpose of amplifying your creativity and helping you tell your story.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is John DeDakis. Hey John, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:05] John: Hi, Matty.
 
Meet John DeDakis
 
[00:00:06] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, John DeDakis is an award-winning author of five mystery suspense thriller novels, a writing coach and instructor, a manuscript editor, a former editor on CNN's the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, and a former White House correspondent. In his spare time, he's an amateur jazz drummer, and he's also the host of the video podcast One to One, which is very fun. I had the honor of being a guest on John's podcast, and his latest book is FAKE. And in fact, in another connection, I got to talk about FAKE with John on my video series, What I Learned, and I'll include a link to that conversation in the show notes.
 
[00:00:43] Matty: And so, John and I are going to be talking today about organization for writers. This is a topic I nerd out on a lot. And I thought it would be fun to start out, John, asking you what, from your experience on The Situation Room, did you carry forward to your organizational approach to being an author?
 
[00:01:02] John: Whoa, I don't know if I did. I mean, CNN is huge, and so they're just normally organized to begin with. And so it was always easy to find what I needed to find to do my job as an editor. I mean, getting to the wires, being able to find video, but it's all about filing. It's all about file systems, I guess you could say. Even though I don't think I took anything consciously from my CNN experience, that is what actually is the similarity, and that's having folders and files where you can find them.
 
[00:01:41] Matty: So did you bring anything forward in the sense of it being like a downsized version of the enormous version that CNN had at its disposal?
 
[00:01:51] John: I think you could probably say that, as I say, though unconsciously. I think any organization that's successful is well organized. And I think that that is what I try to transfer over to my own career as a novelist, writing coach, and manuscript editor. If you've got so many balls in the air, you really need to be able to compartmentalize, which is what a file and a folder, what those things are. You need to be able to compartmentalize so that you can jump from one thing to the next, and as soon as you get there, you're oriented.
 
[00:02:30] Matty: And is your organizational approach mainly around content? As opposed to like your calendar or other organizational things?
 
[00:02:37] John: Got it. Yeah, my calendar is on my phone, and I don't do it on my computer or anything like that. And the phone is, I mean, the phone is my brain, basically my external drive. And so yeah, the writing stuff and all of that, the content, the creative stuff, that's all on the computer, compartmentalized in folders for whatever project I'm working on.
 
[00:03:02] Matty: So let's start with organizing information for fiction, because I'm going to have to go back and look. I just had this conversation with someone on the podcast, but I'm always interested in getting different perspectives. Oh, I think it was Art Taylor. And when I think of information related to fiction, I think that there are kind of three categories of information. One is, it would be cool to write a book about storm chasing. We were just talking about that a little bit before we hit record. Then there's the, here's a really cool way to describe clouds. Here's a verb, an adjective I want to use someday. And then there's, well, I said there were three, but there's kind of an infinite number. Then there are all the ideas that pop into your head that one might want to capture between those two extremes. Do you have approaches for segmenting that out so it's manageable?
 
[00:03:49] John: The things that you were mentioning are not things that I do. When I was at the very beginning of starting to write fiction, I had a notebook. It was a spiral notebook, and I called it a writing notebook. It's now my journal, and it was in longhand. Whenever I had an idea, I would write it in all caps, IDEA, and then I'd write whatever it was. I've gone back and looked at some of my old writing notebooks, and I look at some of the ideas and I go, I have no idea what I was thinking.
 
I really don't have idea files, but that's okay because I think it really depends on the writer and what it is they need. For me, ideas, if they're really worth anything, won't let me go. They just embed in my subconscious or in my thoughts and ruminations, and that's where I work with them. If I write them down and put them aside, they're usually gone, and I'll never be able to do anything with them.
 
Plus, I'm not a writer. I don't write a lot. I write long-form novels, and lately, they've been every four years. It's not like I just crank them out because the novels that I'm working on, I'm wrestling through something. The big idea has been with me. The other things that pop up happen during the writing process. So in that case, I'm not really trying to organize anything in terms of ideas and things like that.
 
So I guess the answer to your question is that the things that you use, the things that you want to capture and save are different from the things I want to capture and save, but what works for you is great, what works for me is fine, and I think that's sort of the takeaway, is that whatever organizational system you use, it needs to serve you, and it need not be something artificial, like, oh, I must do this, or I have to do this.
 
And I'm certainly interested in your perspective because this is your career, your organization.
 
[00:06:06] Matty: Well, I'd like to tap into your career because I just think that any platform called the Situation Room by definition is going to require organization, and I want to make sure that we get that. So what is the thing that identifies a piece of information or a piece of whatever you want to organize that signals that it is something that you want to make sure that you're handling in an organized way?
 
Organizing research material
 
[00:06:28] John: Well, one of the things that comes to mind is research. So whenever I've got a project that's going on, I have a research folder. And as the story is coming into view, and as I'm working through it, I come across issues that I don't know a lot about, and so within the research folder, I'll create other folders for the topics that I want to know more about. I've got a political thriller coming out next summer, and so abortion is a major storyline. So I have a folder on abortion, and in that folder, I've got links to all kinds of different news stories and other resources that I'll be able to access and I can go back to. And that's true for any number of other topics in the book. White Christian nationalism, mental illness, a lot of the QAnon. These are issues that are going to be playing out in my next novel, and so I have research folders, topic folders, for each one of those topics.
 
[00:07:34] Matty: And where are you keeping those? Are they just documents that you have in your computer's file manager? Are you using an app for that?
 
[00:07:41] John: It's a Word document, and each project has its own folder. So, I've written six novels. Each folder is book one, book two. And then within that folder is everything else. Sometimes it's just loose files, but more often than not, I'm creating folders within that project so that I'll be able to go to wherever I need.
 
Pairing a draft document with a journal document
 
[00:08:09] John: Probably the most important folder is the draft folder because any novelist or writer will tell you that you're going to do more than one draft, and so each draft remains separate. And I also keep a journal of the project that migrates from one draft to the other, giving me a sense of what's happening creatively in that particular project because in my novel, "Bullet in the Chamber," my fourth novel, I went away from it for four years or three and a half years. When I went back to it, I knew where I left off and what I needed to do, and I was able to pick up and go from there.
 
[00:08:55] Matty: So can you describe what would be in your draft document and what would be in your journal document? Like you're getting up, you've had your coffee, you sit down at your desk, you open the draft document and the journal document, and can you describe what would be the equivalent entries in each of those so we can better understand how you differentiate those?
 
[00:09:13] John: Yes, the journal document, which is basically the project document, I call it Journal of the Book. It has two components to it, and it's the very first thing I open up when I'm going to be working on it for the day. So the very first thing I do is, I do a word search for "dedakis." That's my last name. And, and as soon as I do that, it takes me to, I hit, I do the word search, and it goes to the last journal entry. This is a document, by the time the project is finished, it could be 175 pages if you were to print it out. But if you keep it in your computer, you're not killing trees, and it's easily accessible.
 
Organizing with MS Word
 
[00:09:54] John: So, as soon as I do the, "DeDakis stopped here," and that gets me to the next journal entry. And because I'm a journalist, I dateline it. I do the date, the day of the week, where I am, and the time. I don't know why. I just, it's history. Maybe the Smithsonian will care about it. And then I just do a little thumbnail of what's going on in my life. It's not my journal journal. It's just the context of what's going on either in the world, my life, or whatever, and what I hope to accomplish. Then let's say that I have a work in progress.
 
So I go to the draft file, and in the draft folder within that folder are a stack of files. Each one is a chapter, and I give the very first, the way you title it is 1, and then give it a name so that you know what's in it, and 2, Word knows how to count. So if you're doing it 1, 2, 3, 4, it's going to order it so each chapter is in its right order. And so then I do my work. And by the end of the session, I go back to the journal and do another time reference of this is what I did. And if there's a long session where I'm doing several chapters or if I'm doing a rewrite or something, every time I finish a particular piece of the puzzle, I'll note that in the journal entry, another time hack, and then this is what I did.
 
And then when I'm done for the day, you tie it up, file it back, and it's waiting for you the next time. The other thing that happens in the journal is that I create the scene outline. This is helpful when an agent says, I'd like the synopsis. You're building the synopsis as you write the book. And it basically gives the chapter number, whatever title I give it, just for the sake of being able to find things. I do. Because novels often cover a certain amount of time, either a week or a month or however long, you give it, you have a timeline in there so that you know what is happening on what day in the story, and then just a little thumbnail of what's happened, what happens in that chapter. So again, you can get a bird's eye view of your novel as it's coming together.
 
And I also mentioned, note, the date that I started the draft, or the, the date. I started at this date that I worked on the second draft so that you can see the evolution of the, of the project. It's history, I guess you could say. And, and so those are the, those are really the two main things. The journal, which is the project, and then whatever it is that you're working on in the draft folder.
 
Organizing with Scrivener
 
[00:12:53] Matty: I use Scrivener, and I think that between Word and Scrivener, we probably cover a lot of what our listeners are using. and I'm interpreting what you're accomplishing to what I, use Scrivener to do. So, for example, one of the things I truly love about Scrivener, and I, yes, I know there are other writing apps that do this, but I started out with Scrivener, is that you're capturing every component, however you want to, define component as a separate little thing in a nav in the left.
 
And so, if I have all the chapters and then I realize I want one chapter to be, in a different place, I just have to drag it up to the place where I want it to be, rather than like having to copy and paste, in, in one big, longer document. And the way I've used that is, in general, each of my components is a scene or a chapter, but I have one called notes.
 
And I'll use that to mark where I am in the story, because the way I write is, I write like an outline, then I write a more complete outline, then I write a more complete outline, then pretty soon it starts turning into a manuscript and I just keep running through it until it's all polished up.
 
[00:14:02] John: Is it one big, is it one big document or is each chapter a separate file for you?
 
[00:14:08] Matty: well, in Scrivener, there is a project that's the entire book. And then there are, scenes, they're called scenes in Scrivener, that are components within it. So it's almost like if you were in Word and you had the outline view on. It's like the outline view that you would see on the left in Word.
 
but the components more easily draggable and manipulatable than they would be in the outline view of word. And then I have this notes entry, which is all the things that I need to keep in mind in general across the book. If there are certain things like double check the timing of the scene or something.
 
I just put a note about that in that scene. component itself. But if there are things like, be sure to keep reminding the reader that it's spring or don't forget that,the primary motivation of this character is whatever, and then I use that component as, like, the marker between what I've, what I've already, worked through during that pass and what I still need to work through.
 
And the benefit there is that, before I start in on editing the next scene, I can reread that notes, component and remind myself of all those things that I need to be keeping an eye out for.
 
[00:15:12] John: did you discover that, learning Scrivener though, that the learning curve is almost vertical? I mean, you really need to spend a lot of time in order to master it.
 
[00:15:23] Matty: yeah, I, I don't think Scrivener, the, the tool is very expensive, but I did have to spend hundreds of dollars on classes. And also, I found someone named Gwen Hernandez. If anybody's looking for Scrivener help, that I had a couple of like one-on-one consulting sessions because it is hard, but at this point, I've identified the parts of Scrivener that I use, and I now know to ignore the ones that I don't.
 
So I'm obviously using just a tiny fraction of its possible utility, but I think that there are, if I were starting out today, I don't know that I would recommend Scrivener to people. I would recommend them to look at other things. But at this point, I've customized it so much that I've loathed to move off it because now I know how to tweak all the levers to make it do what I want to.
 
Don't let the (organizational) tail wag the (writing) dog
 
[00:16:08] John: Exactly. And that's why I haven't gotten Scrivener because of the amount of time you and apparently money you need to invest in order to master it. What I've discovered is by keeping my, my organizational system simple, it's not the tail wagging the dog, and I'm able to concentrate on my writing and not be preoccupied with maintaining my organizational system.
 
Alternatives to Word and Scrivener
 
[00:16:34] John: Yeah, if I were advising someone now, I would probably advise them to look at either Atticus or Dibbly Create, which are two newer and more streamlined, word, word processing, that sounds so old fashioned, but you know what I'm trying to, writing apps. What about Plottr? Are you familiar with that?
 
[00:16:53] Matty: well, Plottr, as far as I know from my last look at it, and there's actually on my YouTube channel, there's a playlist called Tools Cruise. And Troy Lambert from Plottr came on and gave a little demo of Plottr. And Plottr is great, but I don't think even Plottr would recommend it as something that you do, you're writing it. Plotting in it. and so it's functionalities optimized to, like tracking character profiles and, multiple storylines and things like that. I apologize, Troy and Ryan, if I'm downplaying what Plottr can achieve, but, I think it's aiming for something a little different.
 
But something like Atticus, which is from, Kindlepreneur, which, Dave Chesson is, the guy behind. is not only, I think, providing a nice, streamlined version of what I'm achieving with Scrivener, but also, the other big plus of something like Atticus is that you're, you can, do both your writing and your formatting in the same tool. So, back in the day, when I was buying my tools, I got Scrivener and I got Vellum, which I used for formatting,
 
So I can export a document from Scrivener into Word and then I can import it from Word into Vellum and then with a push of a button I can make beautiful ebooks for all the retail platforms and print, which is great. And again, I wouldn't move off it because I've optimized both of those tools for myself, but Atticus does that all in one place. And so you don't have to be moving documents from, one thing to the other.
 
[00:18:30] John: how do you spell, how do you spell Atticus?
 
[00:18:32] Matty: A T T I C U S. And then the other one that I've explored a little bit, but not in a great amount of detail, is Dibbly Create, and I think Dibbly Create's plug is that, among other things, it is more It's explicitly tapped into AI so people can use it more easily if they want to use AI to help brainstorm, or it's also tapped into a marketplace, so if you're done with your work in Dibbly Create and then you're looking for an editor, then you can easily actually from the app, Explore a marketplace of editors and book cover designers and so on.
 
[00:19:08] John: So, yeah, those are the things that I would recommend to people if they were starting out now. And I imagine that both Dibbly Create and, Atticus as well as Plottr would have this ability to more easily drag components around. But the thing that's the most interesting to me is the formatting.
 
[00:19:25] Matty: Yeah, I tried. There are ways, theoretically, in Scrivener to, create the epubs and the PDFs you need, but I don't think anybody uses them. I haven't tried using them for years, but they were horrible when I tried to use them.
 
[00:19:47] Matty: And all these things are evolving so quickly that, here we are in December 2023 recording this, and, I maybe haven't looked at these things for months, so if I'm saying something outdated, I apologize, but that's the kind of suite of tools that I would look into.
 
Creating a synopsis as you write
 
[00:20:00] Matty: But I don't want to get too far afield from your organizational approach, and I really liked what you were saying about maintaining a synopsis at the same time, because going back and writing a synopsis is just, is just a big pain.
 
[00:20:14] John: Yeah, it is. It, it's much, it's very hard because it's like, you've, you've been, all of the moving parts of this, of this book. How do you synthesize it? And make it, valuable for an agent to know that you know how to tell a story. And, so yeah, writing a synopsis can be really tricky.
 
Tapping into AI for synopses and sales descriptions
 
[00:20:37] Matty: Yeah, this kind of thing is exactly what I'm hoping AI will provide because I actually just had the experience of, finishing a novella that was about 18, 000 words and plugging it into Claude and asking Claude to give me not a synopsis but, like back cover sales text. And it did a really good job. I would not have used it as is, but
 
[00:20:59] John: are you saying that you, in a sense, copied the 18,000-word document, put it in like something like chat GPT and said, write a synopsis or write a dust cover blurb? And it did?
 
[00:21:12] Matty: Yeah, it was, Claude. So, ChatGPT, and again, every time I say something like this, I'm sure somebody's going to say, You just didn't use it right. But, my experience with ChatGPT is that it's more limited in the terms of the inputs you can provide. But Claude actually lets you attach a file, and I haven't tried it with a longer word than this 18,000-word novella. but yeah, I just attached the, the document that had the novella in it. And I said, I'm trying to think how I worded it, a sales description for this thriller. And it was very good.
 
And it was useful in the sense that it, it called out three characters, the protagonist of the story and two of her sidekicks, but they were not the two sidekicks I would have guessed. And I realized when I read that that the two sidekicks it had picked to mention in the blurb actually made more sense than the two sidekicks I would have picked if I had been writing it. And so things like that, I think any of those things where you put something into AI comes out and you go, Huh!
 
[00:22:25] Matty: And, on the, this is going a little far afield from organization, but I am starting to, recreate transcripts for the podcast using ChatGPT. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, you can only put in 4, 000 characters at a time. So because my transcripts are quite long, my transcripts are being Automatically generated from Descript, which is the tool I use for the audio and video editing.
 
But, and they're like, pretty good, but not great. However, I find that if I take chunks of 4,000 words at a time, put it into ChatGPT, and say, "Correct typos and grammatical errors in this," it does a great job. I'm sure that the 4000-character limit is going to go away. However, I found that ChatGPT was much better for those things that are like just correct stuff, and Claude was better for the more imaginative stuff. Because if I tried to fix the transcript in Claude, it would write an article or something.
 
I couldn't come up with a prompt that would say, "No, I just want you to fix the typos and the grammatical errors." So, again, another topic that everything is evolving so quickly that this is just a guideline. This is a point in time of how these things are behaving in December of 2023.
 
[00:23:40] John: Right? It's evolving.
 
[00:23:42] Matty: Yeah. So, we've talked a little bit about how we both organize fiction work. How else are you applying organization in your life as a writer that our listeners might benefit from?
 
Documenting your writer business relationships
 
[00:23:55] John: I think that the approach that I take is pretty similar for nonfiction as well. I do some ghostwriting, and again, I keep the project separate. With ghostwriting, you're going to need contracts. You're going to need to be able to deal with a client who you want to make sure you're on the same page with and avoid misunderstandings. So, having a ghostwriting contract is important.
 
I'm a manuscript editor, so I have a file, or I have a folder for manuscript editing. Each one of my clients has their own folder, and within that folder, there are the different projects that they've hired me to do. If someone hires me to be a coach, I have a log file so that the relationship is documented. Usually, people hire me for like a five-hour retainer of encouragement. I keep track of what I've been doing, how much time is left on the coaching clock, and they use the time strategically.
 
There are some clients who I've been working with for a couple of years, and they haven't depleted the five hours yet. Someone will surface after a year and it's going, "Whoa, what's going on?" I have to go back into my file. Being organized that way has really helped me stay up to date. Maintaining that log is just something, as soon as the conversation is over or as soon as the project is over, I update it. It's not something you want to put off because if you put it off, there are so many other things that can get in the way.
 
You don't need to spend much time updating the log. Just get it out of the way, file it, and you can move on with your life. But it's invaluable when someone resurfaces and says, "Hey, let's pick up where we left off." And you're going, "Who are you again?"
[00:25:53] Matty: Yeah, I think that's great advice, even for people who don't have clients. If you have an interaction with, I don't know, let's say a designer, editor, or something like that, make that kind of note and separate out the notes you're going to share with the person. What I do is, whenever I have—it's especially handy on something like Zoom or any kind of virtual meeting—I'll open a Word document. Then I'll have it be like "John DeDakis," and I'll say, "Oh, John and I met today and we chatted about such and such." I can use that if I actually want to send minutes. There are things that I want to share with the person, and then there are things that you might not want to share. For example, if you find that a cover designer is doing some kind of weird thing that's not what you're looking for, you could make your private note that says, "Remember to remind him that I don't want bloodstains on my cover" or whatever. Then you'd have the public, "This is what we agreed to do" kind of document.
 
Managing sign-offs
 
[00:26:54] Matty: You know, your comment about the contracts made me also think of another handy tool that I recently discovered. I needed to have a contract signed, and I always struggle with managing whole e-signatures thing. I have a Dropbox account, as I think many people do, and I discovered that there's an app called HelloSign, H E L L O S I G N. I think it probably used to be a separate app, but if you have a Dropbox account, at least a certain kind of Dropbox account, and you look in the left nav, there's a signatures option, and it's a very nice basic e-signature request and tracking app. With my account, I get like three signatures a month, which is more than I need, but I like that HelloSign on Dropbox.
 
[00:27:41] John: Okay, that's good to know. Wouldn't PDFs do the same? You can sign a PDF.
 
[00:27:48] Matty: Well, I don't think that I have the level of Adobe or whatever that enables me to make a signable field in an online document. So the nice thing about HelloSign is that you upload the PDF, list the signers, and then you drag a signature block over the PDF where you want each person to sign. It's just defined like, "This is where Matty's going to sign. This is where John's going to sign." You can designate the order in which you want people to sign. You enter an email address, then you hit send. HelloSign cycles it through the signers in order, and then the person just has to click into that sign on the PDF and type out their name or sign it with their mouse or whatever they want to do. I always tried doing that with a PDF, and it was probably user error, but I could never get it to work for me.
 
[00:28:43] John: Yeah, because I had to update my laptop and, on the old one, a PDF you could sign and everything was great. With the new laptop, it's like, you gotta buy this, buy that, and it gets a little discouraging.
 
[00:28:56] Matty: Yeah, I was definitely out for the free option. I didn't want to add yet another tool to my list of things that I would have to organize.
 
[00:29:04] John: Exactly.
 
Organizing with Excel... or not
 
[00:29:05] Matty: You know, I was thinking another organizational tool that I use is, I would recommend everybody keep an eye out for anything you have to access repetitively. I'm a huge Excel fan. But I have giant spreadsheets. Well, I have one super giant spreadsheet called William Kingsfield Publishers Pub Information, and over time it's expanded to include even more things.
 
But as an example, for every book, you're going to have an ISBN. And you might have an ISBN you've purchased through Bowker, or you might have—I won't get into a description of the pros and cons, but if you're publishing on Draft2Digital, you might have a Draft2Digital assigned ISBN, and then you might have, like, a Barnes and Noble assigned ISBN. There are also URLs on all your sales platforms for each of your books, like, anything like that that is repetitive. Just go ahead and stick it in a spreadsheet because if I want to post something online pointing people with links to my, let's say, my first book on my direct sales platform and on my Books to Read universal link, all I have to do is open up my pub info spreadsheet and filter on the book name, and there they are right there.
 
I do the same thing with book descriptions. I do the same thing with testimonials, so don't force yourself to go look for the same information over and over again. Just bite the bullet and put it in a spreadsheet. And I really haven't found anything better than a spreadsheet. If you want to use sheets or whatever, that's fine. I think that if people are willing to learn sorting and filtering, then the spreadsheet is the way to go.
 
So when you are looking for, like, let's say you have to provide a URL or an ISBN to somebody, how do you, how do you access that information? Do you have a non-spreadsheet alternative?
 
[00:31:02] John: Yeah. I go searching. I have in my AOL files. I hadn't really thought about that, but there are some draft files so that when people are looking for ISBN numbers and things like that, I've got a file where all of my books are listed with the ISBN numbers. And so I can go there. Usually when I'm pitching a writing workshop, I have a file that has all the blurbs for the writing classes that I teach so that I can pluck from there and create a class that will combine a couple of things. There's a file I have for bios because every writing workshop or writing conference, they want your bio, but they have different standards. Some want 50 words, some want 100 words. And so I've got a bio file that has all kinds of different lengths of bios that I've written and adapt. And that's just one file. And I can go and go, Oh, this is one and just copy and paste it from there. But again, that's Word again.
 
[00:32:11] Matty: Well, years ago, in my corporate life, I facilitated a kind of like a new employee orientation, and one of the modules was about behavioral styles. I think they were analyzing, supporting, controlling, and another one that's escaping me at the moment. But I really thought there were perfect analogies to Microsoft Office applications. Like there's just the Word personality, there's the Excel personality, there's the PowerPoint personality, and heaven help us, there's the Microsoft Access personality. So I think that, I think it's just an equivalent behavioral styles assessment.
 
[00:32:45] John: Yeah, exactly. It really, I think organization is a personal, these are personal choices that you make. And it's an evolutionary thing. I think I've learned a few things from you today, even, on how to maybe adjust and adapt and evolve my own organizational style. It's definitely been trial and error as I've gone.
 
The relationship between organization and procrastination
 
[00:33:11] Matty: Yeah, for sure, for every person, I think that's the case. And so, I thought it would be fun to close out with a question, and I think this is one we discussed earlier, but if not, it'll be a little surprise for you. So, I have the question here, what is the relationship between organization and procrastination? Is that a question you had proposed?
 
[00:33:32] John: I don't know if I proposed it or not, but I know I have procrastination nailed. I mean, I'm a master procrastinator. But the, but it's useful. Because what I tell my writing students is that, unlike what Stephen King tells you, you’ve got to write a thousand words a day or you're not a serious writer. I don't buy that. I think if you're ruminating, you're writing. And, you don't have to be moving your fingers on the keyboard in order to be a writer.
 
Granted, there comes a time when you really do have to get your butt in the chair and the fingers on the laptop. But, I think procrastination is incredibly useful because it's allowing your subconscious to process things, and so that when you do sit down, things have bubbled to the surface, and it's more likely that it's going to flow onto the page. So, it's not necessarily organization, but it is part of, I think, the creative process, and both procrastination and organization serve the same end, and that's to be creative and get something down on paper, or eventually it'll be on paper, so that others, you'll be able to connect with others with whatever your story is.
 
The value of procrastination
 
[00:34:53] Matty: Yeah, what you're saying reminds me of two things. One is that, this is something I always have to remind myself of, but I have found real value in procrastination in replying to emails. So, normally, my goal is always the zero inbox. My default mode is, reply to everything immediately because that's how you keep a zero inbox. But I realized, and this is a lesson that I learned and then had to relearn and relearn and relearn in my corporate life, that if you just wait, and I don't mean days, I mean like 12 hours, 24 hours, a little bit of time, oftentimes either your answer is different because you've had more time to think about it or, the problem takes care of itself.
 
[00:35:43] John: That, you've really tapped into something that I think is worth talking about. This is my to-do list, and it's handwritten, it evolves, there are some crossouts on it, and, some of the things that are on this list are based on emails that I've, that I have yet to answer. And some of them go back a month. I'm so sorry, anybody who's still waiting for an email, it's coming. And some of it is just they don't really need a quick response. Here's another thing that I'm doing that I've discovered. When I get an email from somebody and I look at it on my phone, my iPhone, I'm able to open it and then I'm able to mark it as unread. So that'll at least give me a first glance at it so that I can ruminate about it, as you mentioned. But then when I file it, when I go to my laptop, it's still highlighted as if it's brand new.
 
And that reminds me, okay, I need to pay attention to this, but I've already been thinking about, about an answer. And I've discovered too, that, a lot of people are surprised when I answer right away, and, and so I think we are at a point with email where you don't have to answer instantly, especially if it's an important topic or a potential conflict or whatever, or someone is asking for a lot of information, you can have some time to kind of think about it so that when you compose your answer, it's already been percolating a little bit and the answer itself then becomes easier.
 
And then again, anybody I've had communication with, I create a folder in my AOL file. Yes, it's AOL. Get over it. I have a folder in my AOL file of everyone that I'm in communication with and I file their email and my response, and everything just goes into that file. So the inbox indeed gets cleaned out. Well, I've got 9000 emails still in my inbox. A lot of it's junk, but, the important ones are getting answered and the relationship main is maintained. In its own folder, in its own email folder, with that person so that I'm able to keep track of the relationship. Do I go back and, and, and go through those? No, but they're there in case I need them.
 
Search or folders?
 
[00:38:09] Matty: Yeah, I think that another way to think about it, and I think this is a generational thing because I think you and I grew up in the age of creating folders in AOL, for example. but something that, a younger coworker pointed out to me when I was still in the corporate world is, search in many cases is just as efficient, if not more efficient, than filing things in a folder. Because let's say, you have an email that's related to me and Fred, then do you, do you put that in the me folder? Do you put it in the Fred folder? Do you copy and put it in both? But if you search for my name and Fred's name or my email address and Fred's email address, then you can find it. And I have found that I, in fact, I don't think I put anything in a folder anymore in email because I just find that a search is more likely to bring back what I'm looking for than looking through a folder of information. So again, just another perspective.
 
[00:39:01] John: I would amend that by saying, yes, definitely do the search because often the search has, has shown me things, has, has widened the net a bit. To show me other things, I think that your suggestion or your coworker's suggestion is probably more relevant in a corporate environment where you're just getting this gush of emails and, and so maintaining your own filing system, can be a full-time job in and of itself. But on, so that then means that a search, will do it. But my concern would be a search might also cause things to fall through the cracks. Whereas if you do file it in that particular relationship folder, then you really know you have it. It's not, you're not relying on the server in the sky, to keep track for you.
 
[00:39:57] Matty: Yeah, all just things for people to tweak as appropriate for their own circumstances.
 
The power of percolation
 
[00:40:02] Matty: And the other thing that your earlier comment reminded me of, and then you gave me the perfect segue by talking about percolating on an email, is that that idea of procrastination in the sense of, pondering what you're working on in your fiction writing, for example, or your nonfiction writing too, I'm sure, is, percolating being the third, to plotting and pantsing, and I credit that to Art Taylor, who had mentioned that, that he was a percolator, and I was like, yes, yes, I've never, I've never heard that term used in that circumstance, but I'm definitely a percolator.
 
[00:40:38] John: Well, and it fits with the coffee-fueled, all writers and journalists, mainline coffee. So, yes, I Percolate is a, is a perfect word. And it works for art because he's very successful as a writer and, and quite talented. So, that's a. That's a wonderful word to use. he's probably got her copyrighted now though.
 
[00:41:01] Matty: that's why he got on the podcast, because I was at a conference, and he was speaking, and he said percolator, and I wrote down, Art Taylor, percolator, invite him to the podcast. We talked about other things too, but the percolator thing is what, what caught my attention because it was, it sounded exactly right to my own experience.
 
Well, John, this has been so much fun. Thank you for sharing, your tips on organization. Thank you for being willing to, debate some of the pros and cons of, oh, let's say Excel. so please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
 
[00:41:31] John: Well, and thank you, Matty. I mean, it's always fun talking to you and I think I learned a few things today too. People can get in touch. I'm John DeDakis. it's Greek. You can probably best get me through my website, which is my name, johndedakis.com.
 
[00:41:56] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
 
[00:41:58] John: Thank you, Matty.

Episode 218 - Story Bibles and How AI Can Help with Kaylin Tristano

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Kaylin Tristano discusses STORY BIBLES AND HOW AI CAN HELP. If you’re tired of discussions about AI, you’ll find plenty to interest you in the first half of our conversation, and if you’re not tired of AI, you’ll find some great tips for uses of AI for authors that go way beyond the creation of story bibles. We start out our conversation discussing story bibles in a more traditional context, including what information is important to capture, and how much is too much; capturing story bible details during a proofread (or proof listen); and expanding our idea of story bibles beyond text to include things like maps and audio. In the AI-focused part of our conversation, we discuss tips for prompting; the need to babysit AI; using AI for brainstorming; concerns about AI and piracy; and how the different AI platforms use your data.

Kaylin Tristano is an indie author who has been writing contemporary romance and romantic suspense as Cara Malone for the past 7 years. She is also a freelance editor with Happy Ever Author, specialized in helping other indie authors produce great books. She has a bachelor's degree in writing and a master's in library science.

Episode Links

Kaylin's Links:
http://caramalone.com
http://happyeverauthor.com
 
Mentioned in the Interview:
https://coggle.it/
https://claude.ai/chats
Hard Fork Podcast on Spotify

Summary

Are you an indie author seeking to reshape your scriptwriting process? Have you considered using Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Whether you are a seasoned author or a newbie, Kaylin Tristano brings innovation to the table in her recent chat with Matty, the host of The Indy Author Podcast.
 
Kaylin is an accomplished indie author known for her contemporary romance and romantic suspense novels written under the pen name Cara Malone. With a background in writing and library science, she also works as a freelance editor at Happy Ever Author, helping other indie authors produce exceptional books. Kaylin shares her journey into using AI to develop story bibles—a cornerstone tool for authors to streamline their projects.
 
The Classic Art of a Story Bible
 
In the traditional sense, a story bible is a guide that helps authors maintain consistency within their narrative. It is especially useful for series, allowing authors to maintain accurate details throughout the chronology of the story. A story bible typically houses information about each character's physical descriptions, personality traits, habits, and history. This information can also extend to the setting and timeline of the story.
 
Kaylin pointed out that although templates are available on platforms like Scrivener, authors should not limit themselves. One could integrate spreadsheets, mind maps, images of characters, and even maps of story locations. This not only results in a more elaborate story bible but also makes it interactive and fun.
 
The Role of AI in Script Writing
 
Where does AI come into the picture, you might ask? Specifically, it comes in handy in automating and improving the process of creating a story bible. When an AI platform like Claude or ChatGPT hosts an entire novel, it can generate a character list, summarize important events, or provide detailed descriptions, all at the author's request.
 
AI offers an efficient method of asking precise, unambiguous questions to obtain required information. For instance, Cailin uses the prompts "Please compile a thorough story bible for this book, including names and physical descriptions of all major characters, as well as locations mentioned" and "Please provide a detailed list of the events in this book" for story bible creation.
 
The inclusion of a large context window (currently 100k tokens in Claude and 90k words in Playground by OpenAI) allows authors to paste extensive chunks of their novel for AI processing. However, the generated output should be carefully reviewed and babysat, as AI has been observed to make up its own answers, a phenomenon known as "hallucination," particularly when left for extended periods.
 
Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Piracy
 
The fear of piracy is a major concern for authors venturing into AI platforms. However, as Kaylin reassured, platforms like Claude and OpenAI clarify how user content is handled in their terms of service.
 
Basically, on both Claude and OpenAI, you retain all rights to your content. Neither one uses the content added to their platforms without explicit permission. So, authors can feel secure while using these platforms to augment their story bible process.
 
In Conclusion
 
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has promised to significantly transform the writing process. While the technology is still evolving, it offers an innovative means of streamlining the creation of story bibles without draining an author's energy. As Kaylin puts it, it's about leveraging a powerful tool to save time and make the author's job easier.
 
What are your thoughts on the use of AI in your writing process? Now might be a great time to explore the plethora of opportunities AI opens up for indie authors!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Kaylin Tristano. Hey, Kaylin, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Kaylin: Hey, I'm good. How are you?
 
Meet Kaylin Tristano
 
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little background on you, Kaylin Tristano is an indie author who's been writing contemporary romance and romantic suspense as Cara Malone for the past seven years. She's also a freelance editor with Happy Ever Author, specializing in helping other indie authors produce great books. She has a bachelor's degree in writing and a master's in library science.
 
I invited Kaylin to the podcast to talk about story bibles, and we're going to discuss traditional story bibles as well as how to use AI to help create story bibles.
 
What made Kaylin decide to use the pen name Cara Malone
 
[00:00:37] Matty: But I had to start out because I met Kaylin as Cara Malone, and now I've spent, I don't know how long, maybe a year or something like that.
 
[00:00:44] Kaylin: At least a year.
 
[00:00:45] Matty: Yeah, so inevitably I'm going to call you Cara at some point. But I had to ask, Kaylin Tristano is such a great name. What made you decide that you were going to use a pen name?
 
[00:00:55] Kaylin: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. So really, the only reason was because I have my master's in library science, and in my experience looking for jobs, librarians aren't particularly forgiving if you appear to be interested in anything other than library science. I've been doing this for almost 10 years now, so maybe it's changed, but back when I worked as a librarian, I thought that it was important to keep my resume as Kaylin Tristano, strictly library science.
 
[00:01:24] Matty: That makes sense. And you'll forgive me if I call you Cara periodically throughout our conversation.
 
[00:01:28] Kaylin: I mean, like you said, I've been doing this for seven years, so I feel like Cara just as much as I feel like Kaylin.
 
What is a story bible?
 
[00:01:34] Matty: Okay, good, good. That'll make it easier for me. So we had been spending much of that year having almost daily writing sprints. And in one of those writing sprints, we got talking about story bibles, and you had some background in that. So I just wanted to invite you to chat a bit first about traditional story bibles. Well, let's start out saying what a story bible is, and then what made you decide that this was something you needed for your own work?
 
[00:02:00] Kaylin: So I imagine that story bibles are a lot of different things depending on the author you're talking to and what their particular needs are. Essentially, it's just a guide that you can reference that tells you the important details of your book. Most of the time, it's used in series. For example, if I was going to write book five and needed to refer back to book one and be like, "Oh, what type of car does XYZ character drive?" That's the type of detail that I personally would put in a story bible.
 
I'm a contemporary romance author, so a lot of my stuff is that kind of background and also chronology—when does a certain thing happen in the story, what happens in my characters' backgrounds. Things along those lines. But if you're a sci-fi fantasy author where you're creating worlds, then your worldbuilding would also go into your story bible, things like that.
 
And the reason I personally felt I needed a story bible was because instead of writing book one in the series, then book two, and then book three, where everything was constantly top of mind, my writing schedule involves different series. I write book one in series A, then maybe book three in series B, and then back to series one—I kind of rotate. So I needed a refresher on all those small details. That's why I started using story bibles.
 
[00:03:36] Matty: Did you have a standard list of fields that you collected, like eye color, hair color, height?
 
[00:03:43] Kaylin: Yeah, a lot of the stuff you would find in a character questionnaire or something like that. I like to use models for my visual cues, so I'll model a character after a particular actor. That way, I can look at a picture of them and remember what the visual cues are supposed to be. But yeah, age, race, sexual identity, jobs, education history, pets, hobbies, all those kinds of things.
 
[00:04:16] Matty: And then do you update that? For example, let's say someone has a pet in book one, and then something happens to the pet, and they get a different pet in book three. Do you have a way of accommodating those kinds of changes that happen over the course of the arc?
 
[00:04:32] Kaylin: I do. I try to incorporate that into my process, so I'll either do it right when I'm done with writing that book. Sometimes I capture those details as I'm going along, but you get into the zone, and you're writing, and you don't remember to jot down every single little detail. If I'm being a really good author, I do it right after I finish writing the book. But more often than not, I get lazy and I do it right before I write the next book. So I'll just reread the previous book in the series and jot down all of my series bible information.
 
Tools to create story bibles
 
[00:05:03] Kaylin: That might be a good time to mention there are different ways to keep a story bible. There's software you can download specifically for that, and I believe there are a number of them. I use Notion a little bit for that. I also put it directly into Scrivener, and that's where I do most of my writing. I break it down by character level, information, setting, chronology, things like that. Each one of those will have a separate document in Scrivener, or you could do like an Excel sheet or something like that. So there are many ways to capture the information.
 
[00:05:40] Matty: Yeah, I have a lot of mine in Excel because I find a lot of what I need to accommodate from book to book is chronologically related information. So I have basically a calendar that says, book four takes place in March, and book five takes place about a month later—you know, calculate that out. It helps me keep track of if I'm referencing back to a previous book, did that take place? Would snow have been on the ground? Would flowers have been blooming? Things like that. But I do like the idea of Scrivener. It kind of provides a template for occupation and physical characteristics and things like that, but I find that the things the templates ask for are not often the information I find I need a bible for.
 
[00:06:28] Kaylin: Yeah, I haven't played too much with their preset stuff. I just start with a blank document. But I do like Plottr. I've never used it consistently, but it has a lot of good features. You can create pages for each individual character, and you can create your fields. If you don't like the ones that they preset, then you just delete those and put your own in.
 
You can do that for characters and settings. And then if you don't want to use their timeline for your actual plotting, or I mean, I guess you could use it for both, but you could set up a book in Plottr that's specifically just the timeline for your book and do like across the top the actual chronology, and then down the side would be either each individual character or each plot line.
 
[00:07:22] Matty: Yeah, it gets tricky because there are so many things that could be considered story bible material, as you had mentioned to begin with. I know a lot of people who use Scrivener make a document for each character in Scrivener and then when they're starting a new book in the series, they just copy those files over into the new ones, and then they can build upon them so that you have this gradually expanding dossier of a certain character.
 
What I think is tricky with a story bible is that there are the obvious things that people want to capture mainly for story consistency purposes; you know, what's the pet's name or what's the character's eye color or something like that. But then there are things that you don't realize until later that you need, like, where did they go to college? You know, when you wrote that, you never expected to have to refer to it again, and that isn't too bad because you can always just go back and search for college or university or whatever it might be. But, do you have tips for recognizing the things that should be captured in a story bible?
 
[00:08:21] Kaylin: Only really from experience, like you said, stuff that you don't realize you're going to need to know, and then later you think back, and you need it, so then you start capturing that going forward. Once we get into the AI, that's actually one of my favorite reasons for using AI to do your story bibles because it makes it way easier to find that kind of stuff, so I can elaborate on that in a little while. But yeah, I don't know, just kind of anything that might stand out as a unique thing to that character, I would say. So yeah, like the type of car they drive, the way they take their coffee, stuff like that. Little nuggets.
 
How much info is too much in a story bible?
 
[00:09:03] Matty: Are there any things that you started to capture in a story bible, and then retrospectively you realized that that was just effort that wasn't worth investing? How much is too much for a story bible?
 
[00:09:14] Kaylin: Yeah, there's a fair amount. I try to keep in mind when I'm writing a series, and it all takes place in one city, the favorite diner that all of the characters go to obviously needs to be detailed. But if I think that this one character happens to be interested in yoga, so they go to a yoga studio, but no one else in the series is going to be interested, then I don't actually need details about that. Like, I might write down the name of the studio and what book it's in so that I can reference it later. But things like that I do sometimes get into the weeds about.
 
[00:09:46] Matty: Yeah, I think that just plain old search is your friend there because I have a folder where I have word exports of all my books, and if I'm having an inkling that somebody did something about yoga later, I can just search that folder for yoga, and nine times out of ten, maybe eight times out of ten, I can find what I need without having to diligently go through every single detail, which I think is not necessarily a useful use of time.
 
[00:10:09] Kaylin: I was just going to say sometimes I get it in my head that I gave something a name. I mentioned diners, and I'm seven books into my current romantic suspense series. And these characters have been going to this diner for three of those books. I was so sure I had given it a name by now, and writing book eight, I'm searching and I'm searching and I'm searching, and there is no name.
 
So, if you know the name, you can search for it. But if you don't know the name, then you're looking for a diner, and it's possible that there are other diners in the book, and maybe you called it a cafe instead or something like that. It can get difficult. Asking AI, "What is the diner that they like to go to?" and not needing those details is really cool.
 
[00:10:51] Matty: Yeah, I had a similar experience where I was writing a book, and one of the secondary characters, sort of a primary secondary character, I couldn't remember if I had described it as having a beard and mustache. So I searched for beard, I searched for mustache, I searched for facial hair, I searched for every way I could think of that I would have described somebody having a beard and mustache, and I couldn't find it, just as you're saying. But I do think that people shouldn't get so hung up in the story bible, partially because of some of the things you're about to discuss.
 
Story bibles beyond Text
 
[00:11:20] Matty: The other thing I wanted to mention is when I think of a story bible, I think of a written-out text document, but I've seen some really cool story bible kind of information, like a map of the town where the activity takes place, which I think is super fun. I love maps. Plus, it would be a very fun giveaway for fans, like subscribing to your email newsletter to give them a map of the town where it takes place.
 
[00:11:42] Kaylin: Yeah, I love stuff like that. It's fun, a fun extra. It's fun for you. I've done, because I write romance, and a lot of my stories are interconnected, I have a mind map on a website called Coggle, it's C O G G L E, and I believe it's dot I T. Where it's like the Cara Malone universe is the center of it, and then each branch off is all of the different towns that my books are set in. And then I have arrows going from like, alright, so this town has these three books in it, and here is the list of all the characters that are in that book, and this character is a side character in this book, but then it points over to this book where they become a main character, so I never really thought about that as a story bible, but I guess it kind of is.
 
Capturing Overlap Between Two Series
 
[00:12:32] Matty: Yeah, and that's bringing up a good topic that if you have very explicitly interconnected books, then it's probably clearer. But I have a couple of circumstances where, well, actually, this is a good example because I have two police detectives who primarily show up in the Lizzie Ballard books, but I gave them a little cameo, a couple of line cameo in one of the Ann Kinnear Novels, and I forgot to remind my audiobook narrator that they were the same characters. So, these two characters have totally different voices in the audio of the Ann Kinnear version than they did in the Lizzie version.
 
And those kinds of things, even expanding the story bible further, another thing on top of all those descriptive things like eye color and etcetera is if you can find a snippet of someone's voice, someone who sounds like you imagine the character to sound. Because I think I would have avoided some back and forth with my audio narrator if I had said, "I imagine this character sounds like Kathy Bates," and it would have avoided some of the sort of poking around to try to come up with a voice that is distinctive for that character and kind of makes sense with their personality and things like that.
 
[00:13:47] Kaylin: Yeah, that's a great idea. I never actually thought about telling my narrator a famous person's voice to reference.
 
[00:13:54] Matty: Yeah, it was a person who was very large. You know, people who are very large just have kind of a different timbre to their voice than people who are. Then I think because there's just like more lung area or something like that, you know, there's some physical reason for that. And when I was listening to it, it sounded like it didn't sound like that. So I found, I think it was, I don't know, like Dick Butkus. It was a very old Saturday Night Live. He had been the Saturday Night Live host, and I found the monologue, and it was perfect because I was saying, like a football player voice. Professional football player voice. So that was the kind of voice. So yeah, you could do multimedia story bibles, I guess is the underlying message.
 
[00:14:36] Kaylin: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I do include images of my characters because I said I like to use famous people to reference.
 
[00:14:44] Matty: Yeah, that can, I think, even be helpful for audiobook narrators too because I've done that before. Kathy Bates is the example I'm thinking of because I got a sample chapter, and the person sounded much younger than I pictured. And so I said, no, it's really Kathy Bates, but not in Misery.
 
Created a Story bible with AI
 
[00:15:02] Matty: so we've mentioned a couple of times this idea of using AI. I'm very curious to hear more detail about how you are using AI to help you create story bibles.
 
[00:15:11] Kaylin: So, it all started with Claude because Claude is the original one that has a large context window, meaning you can paste in a really large chunk of text and have the AI reference that whole chunk of text when it's giving you answers. And actually, since you asked me to come on to this podcast, which has been less than a month now, ChatGPT now has a large context window option in GPT-4, specifically in their Playground model. So the stuff moves really fast, and it's entirely possible that anybody listening to this a month from now is going to need updated information too because it just goes so fast. But essentially, yeah, when Claude came out with their version that you could paste in, it was 60k, and that's in tokens, so that would be roughly 50,000 words. It blew my mind, and I was like, there are just so many different options for this.
 
I've used it for a whole bunch of different purposes. One of them is the story bibles because I write roughly 50,000-word novels, and at this point, they're up to 100,000 tokens, which is roughly 75,000 words. I know that was kind of a limiting factor for a lot of people. You would have to paste in half of your novel at a time in order to get your story bible. But if you write shorter or under 75,000 words, then it's relevant now. You can just do your whole novel. Yeah, you can paste it in and then ask it any kind of questions that, let's say you were going to outsource it and hire someone to create your story bible, you can ask it the same kind of questions.
 
So you're like, read this and give me a list of all the characters with their physical descriptions. Or give me a chronology of the events in the novel, things along those lines. So, for someone who's been writing in series for almost all of the seven years that I've been writing and also been putting off the job of doing a really good story bible on most of those series, this was a godsend because I could just sit down and knock it all out at once.
 
[00:17:33] Matty: So, I'm wrestling with this question about the amount of input you can provide. We had talked about this a little bit earlier, that maybe a little more than a month ago now, I've tried putting the AI-generated transcript of the podcast that I get from Descript, which is my audio and video editing software, and it does like a pretty good job, but not a publishable job, and I put it into ChatGPT, and I just gave it the prompt, "Correct the typos and grammatical errors in this transcript," and it does a great job. But I can only put in 4,000 characters at a time, and I've tried to experiment a little bit with other platforms, but I haven't found a platform where I can put in much more than that. Where would you direct people to go to enable them to put in these very long, like a novel-length chunk of information?
 
[00:18:23] Kaylin: Alright, so let me get the, I have them up on my screen so I can give you the exact URLs. Claude is run by Anthropic, and it's at claude.ai. You have to create an account there, and then once you have your account, it would be claude.ai/chat. You can either paste in, and it will convert it into an attachment, or if you have your document already in either Word or it also takes PDF, there's a spot to just upload the file.
 
Claude is free. They also have a paid option. The free option is, don't quote me on this because I don't know for sure the number, but it's roughly like 25 messages in a 24-hour period. So if you're trying to do your whole catalog, then you're probably going to have to stretch it out over multiple days if you don't want to pay for it. But they do have a paid plan where you get more messages.
 
The regular ChatGPT, where you either have the app on your phone or you're on the computer at chat.openai.com, that's the one with the 4,000-word limit. The other version, it's still GPT, but it gives you a longer context window, is called Playground. I believe it was originally developed for software engineers, like people who are writing code, but it works with just words too. And that one is platform.openai.com, and even if you have an account with ChatGPT, which is the regular ChatGPT. You would have to create a separate account for Playground. This one does charge you for messages.
 
ChatGPT is free and they have a paid option. This one, there's no free option. There's a free trial. And then after that, you're paying. By the generation. So, like if you put in a 4,000-character message in Playground, you're going to be paying a lot less than if you paste in your entire novel and start asking questions. But it's still pretty negligible. Like, I would say that you can easily do your whole manuscript for probably, like, definitely under 5, possibly under 1. It's very cheap right now.
 
[00:20:43] Matty: Okay. And once you've loaded it, is it there for you to query later. Is there a library you can add it to so that it's there for later use?
 
[00:20:54] Kaylin: It should be, yeah. So, for sure, in Playground, you can access your history, and on Claude, I believe they have a limit, they'll only go back so far. Let's see, so I have stuff that goes back three months, so I know that for sure it goes back three months, but I wouldn't expect it to save stuff just forever because you never know if something's going to go goofy on their end, and you're going to lose data.
 
[00:21:21] Matty: And when you're querying the information that you've put in there or the material you've put in there, do you have any tips for how to frame up the questions you ask? Does it work to just put in, "Give me a description of such and such character," or is it more complicated than that?
 
[00:21:38] Kaylin: No, you can use natural language. There are better ways to phrase questions. I would say, start with just ask it a question like you're talking to a person, and if it gives you a really weird answer, then you know you didn't phrase it quite right. You want to be as specific and unambiguous as possible is the basic trick to talking to AI, and I can give you some quick story bible prompts that I use.
 
So the four that I have been running my books through most recently, are I paste in the novel and I ask, "Please provide a detailed chronology of this book, including the amount of time from start to end, and any seasonal information provided." You would obviously, if you have different concerns, you would tweak that to include whatever information you want, but I struggle with, like specific months being mentioned, so that's why I put in the seasonal information.
 
I would recommend if you're in, Playground in particular, let it run the answer, copy that into whatever you're planning on storing your story bible in, so if you're going to put it in Scrivener or a Word document or whatever, put it in there. And then actually delete the answer that it gave you and just paste in a new question. So you're starting with a blank document where it's just your book and then the question that you have and then the new answer.
 
Because the question or the problem that you're going to run into is when you were talking about, well, two problems, really. Number one, you're talking about the context window on ChatGPT being short. If you pasted in an entire novel, and your novel is close to that limit, where, you're at, let's see, Playground is actually 90,000 words, and then Claude is 75,000 words, and those are estimates. If you're giving it a whole bunch of different questions, and it's giving you all the answers, that's going to eat into your context window, and it won't tell you that it's run out of context, it'll just start deleting stuff from the beginning. So, you could be missing out on some details because you've run out of context, so I always just copy-paste it into whatever I want. And then start a new question.
 
And then the second problem, I've noticed this with Claude more often, but, sometimes the AI can hallucinate, which means it starts making up its own answers. One time I pasted in a novel that was much larger than the 50,000 that I had access to at the time, so I had to cut it in half. I gave it the first half of the novel and I started asking it my chronology questions, and it summarized the first half of the book that I gave it, but then it just assumed that I wanted it to summarize the entire book, even though it didn't have the second half.
 
And it started writing, and I was reading it, and it actually took me a minute to figure out that it wasn't summarizing the information I gave it, it was hallucinating new information because it was doing a pretty good job of following what I had written, which was impressive, but, yeah, so you have to be careful if you give it if you leave the old answer in there, it could potentially reference that answer and then start making up its own stuff because it's considering that part of the context window as a whole.
 
So I basically just give it one thing at a time, delete the old stuff, put in the new question, to avoid that. So, a couple more questions that I give it are, "Please compile a thorough story bible for this book, including the names and physical descriptions of all major characters, as well as locations mentioned." I put story bible in there, even though we've been talking about story bibles as a whole, including the chronology, and the worldbuilding, and all these things, because through trial and error, it seems like when you say the phrase story bible to do that. Chat GPT or Claude, it thinks about the names and physical descriptions because that's what it'll spit out automatically. If you just say, "story bible" and nothing else, it'll give you names, physical descriptions, locations, things like that. So that's why I included that term there.
 
“Can you please let me know any major life changes or updates that occur by the end of this book for the following characters?” I use that for my series if I have a core group of characters that are going to need updates throughout the series, so I want to know, like, so and so just got engaged at the end of book two, and then by the end of book three, they're going to be married, and things like that. So, I'll just include a list of the specific characters that I want information on.
 
Please provide a detailed list of the events in this book. That one I have not fully tweaked to my satisfaction because it doesn't give you a super thorough list that I would like. It starts off thorough and then it kind of tapers off and gives you a more general list about the midpoint of the book, at least in my experience.
 
[00:26:58] Matty: It gets fatigued.
 
The need to babysit AI
 
[00:26:59] Kaylin: Yeah, it gets tired, and so I need to work on making my AI assistant do that task better. And that's kind of the challenge with AI in general. It's an amazingly powerful tool that can help you save a bunch of time, but you also have to babysit it, at least at this point in the game because, yeah, it gets bored and it starts hallucinating, or it starts doing a bad job, and you have to keep it on task.
 
[00:27:24] Matty: Well, I do think it's kind of a nice example of how we're not at a point yet where it's going to be taking over our jobs. I would never say never, but the fact that it needs to be babysat is what we humans are here for. I found that even with the transcript correction that the first time I put the podcast transcript into ChatGPT. I just said, "Fix this transcript," and it created like an article for me. I was like, "Well, that's nice, but it's not what I need." So I had to futz a little bit with the prompt, which ended up being more or less fixed typos and grammatical errors.
 
Then I also added, "And insert paragraph breaks as appropriate" because otherwise, it would just do one really long paragraph. If my guest or I were talking for a long chunk of time, it would just be one giant paragraph. It did a better job. It actually did break it up a little bit more if I put that extra prompt in. So I think it's very interesting to play around with this stuff because you do have to bring a different mindset to it than any previous interactions with computers that I've had before AI started hitting.
 
[00:28:25] Kaylin: Yeah, for sure. I think it's not even really consistent within itself yet because, last month, I was running a book through AI that I had written in the third person, and I decided that it actually needed to be in the first person. The old way would be to sit there for a week, tediously changing all of your pronouns. It's amazing that you can spend just a couple of days, paste in a chapter, tell it to change it to first person, paste in another chapter, hit go again. I would still have to sit there and scan through it and make sure it was doing it right because nothing else would change. The prompt would be the exact same. It's only been, like, three minutes since I ran it the last time. I paste in a new chapter, and it starts coming up with some kind of crazy stuff, and it's not even writing my book anymore. It's like, "Well, let's try that again. All you're doing is changing the tense, so stick to that, please."
 
[00:32:57] Matty: Yeah, these are all great examples of brainstorming possibilities as well as story bible creation. You could be working on a book and think, "Huh, I wonder if this would be better in the first person." You could stick a couple of chapters in there, run it through ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, see what comes out, and go, "Ah, no," or, "Oh, yeah, that's kind of better, I think I'm going to switch,” and do that much more effectively and efficiently than you would have been able to do in the past.
 
Kaylin: Oh yeah, for sure. This is one of the reasons I'm most excited about AI—tasks like brainstorming and outlining. It would help to have another person in the room. You can run it past AI. Many authors focus on the ethical use of AI to generate novels, big-picture questions. I think there are tons of small tasks that AI can help us do without necessarily touching on the big elephant in the room question.
 
Matty: Yeah, and even the idea of loading all your books into one of these. When you're starting work on the next book in the series, you could say, "Give me 10 ideas for what might happen next in the story or give me 10 ideas for what might happen next with this character." That could be a super cool brainstorming thing.
 
I've been using that a lot for nonfiction articles. I'll have a topic that I need to write about, I'll plug it in, and the text is so generic it would never make an interesting article. But oftentimes, the ideas or the way the information is organized are very useful to me to then write the article by myself.
 
Kaylin: Yeah, I've gotten all kinds of good details. The one that I have to chuckle about—hopefully, my reader who I talked to about this doesn't listen to this and learn my dirty secret. I had a character, this was just a total throwaway scene where the character was interacting with her sister, and her sister was teasing her as sisters do. The character said she got a new hobby, and the sister is like, "Oh, what are you doing now? Competitive air guitar?" My reader actually took the time to specifically message me about how hysterical she found that, and I was like, ChatGPT gave me that idea.
 
Matty: Oh, interesting! And what prompt—like, based on what prompt did it give you that idea?
 
Kaylin: Huh, I believe I asked it something along the lines of, "Give me ten ideas for ridiculous hobbies."
 
Matty: Oh, perfect! Yeah, I found it's good, if I'm looking for another word, of course, you can go to bazillion online thesauri. But, I often find I get more interesting suggestions. Like, I know this is almost the right word, but not quite. You can get more interesting input from AI than just the standard thesaurus.
 
Kaylin: Yeah, for sure.
 
Concerns about AI and piracy
 
Matty: One of the things that we wanted to talk about regarding AI was the idea of piracy. I mean, that's a concern for everybody. What are your thoughts about AI, either specific to story bible kind of information or more generally?
 
Kaylin: so, personally, I don't really worry about it because I think that authors who publish their work online are so used to being pirated by the billions of piracy websites that are out there. We know we're never going to get them all, even if you start sending takedown notices. They take them down, and then new ones pop up, and sometimes it seems like they even pop up maliciously. They're like, "Oh, you sent a takedown notice on this, so I'm going to upload it on five more." I have never personally been upset about the idea of piracy, either by AI or by actual humans. I don't worry about it, but I do know that a lot of my author friends I've talked to about AI are pretty concerned about that possibility.
 
How AI uses your data
 
Kaylin: I did take the time before our meeting to look up the terms of service for Claude and OpenAI, just to reference. You can look these up. I don't know if they change or if they're pretty set in stone, but if you're personally concerned with the AI protecting your copyright, then definitely look it up for yourself.
 
The essential overview is on Claude: anything you put into Claude, you own, you have the rights to it, and they're not going to use it. However, they authorize you to use the outputs, so you don't actually own them, but they're kind of informally licensed to you. That's my not-a-lawyer explanation of it. They also say that they do not train on the things you put into Claude.
 
OpenAI, on the other hand, is kind of the opposite. You still retain all of your ownership of anything you put into OpenAI, and you own the output as well. They don't authorize it to you; they just give it to you. But the way they majorly differ is they do train on anything you input, not output. If you put your novel into OpenAI, then you're giving them permission to use that as part of their large language model, unless you go in specifically and opt out. So you do have that option; you have to go through their helpdesk, and you can opt out of them using anything you put into their system.
 
Matty: Cool. Thank you very much for having done that research for us.
 
Kaylin: Yeah, I figured I should probably know these things too since I do use them.
 
Matty: As you're saying, it's tricky because it is a moving target. A huge fan of the “Hard Fork” podcast. If anyone is interested in AI and is looking for a great and fun source for information on AI, the Hard Fork podcast, which is put out through the New York Times is a great and very entertaining presentation of AI information.
 
Creating a story bible during the proofread
 
Matty: And then just to take the conversation away from AI for a little bit and back more to core story bible. I know we had early on referenced a couple of ways that we ourselves assemble the story bible. One thing that I've been trying with mixed results, because you do get in a flow, like you were saying earlier when you're writing, you sometimes just get in the zone and forget that you're supposed to be taking little notes about this stuff.
 
One way that I've worked to get around that is that I always, another computer-assisted thing. The very last thing I do with my book is I have my computer read it to me, and oftentimes I can pick up things that my proofreaders missed, or my editors missed. You know, there are always a couple of things that I get that way, and I try to use that time for consciously thinking, "Now I'm looking for story bible information." So if people don't quite want to make the jump to AI yet, I think that's a great time to accomplish two things. You can get your story bible written, and you can also do that final check on your manuscript. And, Kaylin, do you have any other, the old-fashioned way, any other tips, the old-fashioned way for story bible?
 
Kaylin: I guess maybe if you use a character questionnaire or something like that, then it can be helpful to just have a blank one. And that way, you know if there's anything that you missed in there because you have a blank spot.
 
Matty: Yeah, that's why I love spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are my go-to. I don't know what I'd do if Excel ever went away in terms of managing it, but it is nice because you can see very clearly where a hole is. Sometimes it doesn't matter; like, I'm never going to care where that character went to school or whatever, but I think that also sometimes looking at that and seeing where the holes are can give you story ideas because you think, "Oh, you know, not only do I still have to establish where they went to school, but hey, maybe I'm going to use that as a backstory or flashback or something like that."
 
Kaylin: Yeah, that's a great way to develop people. And then you're like, "Oh! Wow, I forgot completely to give these people parents."
 
Matty: Yes, exactly. That could be a whole series unto itself.
 
Well, thank you so much for sharing information on story bibles, old and new. So please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and your work and everything you do online.
 
Kaylin: All right, so if you're interested in me as an editor, my website is happyeverauthor.com, and if you're interested in my books, which are sapphic romance, it's caramalone.com.
 
Matty: Great, thank you so much.

Episode 217 - The Many Levers of Your Author Platform with Andrea DeWerd

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Andrea DeWerd discusses THE MANY LEVERS OF YOUR AUTHOR PLATFORM, including two approaches to social media: going wide or going deep; the pros and cons of social media scheduling and cross-posting apps; tips for finding your target demographic on social media; the evolving status of BookTok and TikTok; the fact that an author platform is more than social media, and how to find those alternatives; tapping into your existing network or community, or even building a platform with fellow authors and author services providers; establishing a presence on Goodreads, BookBub, and Amazon Author Central; and, finally, knowing when it’s time for a change.

Andrea Jo DeWerd is a book marketing strategist, consultant, writer, speaker, and the founder of the future of agency LLC, a book marketing and publishing consulting agency headquartered in Brooklyn, NY. Andrea is also the co-founder of MADonna Writing Retreats, a luxury writing retreat experience in Barcelona. She’s a 13–year veteran of Big 5 publishing with over one-hundred career NYT bestsellers.

Episode Links

Andrea's Links:
Author website: thefutureofagency.com & ajdewerd.com
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/thefutureofagency
Instagram profile: https://instagram.com/ajdewerd
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajdewerd/

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

Summary

The world of book marketing is incredibly vast and can often feel overwhelming for new and seasoned authors alike. In a recent episode of the Indie Author Podcast, we dove deep into this subject with our esteemed guest, Andrea Jo DeWerd. As a book marketing strategist, consultant, writer, and founder of the Future of Agency LLC, Andrea brought valuable insights to the table, discussing author platforms, social media, SEO, and other essential topics.
 
The Multi-Faceted Author Platform
 
Contrary to popular belief, an author's platform is more than just their social media presence. Andrea clarified that an author’s platform is their network, their connections, and anyone they can call upon when it comes time to promote their book. This includes tangible portions of their platform like websites, newsletters, and social media, but it also extends to the author’s credentials and other professional affiliations they might have.
 
She emphasized thinking creatively about what’s in your control and advised authors not to limit their idea of their platform to just social media.
 
Handling Social Media
 
Not every author feels comfortable using social media. Recognizing this, Andrea advises authors against forcing themselves to fit into a platform that they don’t enjoy. She promoted the idea of choosing a platform not only based on where the target audience may be but also where the author feels comfortable and can provide regular content of value.
 
She encouraged authors to think beyond social media if they're feeling hesitant and brought up Substack as a platform for long-form newsletters for authors who aren't comfortable with active social media engagement.
 
Navigating Website Analytics
 
Websites, according to Andrea, offer unique opportunities for authors in terms of claiming and controlling your own search. With Google analytics, authors can see the path readers take from social media to the author's website and then to the bookstore, providing valuable data for marketing strategies.
 
Andrea acknowledged the time and energy needed for website optimization efforts and suggested taking a step-by-step approach to improving your website for search engine performance.
 
Using Goodreads, BookBub, and Amazon Author Central
 
Andrea discussed the benefits of claiming author profiles on platforms like Goodreads, BookBub, and Amazon Author Central. She emphasized the importance of regularly updating these profiles with your latest releases and encouraged authors to be active on these platforms without necessarily reading reviews. She warned authors of falling into the trap of constant comparison and advised them to ensure such platforms remain a positive space.
 
The Future: BookTok and Threads
 
As the conversation turned towards trends, Andrea shared her observations about emerging platforms like BookTok and Threads. While she noted that BookTok has become somewhat insular, catering to a narrow slice of literature, she hinted at Threads as a potential platform for authors willing to try something new.
 
In conclusion, the podcast shed much-needed light on author platforms from the unique perspective of a seasoned book marketing strategist. The central message was clear: ensure your platform is more than just social media, engage with readers genuinely and authentically, monitor your digital footprint, be active on notable book platforms, and don’t be afraid to try out emerging platforms. Above all, find a platform that feels good to you and interests your reader base. It's less about fitting the mold and more about creating a unique author identity in the digital space.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today my guest is Andrea Jo DeWerd. Hey Andrea, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Andrea: Hi, good to see you.
 
[00:00:07] Matty: It is great seeing you too.
 
Meet Andrea Jo DeWerd
 
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Andrea Jo DeWerd is a book marketing strategist, consultant, writer, speaker, and founder of the future of agency LLC, a book marketing and publishing consulting agency headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. Andrea is also the cofounder of Madonna Writing Retreats, a luxury writing retreat experience in Barcelona. She's a 13-year veteran of big five publishing with over 100 career New York Times bestsellers. And I met Andrea when I heard her speak at the 2023 Writer's Digest Annual Conference, and I thought the information she had to share was so valuable that  I wanted to invite her to the podcast.
 
Is an author platform more than social media? (The answer is yes)
 
[00:00:45] Matty: And so we're going to be talking about the six levers of your author platform. And I think that a great topic to start out with is, is author platform just social media or is it something more?
 
[00:01:00] Andrea: Okay, so this is a great place to start because so many people come to me and say, I know I need to have a platform, but I don't want to be on social media. What do I do? And I have this conversation so many times. What I always want to remind folks is that your platform is more than just social media. Your platform is your network. It's your connections. It's anyone that you might call upon to help you when it comes time to promote your book.  
 
So I would think about this creatively. There, there are the things that are in your control, which are like website, newsletter, social media.  We're going to talk about those a lot today, I'm sure. But think about what else is in your control that you might be able to call on. Maybe you are an entrepreneur and have a speaking platform.  Maybe it has nothing to do with what your book topic is. Maybe you're writing middle grade or YA fiction and you have a completely different professional life that. But you have connections from that and you might be able to, you know, pull that network and, use it in some way. Let your friends and family, let your professional network know that you have now written a book.
 
So think creatively about that and what you can add. This also extends to your credentials. I was working with a client who is a vet and was selling, one, a memoir, but also two, middle grade fiction about animals. And we really had to make that connection very clear that she is credentialed to write.  Middle grade fiction because she knows animals very intimately from her life as a vet. Her book is not about being a vet; her memoir is, but that particular book, it was important to let readers know, you know, why she's qualified to speak about that topic. So you, using credentials is also part of your author platform and lets you bring in an audience in a new way. So think beyond social media.
 
Tap into your existing network or community
 
[00:02:35] Matty: Yeah, the comment about your network and a network you might have, as you enter an author career is interesting because I spent many years as a project manager in the corporate world, many of those years in IT, and, when I left my corporate job in 2016, I had hundreds and hundreds of LinkedIn contacts, and I'm always happy to tell them if I have a new book or I have a new podcast episode or something like that, but, I sometimes also wonder, like, should I have started fresh? Because it's almost like if you've, put out your first book and you've told all your friends and family and you're writing a mystery, but all your friends and family are always buying books about travel in Europe on Amazon, and so you end up getting this weird also buys. Does the same kind of thing happen with a social network? Like if you're carrying members of your old social network into your author career?
 
[00:03:20] Andrea: Absolutely. I think that's a really important point to make to think about. I was talking with the author today who's starting to write in a new genre. We want to bring her current audience along for the ride. So we're trying to figure out exactly what is her current audience interested in, and then how do we make that shift? It might be gentle and, you know, your shift from project management to writing other kinds of books, that, that might be a more dramatic shift.
 
I think the messaging is really important. I would think about what's the common denominator? And besides, you know, major moments in a book's life cycle, what else could you share with your network there that, that they might be interested in? And is there a hook that would draw them into the book in a different way? So same with social media. If you know that, someone was writing children's books before, and now we're trying to reach, middle aged women's fiction market. That shift might look like, leaning on parents first. So we think parents are the people who are buying that picture book first. Now we want to really target those moms. What is the common denominator that they might be interested in from one book to the next?
 
It's hard. It takes a couple months to do that, to start kind of posting a mix of messaging. Maybe two messages to one message each week about the kind of shifting from the old audience, the old content to the new content, but doing that, that messaging switch just very gently through, through social media posts and through a mix of messages, is a nice way to do that.
 
Look for alternatives to social media
 
[00:04:41] Andrea: The one thing I will add is just also that social media is not for everybody. So if you are feeling hesitant there, look at what else you may be able to do. And I'm working with a client now who is going to just be on Substack. She's going to write a long form newsletter because that is a more comfortable place for her to be than social media. So that is a more basic switch to drop social media and do a newsletter, but think about your comfort level and if there's a platform that really feels better to you than others.
 
Social media is not the be all end all of book marketing, it is not the only thing that is going to sell your book, it is probably like, it's probably more like the icing on top, the thing that maybe pushes something over the edge, it just gets a lot of buzz when we see something really go viral on BookTok or Bookstagram in particular, And but for the majority of authors, it's not going to be the thing that sells your book. So, so look around, look around, look at what you like doing, and maybe choose a different platform. It doesn't have to be social. Maybe it's a podcast.
 
Two approaches to social media: go wide or go deep
 
[00:05:35] Matty: Yes, exactly. I did have one other question about social media because I've heard and, at different times followed two different approaches, both of which make sense to me for different reasons. One is that don't bother being on a social media platform if you're not planning on being active there. And the other one is there's no harm in posting, even if you're not going to be active on a platform, as long as, I guess, you're kind of setting that expectation.  
 
So, for me, I'm most active on Facebook, and, you know, I post everything I do there, but I've also started posting more regularly on Twitter and Instagram. I'm never going to be active on Twitter or Instagram, but I kind of feel like, especially for my podcast episodes, this is more true for my nonfiction than my fiction, that many of my guests are active on those platforms, and I feel like I'm both doing them a service, but also selfishly, reaching their audience if I'm doing that. Do you have a feeling about the pros and cons of posting on a social media platform where you're not planning on being active? Or active in the sense of interactive?
 
[00:06:38] Andrea: This is a really interesting question because I think it's changing right now, especially with folks leaving Twitter, now called X. My answer used to be more the former, what you were talking about of, you know, really only focusing on the platform where you're going to be active and respond to comments and drive engagement. Part of that is because if you're not responding to comments and being interactive, the algorithm does push your content further down, you will be, you know, deprioritizing the algorithm. If it's not your main network. Kind of, who cares? Who cares if you're not at the top of the algorithm if it's not where you're focused?
 
The one thing I would say is that apps like Buffer and Hootsuite make it so easy to cross post across different platforms. You can post the same content on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram if there's a photo attached to it. And you don't have to be active in all those places. You can just follow the comments on LinkedIn or, you know, wherever you're most active. But it makes it very easy to cross post and be, maybe have a passive presence in those places.
 
So my opinion about this is really shifting and it's also becoming more common, especially with people leaving Twitter, to say that they have an updates only account. So you'll see that in Twitter bios now that folks are really actively leaving Twitter. I'm one of those people. I've chosen to leave Twitter very recently, which is still a little bit of a grieving process for me. I really am sad about what Twitter used to be for the writing community. But a lot of people are saying there's an up an updates only account, you might see a couple things a year of, you know, a link to buy something, sign up for a retreat, a new product, but folks are really not being active there, but they're leaving a cookie crumb trail of where to find me.
 
So I think that's going to be more common these days, especially as we're trying new platforms, we're trying Mastodon, we're trying Threads. So I think you'll see that more of folks having updates only accounts where you might post once in a while really important stuff, but then leave information about, you know, where to find your more active platforms.
 
I think this is really more a question of an author's energy. So you want to put your best. Social media energy, maybe one to two hours a week into your favorite platform. So whatever that is, put your best energy there for sure. Do that first. If it's draining your energy to cross post to Instagram and Twitter, I would drop that entirely. I don't think it's worth posting once in a while there just for whatever fraction of an eyeball you might gain. If it's a passive repost, if you're able to do that. From Facebook or from LinkedIn without really putting much effort into it, then I think there's absolutely no harm to keep doing that, and you'll reach the people who happen to be there.
 
Social media scheduling and cross-posting apps
 
[00:09:09] Andrea: I will say that Pinterest is a great platform for that. Pinterest is great for searchability, and it's very easy to cross post anything with photos or videos. So if you're posting photos or videos to either Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn, cross post them to Pinterest. It's, there's easy automations to set up through either a website called Zapier or a website called If This Then That. I have these automations set up so every time I post on Instagram it automatically posts to Pinterest. It also emails links to my Instagram to my mom, so she remembers to look at my photos on Instagram.
 
So that takes about a half hour to learn and set up, and then you never have to think about it ever again. But you might grab a fraction of traffic of folks who are looking for new books on Pinterest or happen to be looking for content related to your topic.
 
[00:09:57] Matty: And is there a one time or subscription fee for those services like Zapier and the other one you mentioned?
 
[00:10:03] Andrea: Not if you only, if you're under a certain threshold, so I think Zapier, you can have up to 20 automations for free, before you get charged, so you can set up at least a couple for free.
 
[00:10:13] Matty: I did experiment. I'm not going to say the name because I have the feeling that the issues I was facing were not a problem with this platform. It was just the nature of the beast. But maybe you can advise me that I got a social media scheduling app because I was going to post to those ones that I mentioned plus TikTok. God help us. I'm sure we'll get to that. And what I found was that pretty frequently this dashboard would tell me it had posted something, but I would, it wouldn't be there if I went and like actually checked the platform, it wasn't there, which was just a bug or could have been user error.
 
But the thing that I found most seemingly, disappointing about it or the downside of it was the inability to effectively flag people. So like if I have a podcast episode go up and I get all the social media URLs of my guests, then when I go and post on the different platforms, then I always flag them. So. You know, I'm hopefully, letting them know, and also letting their followers know that this is available, and I didn't really see a way to do that on, the scheduling apps. Was I missing something, or what's your thought about that?
 
[00:11:15] Andrea: Some of them are better than others at that, is what I will say. I recommend Buffer and Hootsuite, there are many others I've experimented with, none of them are perfect. I, the experience that you had of something not posting that does happen to be on Hootsuite once in a while, And, what happens is that, this is nerdy tech stuff, but it's a problem with the API connection. So your Facebook now, Facebook login requires two factor authentication. So you get texted a code from Facebook. Buffer or Hootsuite needs to connect to that text code. So it gets disconnected very frequently now because of that two factor authentication. So it makes your actual social media platforms more secure, but it makes your social media management apps, much more annoying to work with. That is a problem across the board.
 
What I would say then is to make sure you're logging into your management platform at least once a week to make sure that those things are reconnected. It does take a little bit more work, than set it and forget it, unfortunately. But, so as far as tagging people, some, there, there is one platform in particular that is not very good at that is very hard to find people's handles. Buffer is okay and Hootsuite is okay. There's another one that I will not recommend because, it was very hard to tag people in the platform. So that, I think is a preference. It just takes a little bit of experimentation and figuring out, you know, which one, works best for you.
 
The other thing I will say is that for most of them, you have to have someone's handle exactly and know how to spell it. You cannot search in the platform. So you're searching on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook natively, and then typing it in the exact caption back in your scheduling platform. It does take a little bit of work there. So, there is one platform that is more expensive called Meltwater, and they are better about using the live search to find people without having to leave Meltwater to go find it somewhere else. But it's unfortunately more expensive.
 
[00:13:03] Matty: yeah, the, all the interconnectedness, like the admitted benefit of being able to do it, to manage in one place does bring along its own set of challenges as well.
 
[00:13:12] Andrea: That's it. Pros and cons.
 
More alternatives to social media
 
[00:13:15] Matty: So I wanted to talk a little bit about, you had said before, like you had, you were working with an author whose platform was on Substack, not social media. Can you talk a little bit about some of the other non-social media, platforms that authors can use to build an author platform?
 
[00:13:31] Andrea: The other big one that comes up a lot is Medium, right? Authors writing other long form content on Medium, and I would say about either of those, either Medium or Substack or another newsletter platform is, just think about how much else you have to say if you're someone who is writing a lot and, writing prolifically, maybe if you were a blogger back in the day or used to have another blogging platform, maybe that's a good option for you.
 
Offering value for newsletter sign-ups
 
[00:13:55] Andrea: newsletters, getting in someone's inbox, I think it has to deliver value. You're asking someone to give up a bit of personal information, their email address, which can be personal. It's a little bit closer relationship than passively following someone's on social media. So I think if you're going to ask for someone's email, you have to deliver them something of value.
 
So think about, you know, tips or things you can teach them or interesting facts, maybe. I always point to historical fiction authors who have so, so much beautiful research, share some of that really interesting research. Maybe there's some cool resources there, or maybe you can teach someone else how to do that amazing research.
 
If you're writing nonfiction, I imagine you have sources and interviews and tons of ancillary content. also tip nonfiction authors, if you're not recording your interviews with your sources, start recording now. they can be used for podcasts later, they can be used for video, they can be used for, you know, transcripts for newsletter, but they there's so much other content that can be shared in that way, thinking of repurposing anything that goes into just one book, but it has to be something of value to the recipient.
 
So think about, you know, what are they going to get out of it? What can they learn from it? Is there some kind of idea exchange that can happen there? And it might be as simple as, you know, maybe you read prolifically and you're recommending books. Here are three books you might like if you also liked reading my book, that kind of content.
 
So a book sharing Booklist, sharing article lists of, you know, here are interesting things I'm reading this week that are related to topics in my book. But there has to be just a little bit of value for them in it, to make them want to open it, and truly look forward to it every week.
 
And also think about the newsletters that you really like getting, and, you know, what do you get out of it? Why are you excited to open it every week? there are about two that I open, you know, immediately first thing, and one of them is called The Daily Carnage, which is from a marketing agency. It's the one marketing newsletter that I read. so I recommend that to everybody. And one is Astrology for Writers by Jenna Kadlik, who's a Brooklyn based writer. I read her newsletter religiously.
 
So, think, you know, think about that feeling when you, you look forward to getting that email in your inbox. You know you're going to get something really good out of it. You're going to know how to navigate the current, the coming ellipse and know how to plan your creative projects, because of Jenna Kadlik, or Daily Carnage will give me some new marketing tool or insight every day. So, what can you do that is, it’s going to be of value to someone else. as far as other platforms, you know, it's challenging because those aren't really the active ones besides social media and then podcasts. If you're, if you have a topic that is so expansive that it would lend itself well either to interviews or to a long form narrative.
 
Podcast is an interesting platform for that. YouTube is the other one. I think, but unless you're intending to be a full time YouTube content creator, being a video YouTuber, I think that option is probably not, not the best for most folks unless you're doing something that's very like how to, like makeup tutorials or cookbook authors always do very well on YouTube.
 
The role of an author website
 
[00:16:47] Matty: Well, the other one that I always like to ask about, and I've been on this jag of asking guests periodically about this because I'm still trying to get my brain around it, but, an author website. So I've had a couple of interviews over the last year, I guess, of talking with, experts in this field about author websites and, sort of debating a little bit on, being the devil's advocate about our author websites as important as they used to be, because.
 
Don't you want to send people to your direct sales store or social media or, you know, the online retailers or something like that? And, I'm almost convinced, like I'm convinced in my head but not in my heart yet that I should be spending more time on my website as like a destination. But I'm still struggling with the question of what's the benefit to me as an author and a businessperson of driving people to my website as opposed to somewhere else. Do you have a perspective on that?
 
[00:17:42] Andrea: so thinking about website, it is generally a more static platform. So it's not one, you know, where you have to make changes. I'd say still update it maybe every 3 to 6 months, but, my opinion on whether you need to have a platform or have an author website has changed also, I think, in the last couple of months.
 
Especially seeing what has happened with social media, how little control we have over the Twitter algorithm, the Instagram algorithm. I think websites are important because they let an author claim and control your own search. You are completely in control of your SEO for your website, for your name, and for your book titles, really, in that way. Of course, you can do that on Amazon, and you can, we can talk hours about just playing with the Amazon algorithm and getting that search. But Google search is increasingly important, especially for nonfiction, and for topical fiction in particular, but it's also, it's the one place, maybe, where all of your books and projects live in one place, and you have full control over that.
 
So I see the benefit in driving direct to a sales page, you know, direct to retail if you're promoting one book at a time. It may be if you're a debut author, you only have one book so far, but once you hit that threshold, once you have two books, once you have multiple projects, you don't want to abandon the first one, you So managing a website and really taking control of your search there I think is really important because it's really the one place where an author can completely own that, and start to associate their name with their book title, having those things linked together come, help it, help both of them come up higher in Google search and come up higher in Amazon search.
 
So all of those things play together. The more qualified links that you have that go back to your website and then go back to Amazon or other retailers helps all of those things surface higher, higher in search in the algorithm. There's a very top line overview of that, but, I do think it's important for search reasons.
 
[00:19:30] Matty: Yeah, I do keep my website up to date, and the one page that I update all the time is, the upcoming appearances and events page, so it's, there's always, you know, at least once a week I'm up, I'm in there updating something about that, but, you know, occasionally you'll get the people who are all about, you know, the technical things that need to be done to drive people to your website, and I'm like, like, it's clear in my mind that I'm thinking of it as the backup to if I get kicked out of Facebook, And it looks professional, you know, if like, I can send somebody to my own website, it just seems like a marker of professionalism.
 
[00:20:06] Andrea: Very specific in the analytics there. So the benefit is of driving folks through your website and then to retail is that you can track all of that. You can see that they came from Facebook and then they clicked off to Amazon or they clicked off to Barnes and Noble or whatever. You can drive down pretty deep in those Google website analytics.
 
your website and you control that data. Amazon doesn't control that data. That's the real benefit. If like you can see what is actually driving people to your site. You may or may not do anything with it. Maybe you want to optimize and make sure you're getting more people to your website from Facebook or from your newsletter, wherever, or maybe it's just interesting information that you're not going to do anything with. Totally fine. But it is important that you control that data, that you're not dependent on Amazon or someone else for that information.
 
[00:20:49] Matty: Yeah, I think anything that was, removes our dependence on those kind of platforms is good. And I realized that maybe if I were advising someone on this, I would say that the work is no for when you do whatever those optimization steps are, like, If you're going to do those optimization steps and then you're never going to look at the data, then deprioritize it, like bump it down to the back burner for a little bit and then come back to it later because you need both the time to do the setup that's being recommended and then to look at what is providing you and just doing one without the other isn't really giving you much benefit.
 
[00:21:21] Andrea: That's right.
 
Author considerations for search optimization
 
[00:21:23] Matty: so we've talked a little bit about search optimization. Can you speak a little more generally, even outside the website scenario, about what kind of things authors should be keeping in mind for search optimization?
 
[00:21:37] Andrea: A thing a lot of folks don't remember to do at this point, once, once you have an ISBN, claim your profiles. Go claim your BookBub profile, go claim your Goodreads profile, claim your Amazon Author Central, and then related to your website, you can claim your Google Knowledge Panel. these are all things that can be completely in your control for search.
 
So when you search for anyone on Google, there's a little side panel that pops up on the right-hand column, and it will say, is this you? Claim this panel, at the bottom. So you can click that, and you can point people to that. You can put a one sentence bio in that sidebar, or two sentence bio, I don't know the character count off the top of my head, but you can also choose which social media platforms do you want to point people there.
 
So maybe you only want to point people to Facebook, and you want to remove the LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever else is showing up there, because that's where you're focused on your social. You get to control that, and a lot of people don't realize that. So that, I think that is very valuable, because you could also point people to your newest book there. You can really control that information and control when somebody is looking for you, what are they going to find first.
 
Establishing a presence on Goodreads, BookBub, and Amazon Author Central
 
[00:22:31] Andrea: The other platforms, Goodreads, BookBub, and Amazon Author Central in particular, I do like to treat those really as set it and forget it. They are helpful for discovery, for pointing people back to you and your books. What I am talking about is setting up your Goodreads author profile. Like, add your bio, add your photos. You can link a blog or an RSS feed of other content that you're doing. I am not telling you to go read your reviews. That is not what I am saying. So listen to my words. Claim your profile. Do not read your reviews, authors.
 
What is helpful to do there is to spend just a little bit of time adding your books to lists on Goodreads, under, it's under discovery and then lists. you can, there are crowdsourced lists for every topic and genre, so you might find, books to read on the beach or whatever you want. Books to read when you think you want to quit your job. You can find very specific things. So look for about 20 or 25 lists that fit your book and you can add your book there and have people up and people will upload think it's relevant.
 
But it's just one more place to like put your book out there for discovery and see if there's, you know, any fraction of traffic you might be able to capture from that. So do that. Add your book to your list and then leave it alone. Do not read your reviews. similar with BookBub, you can rate. Other books by other authors, which just helps you, become associated with those authors, so if people like books like Water for Elephants by Sarah Groon, which is being made into a Broadway musical, which is why it's in my brain right now, if you like books like Sarah Groon’s, you might like books by, you know, you, author, so there might, there can be a little bit of association that happens on BookBub, it's, it's really just another discovery tool that I think a lot of folks ignore. And BookBub sends so many daily emails if you sign up for different genres, it's mostly, of course, for deals, for ebook deals, for price promos, But they have a huge email list just for historical fiction, a huge email list just for memoir and inspiration.
 
So having your book associated with other books that might be put on deal or on promo helps your book pop up in the algorithm in that way. So, do that once, do not spend a lot of time there, but when you have a new book, I'd pop back to all of those profiles and make sure you've added it to new lists, rated a couple new comp titles in that way.
 
Amazon Author Central, there's limited options for what you can do there, but at least make sure you've claimed your profile, update your photo, update your bio, because that will show up on all of your book product pages automatically. A lot of folks forget where it is feeding from and forget where that 10-year-old photo is coming from, and it's for your Author Central.
 
[00:25:10] Matty: Yeah, I finally put together a big spreadsheet of everywhere I had posted my picture or my bio with a link to it so that when I had a new book or had a new picture I would know the 17 bazillion places I had to go fix it.
 
[00:25:23] Andrea: Brilliant. Great idea.
 
Building a platform with fellow authors and author services platforms
 
[00:25:25] Matty: The whole thing about BookBub is very interesting because I think that the obvious focus of platform building for most authors is to find readers, but I also think that there's this opportunity to build a platform among either your fellow authors or the gatekeepers like BookBub, so I am not claiming in any way that this is true, I'm just saying that there's a part of my brain that thinks that if I'm active on BookBub as a member of the community, maybe I'm going to be more likely to be smiled upon, maybe they have like a little dashboard in the background that's saying how often you do anything other than just submit for a feature deal.
 
I suppose in the past, I might've thought of Goodreads that same way, but now that it's part of Amazon, it doesn't feel that way so much anymore, but can you talk a little bit about whether that idea of building a platform among one's peers is something authors should be thinking of?
 
[00:26:21] Andrea: So you're right. There are editorial teams at both Goodreads and BookBub. it is like one or two people amongst a team of 500 Amazon engineers at Goodreads. And you're right. It used to very much be that way that you could be rewarded for being a good Goodreads citizen is what I would say. I do think BookBub still looks at this to an extent.
 
Because I think it's a place where a lot of authors are not active as a promotional platform. You're, exactly what you said, folks are submitting for deals or maybe for advertising, but not using the platform natively. The benefit of doing that is that when you are recommending books on either Goodreads or BookBub, other regular readers can follow you and follow your recommendations in that way, which helps you gain a following.
 
And on BookBub, you have to have over a certain threshold of followers before they will give you certain promotions like the pre order alert. you have to have a thousand followers on BookBub before you can be considered for that, and that pre order alert is actually, free and a very valuable presales tool.
 
How are you going to gain followers there if you're not being selected for ebook deals? You're going to have to use the platform natively and, you know, be known as a person who is recommending books, of interest. What I can't tell you is how effective it is in general, like how easy it is to catch the eye of those editorial teams. I think there are so many authors and, you know, Goodreads has become very, so, so saturated. but I think BookBub is still an opportunity for folks to make a, more of an organic splash and gain those followers and hopefully get that free presales alert.
 
[00:27:53] Matty: I do have the feeling that the BookBub team, well, everybody's a smaller team than the Amazon team, but the BookBub team is, I just sense a smaller team. I'll just clip this out and send it to them and say, dear BookBub, how many people do you have working there anyway?
 
[00:28:05] Andrea: Exactly.
 
[00:28:06] Matty: so we've talked, I guess one thing that I would take from what you were just saying about interactive, interacting natively on a platform like BookBub is that some of those are just fun.
 
Like, it's fun to be on BookBub and see what people are recommending and things like that. And so, I think there are some things where you can justify it just because it's an enjoyable thing. Like, maybe you don't put it down in the ROI column of your author business, maybe you just put it down in your hobby, you know, your personal hobby thing, and you may be, gaining personal benefits, but, no harm in having fun in places where you might gain financial benefits and platform building benefits anyway.
 
Online options for reader engagement
 
[00:28:45] Andrea: that's right. Yeah, I think, you know, I didn't exactly answer your question, too, about just, peer networking. I think that's part of it. Like, hopefully you will have fun talking to other book lovers and talking about books and sharing what you are genuinely reading and interested in. I would think, really think of it that way, of like, it's one more place for you to talk about books and talk to book lovers.
 
there's also benefit in the same way. There are other book club websites or book club groups on Facebook in particular, Goodreads has great book club groups, that might be a fun place for you to interact and engage. I don't know exactly what the ROI is because it's so dependent on, you know, does the group decide to read your book at some point? Do they decide to promote it? Will they adopt it? It's hard to say. It's very hard to say, but you might have fun as a reader, engaging with those book clubs. And if that's something that you have time and energy for, I would definitely recommend that to authors. Like, I'm in three book clubs just because it's fun.
 
[00:29:34] Matty: Yeah, I have actually had good luck, and as you're saying, I'm not quite sure how to measure the good luck, but good luck with Facebook readers groups. There are a couple that are very well run, and I've participated in a number of events there, and I can see those people coming over to my, author Facebook page.
 
And, interestingly, about once a month, I post on my fiction author page, I say, I know most of you are here because you're readers, but since readers are sometimes writers, too, you might be interested to know that I have this other page called The Indy Author, and I just, posted one of those coincidentally a few days after I had done one of these, Facebook group events, and saw several of those people come over to my nonfiction platform, and then I also often see people that I've met through those book clubs commenting on Facebook ads.
 
And there are even Facebook ads that I didn't target. I'm letting Facebook doing the targeting, but targeting them. And then I see people I've met through those groups, you know, saying, yes, I've read this. This is a great book. So it's kind of a virtuous cycle. Plus being fun, as you're saying.
 
The evolving status of BookTok and TikTok
 
[00:30:35] Matty: now I'm going to, at the other end of the spectrum for me anyway, I have to ask about, BookTok. So BookTok was all the rage for a while and I'm not hearing that much about it now. I don't know if it's because I just tuned it out or it's really sort of decreasing in popularity. What are your thoughts about BookTok these days?
 
[00:30:54] Andrea: BookTok in general, I think, I think it's become a little bit of an insular community. Once one book becomes popular, one author, like Colleen Huber, of course, it was very hard for anything else to break through. And it's like, the ten books that BookTok crowned just keep getting recommended and recommended.
 
I haven't seen a lot of those readers, and this is completely, you know, just through watching and through seeing kind of what spikes at different retailers. I haven't seen a lot of other books been able to really break through. It's like, we crowned Colleen Hoover and we crowned, you know, ten other books. I guess Fourth Wing is probably one of the more recent ones that did come out of that. But it hasn't been, what Bookstagram has become, which is, you know, many more books, many more authors, many more Bookstagramers being able to break through in that way.
 
We are still trying as marketers, and I know the publishers are still trying to provide books and offer recommendations to the big BookTokers and have them, really help us make something else go viral.
 
I haven't really seen it happening in that way. We're trying to make a splash there, we're trying to have them shift their attention to something else, and it seems like the book talk type has become so narrow, they want to read this. So they're recommending this and it just, it hasn't expanded beyond to like a more general readership. TikTok, broader TikTok, I think is helpful though for nonfiction authors, who are operating outside of the BookTok algorithm. So I have seen in very weird examples, serious biographical history and, serious science books. Making a little bit of a splash on TikTok because they were talking about a very specific topic that TikTokers wanted to learn about.
 
People are using TikTok like they use Google or like they used to use YouTube. They're going to learn about how to write a resume or how to, you know, how to spot an XYZ comment in the sky tonight. they're looking, they're using TikTok for very specific information, using it for tutorials. So if you have nonfiction that could fit into one of those categories, I think that's a really good place for you.
 
For our general fiction writers, memoir writers, maybe more of our narrative nonfiction and, fiction. I think it's going to be hard to break through unless you can shoehorn yourself back into like a how to or related category. What I do see working for writers in general on TikTok is more like, more of what you were talking about with your nonfiction platform of like, come learn to be a writer, come look behind my process.
 
That content is working. I can't tell you that it's actually selling books, though. It's interesting content that people are watching and absorbing, but I don't know if it's actually driving people back to buy the maybe fiction that might go along with something like that.
 
[00:33:33] Matty: Yeah, one of the reasons I had pursued this social media scheduling was in order to get to TikTok, because I knew I wasn't going to be posting there. Among other reasons, I'm just not good with my phone. I have to do everything from my desktop, and that was problematic, but I did have, you know, was interested in it primarily for my nonfiction platform. Maybe I'll have to give some other different social media scheduling thing a tool and give it another try, because now I have like four TikTok videos out there about independent publishing.
 
When is it time for a change?
 
[00:34:03] Matty: so as the last question, I wanted to ask you if there are red flags that people should be looking out for, and now I'm thinking more specifically back to social media, that's saying this platform that either I've tried out or I've maybe been using for a long time, like are there red flags that say maybe it's time to move on or maybe it's time to give it a rest, and if that's the case, do you have recommendations for how a person can decide what other platform they might want to move to as a replacement for that platform?
 
[00:34:32] Andrea: That's a really interesting question. I'm thinking, I think first, as someone who's worked with so many authors for a long time, I want to protect your energy. If a social media platform is not fun for you anymore, if you feel like you're getting yelled at on Twitter all day, it's not safe for you anymore, it's not safe for your mental health. And if it's not helping you sell books in that way, if you're just getting started. You know, backlash or getting pulled into conversations that don't feel like a place where you want to be, I think it's time to go. And I do say that, you know, it happens with, it can happen with Facebook comments, it can happen in group chats, it can happen in TikTok, it can happen once in a while on LinkedIn comments. But if those places are feeling toxic to you, I think, you know, feel free to, you know, say goodbye and find something that, that makes you feel good.
 
And that, that's when I am thinking of more of the newsletters, things that are more of a one way street, one way conversation. Sometimes the scheduling apps also help with that, that you're not actively scrolling on the apps and reading all the conversation if you're just posting your content and then getting out. That might be another way to, to approach that situation. So there's that of like, Is it still fun for you? Does it still feel okay? Because I want authors to feel happy and feel like they can invest their time in places that feel good.
 
And then, you know, I will say, like, if you have seen your engagement really plummet on any particular platform, sometimes the algorithm has just decided, and I know I'm talking about it like it's anthropomorphic, but, we don't always know. We don't always know why. There have been one particular word or phrase that got flagged. God knows what happened with your algorithm, but if you're really not seeing the engagement that you used to, and I'm talking maybe, like, Like a 90%, 80 percent reduction in your engagement. That might be time to also look at something else, because it's not worth banging your head against the wall if it's not working. If your posts are being shown to ten people, and you used to get hundreds, or hopefully thousands, it’s not worth it.
 
So as for looking for something new, I will say that Threads is an interesting place right now for writers. There is kind of a lovely book community growing there. Again, I don't know the ROI yet because it's still so new, but there is a kind of a lovely, like, book recommendation supportive community growing on Threads. And I'm like, ooh, could it be the thing that replaces the writing community on Twitter?
 
Hopefully. We'll see. Thank you. So I would say keep an eye on, keep an eye on the new ones. I'm not hearing much about Blue Sky or Mastodon anymore. I'm not hearing much about Clubhouse anymore. I think everyone tried those things and then, you know, decided after a couple weeks that it wasn't for them. But I do see more folks now, especially in the last couple weeks leaving Twitter and giving threads a try. So I would say, yes, keep an eye on that and give it a shot for a couple weeks. See how it feels to you.
 
Finding your target demographic on social media
 
And then what I always say when you're thinking about what social media platform to be on, think about where your audience is. That is really the most important question. If you are trying to reach Gen Z, they are probably on TikTok. If you are trying to reach, you know, Millennials and Gen X, they are probably on Instagram. If you are trying to reach Boomers, 55 they are probably on Facebook, so that is also a, that's a safe bet.
 
LinkedIn skews obviously professionals, but skews a little bit more male, and also higher income. There are parents on Pinterest, parents on Facebook, so I think that's really important too. If you are joining TikTok because. . . You enjoy TikTok, fine, that's one thing, but if you are trying to reach a 55 plus audience, they are maybe not there, so maybe you are yelling into the void and not reaching your primary audience.
 
So I think that's really important too. If you're ready to shift, I would ask yourself, you know, one, where am I going to be comfortable? Where am I going to have fun? And then two, where's my audience?
 
[00:38:15] Matty: Perfect. Well, Andrea, thank you so much for sharing all those tips, all the levers that an author can pull to control their author platform, and thank you for making all those suggestions for alternatives people can pursue. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
 
[00:38:30] Andrea: Amazing. Thanks so much for having me. So my book marketing agency is called The Future of Agency. We are at thefutureofagency.com. And I also run those amazing writing retreats. We are filling for Barcelona, February, 2024 right now at madonnawriting. com.
 
[00:38:47] Matty: Great, thank you so much!

Episode 216 - Learning from Our Readers and Our Characters with Frank Zafiro

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Frank Zafiro discusses LEARNING FROM OUR READERS AND OUR CHARACTERS, including what writers can learn from a negative review (not to be confused with a bad review); tips for crafting realistic dialogue (it’s not a transcript); allowing a long-running series to evolve; the dynamics of an ensemble cast; and how to position a first book in a series as your craft skills grow with subsequent books.

Frank Zafiro writes gritty crime fiction from both sides of the badge. He was a police officer from 1993 to 2013, serving as a patrol officer, a training officer, and a detective, and leading K-9 and SWAT units. He retired as a captain. Frank is the award-winning author of over forty novels, including the River City series of police procedurals, and co-author of the Charlie-316 series. Frank also hosted the crime fiction podcast Wrong Place, Write Crime. He has written a textbook on police report writing and taught police leadership all over the US and Canada. An avid hockey fan and a tortured guitarist, he lives in the high desert of Redmond, Oregon.

Episode Links

Author website: http://frankzafiro.com
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/FrankZafiroAuthor/
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/frankzafiro370/
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-scalise-3b252252/
BookBub profile: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/frank-zafiro

Summary

Every writer embarks on a creative journey destined to teach them something new. In conversation with the noted crime fiction writer, Frank Zafiro, we explored those enlightening lessons that he picked up during the process of creating his latest book, ‘All the Forgotten Yesterdays’.
 
Frank Zafiro's Writing Voyage
For Frank, the act of writing isn't merely a creative endeavor - it's an opportunity to teach and learn simultaneously. With his highly successful 'River City' series, Zafiro stepped into the role of a seasoned crime fiction writer who mirrors his character's morality, struggles, and growth on real-life happenings and experiences.
 
Learning from the Critics
While 'All the Forgotten Yesterdays' is the 14th book in Zafiro's series, the seeds of inspiration can be traced back to his very first book in the series, ‘Under a Raging Moon'. Interestingly, it was a negative review on his debut book that fuelled his motive to write the latest installment. This review was not inaccurate or spiteful; it was thoughtful, measured, and full of insightful criticism.
 
Utilizing Criticism as Creative Fuel
The review in question was critical of the controversial actions of the police officer characters in the novel and even labeled the climactic event as 'murder'. This critique made Zafiro reevaluate his own work, and he realized the potentially alternative ways his book's events could be viewed.
 
This profound insight was later incorporated in 'All the Forgotten Yesterdays', where the protagonist Katie ends up facing a similar criticism as she investigates an important case. This intriguing shift in perspective and narrative was a direct result of the insight gained from the previously mentioned review - a clear testament to the power of constructive criticism not as a setback, but as an inspiration for growth and evolution.
 
Charting Character Evolution in Long-Running Series
Zafiro also shared valuable insights into the evolution of characters and their roles within a long-running series. By embracing changes in roles, power dynamics, and relationships between ensemble characters, he believes writers can create more engaging and resonant narratives.
 
The character arc of Katie McLeod, who transitioned from a patrol officer to a significant lead character, perfectly encapsulates this approach. The evolution doesn't stop there - as life changes, so do characters. Zafiro reveals plans for future books where Katie’s role will become secondary as she moves into positions less involved with active crime-solving.
 
Staying True to One's Work
Zafiro’s openness about the varying quality of work throughout a writer’s career was refreshing. He acknowledged the craft improvement between his earliest and most recent work. He also discussed the common writer’s dilemma - whether to “fix” or revise previously published works to match their current writing quality.
 
Despite the temptation to revise his first book, Zafiro opted to allow it to stand as a testament to his growth as a writer and respect the printed copy as a product of its time and his evolution.
 
In Conclusion
Frank Zafiro’s approach to accepting criticism and embracing character evolution within his long-standing series speaks to his flexibility and growth-oriented mindset as a writer. It provides important lessons for any writer, particularly those juggling long-running series. Recognizing that characters should evolve and undergo transitions, just like real people, can make for compelling storytelling and allow a series to breathe, grow, and remain engaging to its readers.
 
Moreover, his acceptance of thoughtful negative reviews as a source of inspiration rather than unwanted criticism sheds light on the importance of seeing the value in every feedback and turning potential setbacks into creative opportunities.
 
Frank Zafiro’s journey underscores the importance of learning from every external comment and impression, internal impulse, and unexpected character development in the writing process. As he rightly puts it, a book - just like an author’s growth - is never finished, but merely published and open for evolution.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, fellow book lovers, both readers and writers. I'm Matty Dalrymple. I write the Ann Kinnear suspense novels and suspense shorts, and the Lizzy Ballard thrillers. I also write, speak, podcast, and consult on the writing craft and the publishing voyage as The Indy Author. This is my video series, What I Learned, where I ask authors two questions related to their latest book.
 
What did they learn from that book that they'd like to share with their fellow writers? And what did they learn from their latest book that they'd like to share with their fellow readers? I am here today with Frank Zafiro. Hey, Frank, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:30] Frank: Are you, Matty?
 
[00:00:31] Matty: I'm doing great. Thank you. To give our viewers a little bit of background on you, Frank Zafiro writes gritty crime fiction for both sides of the badge. He's a retired police officer. In fact, he was my guest on The Indy Author Podcast to discuss mistakes writers make about police roles and how to avoid them. His latest book is All the Forgotten Yesterdays. Today, I am asking Frank the two What I Learned questions about All the Forgotten Yesterdays, starting with what did you learn that you would like to share with your fellow writers?
 
A negative review can be an inspiration
 
[00:00:59] Frank: Well, I think the lesson I learned was, a lesson I learned actually before I even started writing the book, and that is that a negative review can be an inspiration. To give you the short version of what happened, I came across a, I think it was a three-star review on my first River City book. This current one is the 14th, Under a Raging Moon, and the review was not a bad review, which I would say is a review that just isn't accurate at all.
 
I mean, It might not even be about your book or it just doesn't, you know, worst book ever, you know, these are bad reviews. They don't do anybody any good, but a negative review can, you know, say negative things, critical things about your book, but it's thoughtful. It's considered, it informs the person reading the review as to whether they might want to try this book or stay away from it. And this negative review was written by someone who actually was complimentary of the writing itself but took issue with plot points, and not from a, like, plot hole standpoint, but it was a police procedural, of course, and the issue they took was with the things the police did, many of which were, I think, incorrectly labeled.
 
They talked about profiling and what was going on was not profiling, but I could understand why they would fall into thinking it was. But I, you know, so I read through that and it was one of those things where, well, this person's not very pro-police, but at least they're honest about what they're thinking and their opinions are sound and logical internally. They're not just, you know, cuckoo or anything.
 
Then I got to the final piece of critical statements that this reviewer made, and they took issue with the climactic event of the book. Now, I don't necessarily want to give it away, but it involves a clash between the main antagonist and one of the policed protagonists. The River City series is kind of an ensemble cast, so it's not always the same main character. Sometimes it's the main main, and then some secondary ones that get a fair amount of screen time as well. And this reviewer said, essentially, that, that wasn't justice, that wasn't legal, that was basically murder.
 
It stopped me in my tracks when I read that because I wrote this book in 1995 as a two-year officer, and it kind of sat on a shelf for a few years till I came back around to writing fiction again in the 2003, 2004 timeframe. And by that time, you know, the bones of that first draft are still what are in the book.
 
That was eventually published. At that time, I looked at all the events of the book more as almost historical, opposed to through a critical creation. Like you do with a work in progress. I never really framed the events any other way than the way the characters framed them. When this review came out, I looked at it and sat back, taking a look at the situation through what I hoped were close to the reviewer's eyes.
 
I realized, you know, taken from a certain point of view, that's not an unsound argument. There's some meat on that bone. No one else has ever pointed it out. So I think most readers believe what happened was justice in a fictional world. But the reviewer had a point, and again, this was a three-star review. It was like basically one star for what the cops did in this book, four or five stars for the writing of it, that it was well executed. I had to admire this person for taking the time to write a review that was thought out and logical and made their point, rather than just the two or three words you're lucky to get with a one-star review. It got me thinking and reframing that event a bit.
 
I wrote it in 1995. It was published in 2006. This was 20, a year ago. So quite a lot of time had passed. Ultimately, I took that realization and thought process and worked it into All the Forgotten Yesterdays. In the book, one of Katie's investigations takes her to a very interesting place. She confronts someone not very well-liked in the series at all. This person fires back at her about her hero, the protagonist involved in that first book event that the reviewer took issue with, reframing it in essentially the same way that the reviewer did, making a lot of the same points. Katie is resistant to it and doesn't accept it, but it's left a little unresolved. It'll play out over the next two or three books while she can't get that bug out of her ear, particularly as her perspective changes because her job changes.
 
The lesson I learned was that someone can be critical of your work, make a good point, and there's no reason why you can't embrace it. That was the climactic event of the first book. It was the big moment, and there's some sanctity to that in most cases. Somebody reframed it, and they made a good point. They made a good point with their reframing. Instead of getting frustrated, mad, or ignoring it, I decided to embrace it and use it. It's going to have a fair amount of impact on the series arc over the next two or three books.
 
[00:06:56] Matty: That's so fascinating. Do you know if the person who wrote that review has continued to follow you or read your books and would maybe happen upon this video? It would be super fun for that person, I think, to see this video.
 
[00:07:14] Frank: Yeah, that would be awesome. It would be awesome. You know, the weird thing, the Amazon algorithm is strange with reviews, as you well know." I went back and tried to find the review. I ruminated on this. First, I simmered on it briefly.
 
And then I was like, wait a minute. This is just like any other feedback. If I gave you my book and said, "Tell me what you think of this draft," why am I getting mad? Or I wasn't mad, but why am I being negative about it? It was quite a lot of time that had passed before I was like, you know, I'm going to go back and make sure I'm getting all the points the person made. If I'm going to use this, let's use it. I could not find the review again when I went through looking for it. I went way back, you know, because I thought maybe I just didn't notice it. It was a much older review or something like that, and I could not find it.
 
I'm going to make another attempt in case it's popped back up because I would be curious if, you know, did they pick up that first book? They read it through to the end, obviously. They liked the writing; they just didn't like the events. That's a candidate for somebody who might continue with the series, and I, you know, I mean, I'm biased, of course, but I would like to think that maybe there would, they would come around a little bit on some of the characters because of the things that happen to them and the choices that they make. They're essentially noble, admirable people. They just make mistakes. Or to see a video like this and go, huh, yeah, I'm going to shoot him an email because that was me. Where's my royalty check?
 
[00:08:47] Matty: Well, I think that we sort of touched on this idea of accepting input on one's work in some of our earlier conversations. And Frank, I think you're sort of like the poster child for the healthy way of handling it. As you said, you had to simmer on it for a little bit, but I do think it's sort of generalizing. It's a good lesson for writers to learn that if someone says, you know, hate the book, I didn't even read it, then you can just ignore them. Because that says more about the I'm not a bigger writer of the review than it does the writer of the book. But if you can bring yourself to look for those negative reviews that are thoughtful, as you're describing, it can be a learning experience.
 
[00:09:29] Frank: You're so right. You're so right. And there are trolls out there that, you know, I have a friend who's got somebody out there who just almost like a vulture just waits to swoop in and leave a one-star review with a pithy, useless comment and it, and especially when the book first comes out, you know, if there aren't many reviews, it really tanks the overall star rating.
 
But Kevin Tipple is an independent reviewer. He's the one who got me thinking in terms of a difference between a negative review and a bad review. And he described it the way, you know, I described how he described it, you know. A bad review is just... They say bad things and doesn't, there's no substance to it, or they say nothing, but a negative review can still be a positive experience for definitely the reader because, you know, just because I leave a negative review for something, "Oh, there's too much fishing in this book." Well, maybe you love fishing.
 
[00:10:25] Matty: Well, I do think the reviewer you're describing is a perfect example of that because I can imagine a lot of people reading that review and saying, oh, that's really interesting. I want, now I want to read that scene and I want to think for myself about, you know, my own interpretation of it. Or, you know, if someone says, if you have too much sex in the book, then you're going to sell a whole bunch of books to people who are looking for books with a lot of sex.
 
Factoring reviews into your craft
 
[00:10:48] Frank: Yeah, yeah, exactly, and, you know, anybody who says they don't read the reviews, I've said it before, they're lying. Everybody does. But, I think the point that I take from what you said and that I try to employ is you're looking for trends, you know, if you're getting a lot of low reviews and people are mentioning a certain element, well, you may have blown that element, and you know, you, I guess you could pull the book and fix it, but, you know, more to the point in your next book, you're going to make sure not to make that same mistake.
 
And the same is true with positive stuff! If people are loving your characters then you can, you know, kind of rest assured that you've written some vibrant characters and you want to keep doing what you're doing.
 
[00:11:31] Matty: Yeah, I had, the example of that for me is my first book, The Sense of Death. It had a sweary character in it, and when I wrote it, I had no idea who I was writing it for, but I saw that the trend in my reviews was a lot of people said, I really like the book, but yeah, I thought that there was excessive profanity, and I went back and I looked, and I was like, you know, they're kind of right, like, he doesn't have to swear quite that much, and I think I reduced the dropping of the F bomb from like 17 to 9 or something like that, with no loss of Like, creative, control over the situation, but the other thing I'm thinking of that is, I think, a good tip for writers is, I wouldn't just happen upon...
 
Bad reviews. Like, I often go, and look for good reviews if I'm doing, like, ads, and I'm looking for pull quotes from good reviews. And that's always fun. You know, you go look for the five-star ones, and you pat yourself on the back.
 
But I think that it's better if you're going to be looking at reviews across the board.To look for those kind of trends that you're talking about, then it's kind of nice to go into it intentionally and knowing that you're kind of in a place where you can read those things with a sort of frame of mind that you're describing. Not just, like, accidentally see them and maybe you're not in a mental place where you should be reading that kind of thing at the moment.
 
[00:12:49] Frank: I actually have a funny story about... swearing and you can cut this out. It might probably make us go too long. But when I wrote Under a Raging Moon, I tried to be very clear or very, true to, to dialogue. And dialogue is what was, has always been one of my strengths. And so I wrote the way cops talk, you know, and spoiler alert, but they talk like sailors. And so, A lot of the early readers, both professional and just lay people commented on that. Wow, there's a lot of swearing here. There's too much swearing in here. And I resisted it at first, but ultimately, I thought, you know, they've got a point here.
 
And so I went through, and I called out probably 70% of the profanity, and actually probably close to 90%, if you include softening some of the terms. Either cutting them out entirely, making them not a profanity, or softening them, or just saying, you know, Matty cursed into her hand quietly or something. So the book is published and it's out there. Some years later, I got another, I guess negative review, maybe a bad review, I don't know, you decide. The person wrote, "Too much swearing in this book, every other word, and yes, I don't care if you think that's how cops really talk." So I just, I had to laugh because on two points, you know, I mean, I think I know how cops actually talk was the biggest one, but then I remembered how much I cut out. So, you know, swearing is a thing.
 
[00:14:20] Matty: Yeah.
 
[00:14:21] Frank: Yeah, their head would have exploded.
 
Crafting realistic dialogue (not a transcript)
 
[00:14:24] Matty: Well, I think that's another good, the more we talk, the more I'm thinking this is turning into a podcast episode because I think the information you're sharing about what writers can learn is so great. And the other thing I'm realizing, apropos of dialogue, is that realistic dialogue isn't necessarily, and I'm not suggesting that you're suggesting it is, but it's not necessarily you turn on the recorder, you record The Room Full of Cops or whatever, and then you transcribe it that. You know, you might have a conversation where in reality it would be perfectly reasonable for those characters to drop 17 F-bombs, but you only need a couple to sort of convey the message. Gestalt of the situation.
 
[00:15:06] Frank: Yeah, it's like spice, really. I mean, if you put too much pepper, all you taste is the pepper, right? And so, and you're right, I mean, dialogue is meant to be an approximation of how people really talk, but it's much more concise, and, you know, characters don't interrupt each other nearly as much as we do in real life, and there's more direction to dialogue in fiction, whereas people wander in real life, you know, they go off on tangents and leave the path of the intended discussion and so forth. So, you make a great point, you make an excellent point there.
 
[00:15:41] Matty: Yeah. What I find in subsequent sweeps through my books on edits is that I'll shorten up the back and forth. So in an early draft, I might have, "I'm going to the store. Why are you doing that? Because I need to talk to Joe." And then it will become, "I'm going to the store because I need to talk to Joe," because the back and forth is just might it be realistic? Sure. But is it worth the extra line? Probably not. It's, you know, it's choppier than it needs to be, or it's more obtuse than it needs to be, or something like that.
 
[00:16:18] Frank: I wish I did that better. That's one that I've noticed when other people edit my work, whether it's an editor for a short story that they're publishing an anthology or something, those are the corrections that sometimes get made, and I'm like, oh yeah, that's tighter, you know, nine out of ten times I like it better.
 
You know, there are times where you want that response because you're slipping something in with it, either a characterization or a little. A little bit of a plot point there that, or a red herring or something, but nine out of ten times I think it's tighter, so that's, I'm glad you're on it because I'm certainly not.
 
Allowing a long-running series to evolve
 
[00:16:59] Matty: Well, let's address the other question, the other, "What I Learned" question, which is, what did you learn from All the Forgotten Yesterdays that you would like to share with your fellow readers?
 
[00:17:08] Frank: For the reader lesson that I learned, I think it's about allowing a long-running series to evolve, to breathe, that characters can come and go, especially if it's an ensemble cast, but even if it's a main character thing, then a lot of the secondary characters could be the ones to come and go.
 
And, you know, the main character of this book is no surprise, Katie McLeod; she's been a central character to the series since, well, for the entire series, but certainly by the third book, she became the core character. But, as time has gone on, I've tried to give some oxygen to other characters and some page time, explore a few other stories and go down a few side streets while still having her as the main character, most of the time.
 
And what I've come to realize is, you know, life is never static. It always changes, and so Katie is experiencing changes. She's gone from being a patrol officer on graveyard to a day shift officer to becoming a detective to becoming a major crimes detective. And when this book opens, she's taking the exam for promotion to sergeant. So her, you know, and she's gone from being involved with a fellow police officer to being kind of serially single, to being involved in a steady relationship for several years with an emergency room doctor, and, you know, these are all changes.
 
And if you think about it, those don't sound like radical changes in a real person's life. I mean, those sound like what happened to somebody over a decade or a decade and a half. But I realized as time has gone on that, you know, Katie's role will diminish somewhat in the coming books. Not go away, and not for a couple of books. But as her career progresses, she's going to be in some positions where I would be making one of those mistakes that we talked about on a previous podcast together, by having her do things in that role that people in that role don't do. You know, she won't be a detective anymore, so having her go out and solve crimes doesn't make sense.
 
And so it's time for the next generation, if you will, to step into that role and to have some face time and to, to get some time as the main or core characters, as we move on. And, you know, as this series has progressed, people have retired, people have, people died, you know, people have left the job for other reasons than retirement. Things have changed, and the one thing I've never really let change up, up till recently is, you know, I've clung to Katie because she's my favorite character. She's the core character, and it's hard to think about letting her become a secondary or tertiary character. And we're talking seven, eight books from now when we get to the tertiary stage, but still, I mean, it's difficult emotionally. But I think it's true to the series. I mean, it's an ensemble series, and people's roles change and who's doing what changes. And I think I need to stay true to that.
 
So for instance, in the previous book, Katie was in, the worst kind of truth. It was 100% from her point of view, third person. But from her point of view, that was Book 11. And Book 12 was a different book entirely. It was all about Tom Chisholm. It was away from the main River City storyline. And then 13 was a short story collection in which I don't think Katie was even in any of the stories. So this Book 14 is really the first novel that's back to the mainline events.
 
And in this book, she's probably 70 percent of the main perspective, the main POV, and there are two or three characters that share the other 30%. This is a trend that will continue as the next several books play out. She'll probably be roughly 60–70 percent for the next two or so, maybe three, and then her role will diminish. She'll always have a role no matter where she is because she's Katie in that, and she, you know, she is the iconic character of the series, but that's the path that I'm presently on, and it's a difficult one, so, if it's difficult for me, it might be difficult for readers who are attached to these characters as well. That's the lesson that I'm learning.
 
[00:22:10] Matty: Yeah, this is going to be a really interesting conversation paired with podcast episode 210 with Sara Rosett on creating compelling series. And one of the conversations we had was about how do you make those kinds of evolutions either strictly for story reasons or because you're getting bored or because readers are getting bored or whatever. And it is interesting to hear about somebody who has such a sort of long-term view of where you're taking the series and the considerations, like a very sort of scientific step down of that character's involvement. Did you ever think about actually ending that, the Katie series, and then officially spinning up a separate one that might be one of the other characters, or have you always thought of it as it's a world and you're just continuing that world with a shifting cast of characters?
 
The dynamics of an ensemble cast
 
[00:23:03] Frank: Yeah, the latter. It's always been, you know, an ensemble cast was always the vision for this. Initially, it was a four-book series is all I had in mind. I had the titles, and I had an arc for the four books, and it changed a bit as time went on, and ultimately the fourth book radically changed. Nothing except the title remained from the original concept, and the character that I drew up early on as kind of one of the main characters, Stefan Kopriva, we talked about him on a different podcast. He ended up leaving the job after the second book, spoiler alert, and I thought he was going to be the main character of the series, and it ultimately became Katie.
 
And that, you know, that's the interesting dichotomy in that I'm sitting here today, and I have a long-term plan for the universe of River City and these characters, but at the same time, they surprised me. I mean, they surprised me in what happened with Kopriva, and Katie's emergence as the core, this stuff that we talked about here with how she's viewing Chisholm differently, or at least an event that occurred with Chisholm differently, because somebody reframed it, characters that I didn't realize were going to retire or be together or, you know, die, get killed. I mean, these things, they're still surprises no matter how much you plan. And so that's kind of the fun of it is, yeah, okay, maybe this is going to happen with Katie. She's going to go into this role or that role, but there may be some surprising things that happen during that time and other characters that. You know, are playing smaller roles now will have larger roles. I mean, it's not like I'm just going to suddenly have Dudley Do-Right show up and be the main character. I mean, it's just going to be characters who already have roles will just take on slightly larger roles. And that's, you know, to me, that's what a true ensemble show does.
 
Ensemble Cast Dynamics
 
I mean, if you think of NYPD Blue as an example, you know, David Caruso was the star of that. After two seasons, he left. And then they brought in Jimmy Smits and he was arguably the star of that. Then he left and they brought in Rick Schroeder, you know, and then he and Dennis France kind of shared the spotlight, and then Schroeder left. By the time they brought in his last partner, Sipowicz, a Dennis Frantz character, had become the main character of that series, and really was for the remainder of the series.
 
Now when you go back and watch those episodes, it's hard not to watch them without an eye towards that eventual, you know, development of him being the main character. And so, that's kind of what I've always liked about the idea of an ensemble cast, is it can ebb and flow, and people can come and go, and things can happen and surprise you, and yet you can still at least have a compass direction that you're taking the series.
 
Evolution of Characters: A Benefit of Ensemble Casts
 
[00:25:47] Matty: The Sipowetz example is a great one because that is a character that I think viewers would have had to have grown into accepting as a main character because, as I recall, he was pretty unpleasant, and it was only over time, I think he became somewhat less unpleasant probably as the writers sort of understood the potential they had there. Also, the more you knew him, the more empathetic and sympathetic a character he became.
 
And so that's another benefit of an ensemble cast is you have that time to, both for yourself and for other people, to understand the characters at a much deeper level and have the readers accept them in a way they might not have accepted them if you sort of, you know, shoved that character into the leading role right to begin with. Like, I don't know that show would have survived if they had just teed up Sipowitz as the primary guy.
 
[00:26:40] Frank: A fat bald guy in the lead in 1993 or whatever it was, I mean, I don't think so.
 
[00:26:48] Matty: And an unpleasant  bald guy, too.
 
[00:26:51] Frank: An anti-hero.
 
[00:26:53] Matty: yes, very much an antihero.
 
[00:26:56] Frank: Yeah. NYPD. Blue. Now that I think about it is really very much the story of the redemption of Andy Sipowitz. I mean, if you look at it, it's just that he's not the main character in that story for a while. At least in terms of screen time, but that's really what it's about. And if you recall, at the end of that series, he becomes a sergeant. He moves into a leadership role. So his, you know, everything changes right now. He's the one doing the leading and someone else is going to be doing the investigating. And so you, you have some of that evolution of life roles that takes place, and I've always admired that kind of storytelling in ensemble stories and have really wanted to represent it in my own series.
 
Positioning a First Book as Your Craft Skills Grow
 
[00:27:42] Matty: Well, obviously, we've gone so far off the rails with the, theoretical, what I learned thing. so, I'm going to ask one more question, unrelated to the questions I teed up for you, which is, I think a lot of people who've been writing a long time, look back at their first book. And hopefully they're proud of it, but maybe sometimes they think, oh, is that really the book I want to be sending readers to? Because, you know, if you've been writing for 5, 10, 15, 20, however many years, then, you know, your craft improves. And so, one assumes that your most recent, that one's most recent book is better than one's first book. But when you're writing the kind of series that you're writing, where there's this overarching story arc and the evolution of the characters, you probably don't expect your readers to be dipping in and out at different points. Do you still like to send readers to, the first book so they can read through in and experience the evolution of these characters in order?
 
[00:28:36] Frank: It's usually my recommendation. Any of the books can stand alone, and I'll tell people that. It's true, but I think you get more impactful enjoyment out of certain scenes if the weight of the cumulative events that preceded it is present for you. A good example might be in The Worst Kind of Truth; there's a wedding near the very beginning of the book and a retirement near the end of the book. They're kind of the bookend events of the worst kind of truth. The wedding is a culmination of a longstanding relationship that began in the shadow of a very untimely and sad death. So there's guilt associated with it, and it's just been a long time coming. If you read those scenes, you might pick up on what's going on, and it might be like, wow, this is kind of tense or this is kind of a beautiful thing.
 
But if you read the previous nine installments of the series to that point, you might be in tears. You might be crying at that wedding. I certainly very nearly was. I would send people back to the beginning. The danger of that is exactly what you said, Matty; if somebody asks me what's your worst book craft-wise, it's an easy answer. It's the first one, not only because it was the first one that was ever published, but you can still see the bones of that 1995 draft in there. Even in 2006, I was a better writer than I was in 1995. Certainly in 2023, I hope I'm better at it.
 
It's a mixed bag. You want them to start at the beginning for that sort of stick with the family and get the entire history of the family, sort of experience, but you're sending them to what is arguably your weakest book in terms of writing craft. I don't know the answer to that. I've been tempted, like I think many writers have in this digital age; it wouldn't take much to completely rewrite the book and republish it. You know, this is the book, you know, just feels dishonest, though. It's a product of its time. That was who I was when I wrote that book. That's who those characters were. That's how I saw them. That was the energy associated with it, and it feels untrue to go back and completely redo it, at least, and then represent it as the first book.
 
Maybe a special edition, available only through my direct sell store or something like that, where, you know, here's an alternative universe if I had waited another 20 years, what this book might have looked like.
 
[00:31:31] Matty: The question would be, do you just go through and tidy up the craft parts like a copy edit? I guess that's the question. You might look at it and say, oh, if I were going to return to it, it would be like a developmental edit. And yet you could return to it and have it be more like a copyedit where you're applying the line-by-line craft improvements you've experienced but maybe not taking down the whole structure of it.
 
[00:31:45] Frank: Yeah, I think copyedit stuff, I think it's okay to return to stuff that you've written in the past and fix outright typos or errors. I have a proofreader who is hell on that, kills so many "that's." She literally kills so many "that's" that I have to fight to keep some of them. I have to be very careful because occasionally the "that" that is being killed actually creates a problem with the logic of the sentence. It's a good point that we all have these tics, and copyediting, that's a gray area. I think it's okay to clean something up.
 
We live in a digital age, and that's the advantage of it. But a developmental edit would be something different. I've actually been toying with the idea, though. The book was out in 2006, so it'll have its 20-year anniversary here coming up a bit, and I haven't really announced publicly yet that I'm setting up a direct sell store that'll be available in January, but I am.
 
[00:33:01] Matty: You heard it here first.
 
[00:33:03] Frank: You actually did. It might be something that would be one of those things that's only available from that.
 
[00:33:10] Matty: Exactly.
 
[00:33:12] Frank: I think you've got to be careful going down that rabbit hole of fixing things because, you know, what do they say, a piece of art is never finished. It's just released. A book is never done. It's just published. You could go back and preen and polish till the cows come home and you might feel better about it from a compulsive, obsessive-compulsive standpoint, but isn't the point to tell new stories, and you're taking time away from that.
 
[00:33:40] Matty: So much great information. Well, Frank, if you're willing, this is definitely going to be a podcast episode because I just think you've shared lots of great lessons, both for readers and for writers as well. So now that you've piqued everybody's interest in your work, please let them know where they can go to find out more about you and all your work online.
 
[00:34:00] Frank: You know, the easiest point right now is just to go to my website, frankzafiro.com. Everything's there that you need. All the books are laid out. There's a handy dandy little "which book is for you" sort of thing in the right-hand column there. So if you like procedurals, there's River City or Charlie 316. If you like private investigators, there's Copriva or another one. Thrillers, hard-boiled, whatever it is that you like, there's a series or two underneath each heading so you can know right where to start. But franksoffaro.com is the best place to get rolling.
 
[00:34:34] Matty: Great, thank you so much.
 
[00:34:36] Frank: Well, thank you, Matty, and I want to say thank you for all you do for writers. You put a lot of effort into promoting and supporting other writers with your Facebook page and this podcast and a myriad of other things that you do. I know firsthand how much work that is, and so I think writers should be very grateful to you for the work that you do. I think it's very selfless, and you should be commended.
 
[00:35:00] Matty: Well, thank you so much. What a nice thing to say. Thank you, Frank.
 
[00:35:04] Frank: Well, I mean it. It's very true. A lot, in today's world, a lot of people are understandably focused on promoting their own work all the time, that's what I'm doing here, but you know, it's a nice thing to see someone being so selfless, so good on you.
 
[00:35:18] Matty: Thank you.

Episode 215 - Mistakes Writers Make about Firefighters with Thomas Dunne

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This week on The Indy Author Podcast, I talk with Thomas Dunne about MISTAKES WRITERS MAKE ABOUT FIREFIGHTERS, including the fact that firefighting is a small part of a firefighter’s job; how the variety of firefighter roles enables story and character depth; story opportunities involving false alarms; how where there's fire, there's (almost) always smoke, and portraying the experience of moving through smoke by tapping into all the senses; life in a firehouse, including the official and unofficial hierarchies; and the variety of personalities who choose firefighting.

Thomas Dunne is a retired Deputy Chief and 33-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department with extensive experience working in Mid-Manhattan and the Bronx, including acting as incident commander at hundreds of fires and emergencies in the city. Chief Dunne lectures at conferences and colleges across the country, has written numerous magazine articles, and serves as an adjunct instructor for the National Fire Academy and Kean University. He is the author of NOTES FROM THE FIREGROUND, a memoir of his experiences with the FDNY, and the novel A MOMENT IN TIME.

Episode Links

Author website: www.chieftomdunne.com
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/thomas.dunne.7568/
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-dunne-b6950b250/

References in Interview:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/08/nyregion/bronx-fire-nyc.html

Summary

Have you ever wondered about the life of a firefighter? The action? The atmosphere of a firehouse? Or perhaps you're drafting your next novel and have a main character who's a firefighter. The reality of firefighting is far removed from Hollywood portrayals. Understanding the nuances can help you write more authentic characters and scenes. While no better person can shed light on the reality of being a firefighter than a seasoned professional like Thomas Dunne.
 
Diving into Firefighting
 
A retired deputy chief and 33-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department, Thomas Dunne shared insightful glimpses of the life of firefighters on the Indie Author Podcast. Dunne lectured at conferences and universities across the country while also authoring numerous magazine articles. He wrote his memoir, "Notes from the Underground," based on his experiences with the FDNY and the novel "A Moment in Time."
 
Dunne expands on common misconceptions about the work of firefighters and how many fires they tackle. Thinking the life of a firefighter involves stepping into an inferno every few hours is far from reality, Dunne mentioned. He suggested that authors weave in aspects like answering fake calls, carrying out maintenance tasks, researching firefighting techniques or scenarios, or even downtime and sleep.
 
Sensory Details Matter
 
Dunne further explains the sensory experiences in firefighting as encompassing more than just visual cues. He delves into the smell of tar and smoke, the feel of handling firefighting tools, the hiss of the breathing apparatus, and the harsh calls from squad mates.
 
The physicality of the job is crucially important, he said. Description can include how a firefighter’s breath quickens inside a respirator mask. Equally critical is the post-fire atmosphere: the lingering smell of smoke and the soot everywhere. These are elements that can add depth and authenticity to a scene.
 
Life in the Firehouse
 
At the crux of writing a firefighter's story is depicting life in a firehouse. Dunne made it clear that firehouses differ from one place to another. Some might be a clamorous alpha-male-dominated environment, while others might be more laid back. Each firehouse has its own dynamic and individual character that distinguishes it from others.
 
While there's an allure to sliding down the fire poles, it's not as common as people imagine. Newer firehouses might not even feature them. But the tradition continues, with alterations, including steel poles replacing the older brass ones.
 
There's equal diversity among firefighters, dispelling myth that they're all burly, mustachioed men. Men and women in the service come from various backgrounds — from blue collar to lawyers, architects, or even actors. Firefighters joined the profession for different reasons. Some have lifelong dreams of firefighting, inspired by generations of family tradition; others having stumbled into it by chance.
 
True-to-Life Characters
 
The key takeaway from the interview is that when writing a character who is a firefighter, they should not be one-dimensional. Firefighters can be heroes saving lives, or they could be everyday people, coping with mundane routines and the occasional inferno. These characters come with unique backstories, motivations, and personalities, and that’s what makes them compelling to readers.
 
The world of firefighters offers a broad canvas for writers, but it's necessary to delve beyond the stereotypes. As Dunne suggests, don't be afraid to play with the tropes, yet ensure to embody authenticity throughout the character and the scenes.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Thomas Dunn. Hey, Thomas, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:05] Thomas: Morning, how are you doing, Matty?
 
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great. Thank you.
 
Meet Chief Thomas Dunne 
[00:00:08] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Thomas Dunn is a retired deputy chief and 33-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department with extensive experience working in mid-Manhattan and the Bronx, including acting as incident commander at hundreds of fires and emergencies in the city. Chief Dunn lectures at conferences and colleges across the country, has written numerous magazine articles, and serves as an adjunct instructor for the National Fire Academy and Keene University. He is also the author of Notes from the Underground, a memoir of his experiences with the FDNY and the novel A Moment in Time.
 
And I asked, Tom to be on the podcast because he had been very helpful to me with some questions I had about firefighting for my Ann Kinnear novel, Furnace for Your Foe, and I wanted to add his perspective to the Mistakes Writers Make series, sort of focused on prime writers. now we have amassed the mistakes writers make about firearms, police procedure, coroners, first responders, the FBI, PIs, forensic psychiatry, police roles, and bladed weapons, and how to avoid mistakes about those in your writing. And you can find links to all of those episodes at theindyauthor.com forward slash podcast, and then scroll down to Crime Fiction Writer, or you can also find them at the Indy Author YouTube channel on the playlist for Crime Writers.
 
And just as a side note, I have also added another YouTube playlist for short story writers, that is short fiction. So you can find all that information at my website and at my YouTube channel.
 
Misconceptions about firefighters' work 
[00:01:34] Matty: And so, Tom, I wanted to start out talking about misconceptions that writers might have about the work that firefighters do. What do you see in writing that kind of makes you cringe as a professional firefighter?
 
[00:01:47] Thomas: Well, a couple of things. I mean, there's some real good stuff out there, but there's also, as you know, a lot of misconceptions, out in the world, out in the writing world, certainly in the movie industry, certainly on television shows. There are a number of shows now that are, I don't watch, that are, you know, not good shows, and there are a lot of misconceptions. But as you pointed out, 33 years as a firefighter and the last 20 years or so as a writer, or would be writer, I kind of have--
 
[00:02:14] Matty: an actual writer.
 
[00:02:16] Thomas: I guess at this point I could consider myself a writer.
 
[00:02:19] Matty: Yes, you can.
 
[00:02:20] Thomas: but I found myself in an interesting dichotomy in that one foot was in one world, one foot was in the other world, and they were two very different mindsets. in other words, the fire world was sort of a world of activity and action. The writer world, I think of a writer as an observer, and I tried to tie the two together as much as possible. So my hope would be that for the writers who tune into this, who have published or are anticipating writing, for the people who are at least considering writing, I would hope that maybe I could bring up one or two points that might give them a little more realistic approach to the world of emergency response, the world of firefighting, and the ability to create a variety of characters. # Firefighting is a small part of a firefighter’s job.
 
[00:03:08] Thomas: But you mentioned you wanted to start off with the work, I guess, I won't say illusions, but work misconceptions, and there certainly are a number out there. I think maybe, the first one is the concept that there are a lot of fires, and nationally and statistically there are, but realistically, if you're going to create a character or an imaginary firehouse or fire department as part of your storyline, there would probably be a mistake to introduce a story where they're going to fires like five, six, seven, eight times a night. It's not like that anymore.
 
That was the case in the so-called war years in New York City, where, for example, the South Bronx firefighters would go literally to 15 to 20 structural fires a night. Fortunately, it's no longer like that, in part because of the economy, in part because of fire prevention activities and things of that nature. Fire is the aspect of emergency response that seems to gather understandably all the attention. But in the last 20 years or so, certainly after 911, the fire department's responsibility and assignments are much broader.
 
So if you can picture a pie chart, which would constitute all the fire department's activities, in that pie chart, the firefighting would be a relatively small slice at this point. Largely, in urban areas, it might be different. The division I worked in, for example, covered, the Bronx and Manhattan, and over a 24-hour period, you did go to a lot of fires, but I would think it would be a little unrealistic to create a storyline, where somebody was going to a fire, like, every other hour. That just wouldn't happen.
 
[00:04:55] Matty: Can you talk a little bit about what constitutes the remainder of the pie outside of fighting fires?
 
[00:05:01] Thomas: a great deal of that, as I said, since 911, the fire department has picked up a lot of peripheral activity, all right? A lot of fire departments have assumed EMS responsibilities, which, you know, may constitute a third or more of the runs of the responses in parts of New York City or other fire departments. Hazardous materials, things of that nature, that are now... A lot of HAZMAT experts, a lot of HAZMAT incidents in the fire department, fire prevention activities, which are not, you know, again, if you want a realistic character, firefighters love going to fires. They love hands on challenges like that. You'll never have to motivate a firefighter. To do something out of fire. Things, the so-called soft areas like fire prevention activities, are not quite as popular, but that takes up a substantial part of any tour, typically.
 
Things like simple maintenance, you know, there's a great deal of maintenance that's required in the firehouse drill periods where the members of the fire department of that particular working that particular tour would sit down and drill something, which means a rehearsal of how to use a certain type of equipment, a rehearsal of What if situations? What if we had a fire in this type of building? What if we had a bus crash on the interstate? These scenarios, they review before it ever happens. So there's a lot of that going on.
 
In fact, there's a fair amount of downtime. In many fire departments. I got a, personally got a lot of reading in, mostly in the night tours. You know, during the day tours you kept pretty busy with responses, drill, maintenance, things of that nature. At nighttime, I went through a lot of novels. Had an ability to read a lot, especially since I stayed up most of the night and it was fairly exhausting, but you would do some reading, if you wanted, or studying for, advancement, things of that nature.
 
So I think maybe the first misconception, again, if someone out there is envisioning writing an imaginary fire department or creating a character, in a typical day by day, activity in that department, don't send them out the door 50 times for fire. That's not going to happen. # The variety of firefighter roles enables story and character depth
 
[00:07:09] Matty: I think that's good news for writers because even an exciting event like fighting a fire, if you just have a character doing that over and over again, even that would pall after a while. And I think it's actually good news for writers that there's this whole assortment of things a firefighter could be doing. And you could even bake in the idea that, okay, now I have to go to like, you know, the junior high and talk about fire prevention or something. And maybe the frustration that a firefighter would feel if that was what they were spending their day doing when what they really wanted to do was fight a fire.
 
[00:07:38] Thomas: Exactly. And then there's the frustration of the false alarm. a certain percentage of your responses, you go out the door and you have to be, you know, keyed up and mentally and emotionally prepared every time you go out, but a certain percentage, which will vary depending on where you work, will be for nothing.
 
For example, when I was a firefighter in mid-Manhattan, there are these mechanical alarm systems in just about every mid-Manhattan building. And they often malfunctioned, and especially, in the wintertime, it seemed to happen more often for whatever reason, and over a 24-hour, tour of duty, there are nights where we might have gone out 10 to 20 times, out the door, you know, lights and siren, all set for action, only to find out that it was, past. A defective alarm system. So there's that sense of frustration sometimes that, you know, there's a sense of wearing down over time when you go out the door a lot.
 
And certainly when you go out to a fire, you generally know, when you're actually going to do something real. Because, typically, you dispatch some basic dispatch information, and as you're responding, the dispatcher will contact the officer by the radio, so on the apparatus, the truck that you're responding on, you'll hear things like, sounds like you're going to work, fire in the top floor, sometimes you hear things like people are trapped, et cetera, et cetera, and now you're really geared for combat, so to speak, and, you know, you're going to do something real, something real. Fortunately, those are things that you certainly experience over a period of time, but they generally come every so often.
 
And that's in New York or any urban area, so you can imagine if your character lives or works in suburbia or a rural area. one of the things I always hear as I travel around the country, lecturing, especially to local firefighters, is that there's not enough fires. And that's bad for the fire department, but it's good for the people, but it's not unheard of for me to go to a small department somewhere, give them a lecture, and find out that nobody in that room has even been to a fire in six months, and they know you're from New York, and they envision it as, wow, I wish I was in New York. I should be going to fires every day.
 
So that's one of the misconceptions. What a typical tour of duty would involve, yes, absolutely. There'd be some firefighting, but it would not be as often as you might expect. There's a lot of peripheral stuff that is somewhat routine, somewhat tedious, you know, that might wear on you for a while.
 
Story opportunities involving false alarms 
[00:10:11] Matty: that reminds me of a story. A couple of years ago, my husband and I were sitting on our porch, and we're, in an area, we're in a forested area that has a lot of, deer, and we're also right down the street from the fire station. And so we were sitting on the porch and we heard this thump, and then the screech of brakes, which seemed odd, but I thought, I bet that a deer ran out into the road; the car hit the deer before it even had a chance to brake, and then slammed on the brakes, and we were kind of trying to look through the trees, it was right down the street from us, you know, trying to see what was going on, and we weren't hearing any noises that made us think it was a big emergency, but I thought, I don't know, you know, if somebody's And I they might just be in the car.
 
And so I called up 911, and I described what had happened, thinking that they would just send somebody, like, send a police car or something to see if there was even anything going on. And pretty soon, I think they rolled every piece of equipment in the fire department. I think partially just because why not? And then I thought, oh, no, I'm going to get in trouble because I just called out the whole fire department. And then when I made the call, I had given my address, and so pretty soon, one of the guys, I can't remember if it was a firefighter or one of the police officers stopped, and, it was also embarrassing because my husband and I had been drinking wine, so I thought, oh great, they're going to show up and think I just called because, like, I was drunk or something.
 
But it was super nice, and, you know, I described again what I had heard, and he said, oh, we looked around, The car must have driven away, and we looked in all the ditches, we don't see a deer. But he was super nice about it, and I actually, then a couple of months later ran into the chief, and I described the scenario to him, and I kind of apologized, and he said, no, never apologize, because we would rather hear it than have someone think, oh, well, it's probably nothing, and not make the call. And the next day, I did find a deer in a ditch, so I felt vindicated.
 
[00:12:03] Thomas: Yeah. people will call in for all kinds of reasons. And, since most people, thankfully, have not actually experienced the fire, or perhaps are not familiar with, everything, in, that's peculiar to their area, or their apartment, or the city, people will call in for things that you look back on and you feel that was a ridiculous reason to call, but... You have to make the call.
 
Where there's fire, there's (almost) always smoke 
[00:12:25] Thomas: And there's the other aspect, I like to call this the Hollywood syndrome. if you've been to any of the movies that came out over the last 20 or 30 years, and I really don't go to them. I saw one years ago. Understandably, Hollywood has a concept of what a fire should look like. And if you see a movie or perhaps an episode in one of these ongoing television serials about fire departments, typically it would be a room full of fire or a building with fire coming out of every conceivable window and no smoke at all. And, you see this over and over.
 
And nothing could be further from the realities. The realities are that certainly if you have a room full of fire in a typical building, you'll see fire pushing out that window. When you go inside a building, very often you don't see anything. Especially if you're sent to the floors above to do a search for life and see if anyone's been trapped up there, it's really an almost claustrophobic, blinding type of experience where they often say you can't see your hand in front of your face, and that's exactly it. You have a, a face piece on that you're breathing through, so you're kind of very myopic in your outlook. You can't see anything. You're going around almost like with braille. You're feeling your way for security. If you are going down, let's say, the length of an apartment, you typically would keep one hand, maybe your left hand or your right hand, depending on the layout, on the wall, because you can't see anything, and that is your way out.
 
So, I would say to anyone, again, who wants to, create a realistic fire scene in, in their storyline, yeah, absolutely, it has to be fire, all right, perhaps there's some heat, if you're feeling that in the hallway, or certainly in the floors above, but to make it realistic, I would definitely incorporate The smoke aspect of it, because that's, more than anything, that, that is what's going to overwhelm you at a fire.
 
[00:14:32] Matty: A really interesting resource, and you may be able to comment on this, based on your experience, but it was in the New York Times, it was one of their visual investigations, and it was about a fire in an apartment building, and the thing that I remember most is that they did this 3D sort of virtual model of the apartment building. And it was very odd in that it wasn't just a hallway with apartments off it. You would go into an apartment, and in some cases the apartments had been, made two floors, like I think retrofit is two floors, so you could go into an apartment and you'd be going downstairs, and now you were at the lower level, but there wasn't a door from that level into the hallway of that level. And also the apartments weren't just stacked one on top of the other. Sometimes, like the second floor of one apartment would be kind of like underneath the first floor of another apartment. Are you familiar with the scenario I'm describing?
 
[00:15:23] Thomas: I think those are probably the duplex apartments that you see in certain buildings, scattered, like, for example, throughout New York City, where, you go into an apartment and that apartment encompasses not only that floor, but conceivably an extension to rooms on the floor above, or in one case scenario, maybe a floor, the stairway goes to downwards, the sort of bottom, the floor below where the, perhaps the fire originated, and now you're obviously getting blasted with this smoke. The fire obviously burns and kills, but most of the deaths, most of the fatalities are really from smoke inhalation.
 
The experience of moving through smoke 
[00:16:00] Thomas: You know, and that's why, both in firefighting and in writing, I always tried to give a lot of credence to smoke and that feeling of being encompassed. It's almost like crawling or walking on the bottom of the ocean, where, yeah, you can move around, but you can't see anything, and your environment is totally encapsulated in your feelings of what you can feel through your gloves.
 
And even to some extent the experience of wearing that mask over your face that you're breathing through makes you more myopic, because now you can actually hear your breaths as the diaphragm in this thing opens and closes, and if you start getting nervous, or you start really getting too physically involved in it, you can actually hear your breaths increasing in this diaphragm. So it's kind of like the kind of thing that anyone who's been in a fire as a firefighter would know, and it could translate very nicely, I think, in certain scenes that a writer might want to sit down and write about.
 
Tapping into all the senses 
[00:17:04] Matty: I'm hoping I'm remembering the article correctly. I'm going to provide a link to this New York Times article because it was really... excellent. All their visual investigation articles are excellent, but I believe that was the article that also had, I think they had found a picture of one of the hallways from before the fire, and then they modified the photograph so it reflected what it would look like in the circumstances with the smoke, almost unrecognizable, you know, you could pick out tiny little things here and there, but, I think it's a really good illustration of exactly what you're saying, that, that sense of claustrophobia, that sense of, of, I think that idea of walking at the bottom of the ocean is an excellent analogy, that makes a lot of sense to me.
 
[00:17:46] Thomas: Yeah, I would say too that that post fire, when the fire is put out, the post fire sense of what it looks like, what it smells like, what it feels like, I don't know how easy it is for any author to get into a situation like that, but if you If you ever live near a building that burnt, most of the time you can't get in, but if you typically, let's say a mid-Manhattan high rise, if a person four or five or more stories below you has a fire, you're going to have a sense of that fire for days afterwards. the soot, the smell, you know, there is like a post fire experience that stays for a while that a person could incorporate into a storyline also.
 
So it's not only the fire. The fire most often, fortunately, gets knocked down fairly quickly. And then there are the important functions of searching for life, you know, overhauling the apartment to check for extension, things like that, and it is a very, one of the things I like about firefighting, I mean, I like writing because it's cerebral, and a writer is an observer, but I always was sort of a physical person, and I like the physicality of firefighting, I tried to describe in my writing what it felt like to handle tools to deal with the scent of tar and smoke and things like that, and even later as I became the chief and was the guy supervising and choreographing from the street, I kind of liked this sense of the physical challenge and the physical presence of smoke, water, tar, things like that. And, I think that's something that would be good for a writer to try to incorporate in a fire scene to make it, you know, more realistic. It's a very physical experience at the scene. But
 
[00:19:35] Matty: really like this idea that you're mentioning all these senses that can be involved, like the sound of the breathing apparatus. And, yeah, that's great. That's something. I think everybody goes to the, the visual aspect. And I think it's a great reminder not to, Stop there.
 
Creating a story without direct experience 
[00:19:49] Thomas: My two initial books were based on my experience, because I knew New York City intimately, I knew firefighting and the FDNY intimately, and I wrote about what I personally experienced. But I am a great believer that a good writer can create characters, can create a storyline, based on something they've never experienced. You know, I believe that, but in a good example, he's kind of, the same thing over and over, but Tom Clancy, all right, probably has never been in combat, and yet he made a whole industry out of books that were intricately described, combat and how it would be in combat. And I guess, again, my hope would be that if I could just throw a few tidbits about the realities of fire, about the realities of what it's like to be in a building, about some of the misconceptions of the work that's involved.
 
Life in a firehouse

[00:20:44] Thomas: Yeah, a lot of it is routine, some of it's boring, you know, but there are those moments, it's kind of like this, moments of utter boredom to moments of utter panic, it goes up and down, and I think is, certainly typical of most of the urban departments, you And as you get away from the city, maybe as you get into the suburban areas, or certainly the rural areas, the fire incidents, the fire activity diminishes quite a bit, and I would think, not having worked in areas like that, that you'd have a lot of downtime, which could be good or bad, depending on your relationships, in that particular fire station, which is a whole, you know, another tangent to go on. If you're spending 24 hours with a group of people, well, there are a lot of interesting characters, in the fire department, and you can create a lot of interesting characters from that environment in your writing, and especially when it's compacted into a building where You live together, you eat together; you sleep together for 24 hours, sometimes there's really good connections made, sometimes there's a lot of banging of the heads going on.
 
And I think a lot of people, again, going back to that Hollywood syndrome, if you've had no connection with the fire department, and most writers I imagine have had little or no connection, you might be subject to that, well, traditionally a firefighter has a mustache, right, He wears suspenders and has, slides a pole and has a dalmatian. a lot of fire departments don't have poles. Very few dalmatians. Usually it's some butt that walked in off the street that adopted the house and they adopted him. Uh, it's different than the storybook thing. And you can create a fire scenario, a firehouse. And when we talk about the people who do it, characters who have depth, who have variety. It's not all like the typical what you see on television or the thing you read about or heard about when you were in the second grade.
 
[00:22:46] Matty: Well, I think that's a great entrée to one of the other things we wanted to talk about, which was, maybe these are overlapping. One is misconceptions about the people who choose firefighting, but also life in the firehouse. So, let's maybe talk about life in the firehouse. And I actually have to start out. Are there any poles? Is that actually a thing anywhere?
 
[00:23:03] Thomas: Yes, there are.
 
[00:23:04] Matty: Okay.
 
[00:23:05] Thomas: Absolutely. Some of the newer stations, I've read about are not having poles installed and their argument would be, it eliminates the risk of injury. I don't know if that's a great idea. Sliding poles really facilitates and speeds up firefighters’ response to emergency. And it's always a ticking clock. The sooner you can get there, the better off the operation is, the safer the people who are affected by it are, and aside from this, the tradition. You know, fire poles were invented, I think, in Chicago around the 1890s or thereabouts, and they were invented for a reason, okay? They found that it would facilitate by x number of seconds or whatever the statistic was, every response they went on.
 
I got to a point where, certainly as a firefighter, I worked in firehouses that often had three stories. So if you were doing something on the top story, maybe you're doing something at your locker or maybe you were fixing or doing some maintenance work or cleaning. That's another thing, a typical firehouse day, a lot of cleaning, all right? The bunks have to be made. It might be as many as 15 or more bunks. There's a lot of routine day-to-day work like that. So if you're on the third floor and a run comes in, you can grab a pole, slide down that to the second floor. Before you know it, you're sliding down to the first floor. That still exists. Most New York City firehouses still have that.
 
[00:24:32] Matty: Is it one pole from the third floor to the first floor? Or do you stop at the second floor?
 
[00:24:37] Thomas: That would be quite a ride.
 
[00:24:38] Matty: Yeah, that would be.
 
[00:24:40] Thomas: no, the poles would not extend more than one floor. The book floor may have two or three poles that would go to the floor below, which then would go to the first floor where the truck is. That being said, there is one of the older firehouses in New York City is on the Lower East Side. And, this firehouse has a tremendous, it's the highest ceiling in New York City. It's like 30 New York City firehouses. And I remember sliding. I worked briefly in that firehouse and sliding that pole. And that was an experience. I mean, you felt like you should bring your lunch or something.
 
[00:25:13] Thomas: So yeah, the poles are there. There are a lot of firehouses. Some of the newer firehouses, certainly any firehouse like in my area here, which has a volunteer department, it's one level. There are a lot of firefighters who never in their careers slide the pole. There's a reason for it. It does facilitate response. I personally, and most firefighters, almost forget about it after a while because it becomes so routine. But to be very honest, I enjoyed it. I mean, I, even when I got to a point where I was responding from the second floor as the chief, it wasn't as important that I get there immediately because the firefighters would arrive first; they were doing the physical work, even if they were, let's say they were serving lunch or something, I could walk down the stairs or I could slide the pole. I often slide the pole. I just like the experience, you know, of sliding down the pole.
 
So yeah, in answer to your question, they are still there. I even try to incorporate the feeling of sliding a pole into my writing because it was something that meant something to me. And if an author wants to have a character slide a pole, by all means do it, if you can imagine what it feels like. I tried to describe, there are different types of poles, the traditional shiny brass pole I like, you slid very quickly along this brass pole. And then the newer firehouses, they introduced a stainless-steel pole. And the difference was the stainless-steel pole was wider. It had a different feel. It didn't have that slick, traditional, shiny brass feel. And the sliding process didn't feel the same. I kind of described it as the brass pole welcomed your embrace and the stainless steel just kind of tolerated you for a couple of seconds.
 
[00:27:08] Matty: I love that description.
 
[00:27:10] Thomas: Yeah. So that the poles exist, there are different types. And if someone wants to incorporate a pole into their story, include that part of it, that's fine. They would certainly be realistic in doing that.
 
[00:27:23] Matty: Well, I think that the opportunity to try to convey that sense of fun, I mean, it almost sounds like that sense of fun that attracted you to using the pole, even when you could have used the stairs, would be fun to represent in the story. What are some other misconceptions about life in the firehouse that you see writers or screenwriters doing?
 
Tips for a realistic portrayal of firefighters 
[00:27:43] Thomas: well, I don't really watch Uh, there are television shows that are fired. There's one, Chicago Fire. I don't watch any of them, but I caught about five minutes once, just out of curiosity and everybody is very well spoken. Everybody is kind of the same. They're Hollywood actors. They're incredibly pleasant. Handsome or beautiful, you know, there's, interaction that's almost predictable. The firehouses that I experienced, there are women in the fire service, there are women in the New York City Fire Department, they're still very much a minority at this point, there are very few women, there are a lot of men who have maybe never ever worked with a female firefighter. So that still creates and enables the typical firehouse environment, in my experience, to be a sort of a rough, tough, alpha male type of environment.
 
A guy I worked with and liked a lot made the analogy that a 24-hour tour in a New York City firehouse was almost like being in prison because we had to stay there for 24 hours. We wore the same clothes. We worked out with weights together. We ate the same meals together. And we always complained about the same things, you know. So the overall flavor of the firehouses, in my experience, has been kind of a loud, tough environment where if you can imagine a bunch of alpha males kind of competing for their ranking in this informal bureaucracy that's there.
 
Which is not to say that they're bad people. They're not. And it's not to say that they're bad people. There was not a tremendous variety of people, within that environment, because there were. The environment itself, if you basically are living in a version of a garage, the first floor would be the floor where the engine of a lot of companies is actually positioned. There's generally a small desk at front called the house watch desk where the person takes phone calls and handles the communication with the dispatcher. And the upstairs are lockers, offices, the bunk room.
 
But the walls, especially on the first floor, are generally a tile, like a white tile. And that kind of reverberates and amplifies all the noise that goes on in a firehouse. Firehouse can be a very noisy place. And part of that is the machinery, you know, testing out the equipment, all of that. But firefighters in general are very outspoken individuals, all right? You don't get a lot of subtleties. You'll get a fair amount of yelling, you know, and the noise of the equipment and the people, and the yelling, and the bells and the PA system, and the radio reports coming in, if you can imagine being in this environment for 24 hours, at least for me, it got to me after a while. We're to a point where it was, I liked being with the people I was with, but it was kind of a relief to get out of that noisy environment. So that's kind of the scenario.
 
Again, obviously, it really depends on the situation. There are some firehouses that are very quiet. There are some firehouses that have more than one unit assigned to it, and you have more people. I found sometimes that the really busy companies in the rundown areas of the city, there was a more of an informality of it because they did more work than, some of the companies in the nicer neighborhoods, and, that the noise would be comparable. You know, on the other hand, if you want to create an environment in your writing, in your storyline, of a sort of quiet, set off fire company where people sit around and discuss things at the kitchen table. Yeah, that could happen. That could happen also.
 
But I would say, just keep in mind the overall nature of firefighters, that they tend to be conservative people. And if they're going to have a political discussion at the kitchen table, which is really the focal point of the firehouse, the kitchen table. They're going to tend to be conservative, if they disagree, it's not likely to be with a lot of subtleties. There'll be some butting of the heads, that type of thing. So it's a very different experience than what you might see in the corporate world or the typical office building.
 
The hierarchy (official and unofficial) in the firehouse 
[00:32:09] Matty: Well, I'm curious, can you describe a little bit, is there a hierarchy? I mean, I think we're all familiar with the concept of the fire chief. But are there, like you've made the analogy to prison. I originally thought you were going to go, that you would go with like being in the army, but it seems a little more democratic in both a good and bad way.
 
[00:32:32] Thomas: Well, typical firehouse, let's say, would have an officer on duty, could be the lieutenant or the captain, who's in charge of the tour, in charge of the personnel and the building for that, that particular tour, which, you know, could be 15 hours, could be 24 hours, depending on where you work. Firehouse in New York, again, would have an officer and four or five firefighters. If it were a house that had more than one company, you could have two or three officers, perhaps, it may be as many as 15 or 20 firefighters. And, there is a distinction between officer and firefighter, but it's not as rigid as in the army. All right, the New York City Fire Department is a quasi-military institution with the emphasis on quasi. So, yeah, if the officer tells you to do something, you're going to do it.
 
But within the ranks of firefighters themselves, there's sort of a rapidly established, how would you describe this, sort of chain of command in terms of you have the very newest person All right, the probationary firefighter who's first year, he has no experience or she has no experience, they come in, they are the lowest of the low, they are treated as such for a while until they are gradually accepted, and their job would be to keep their mouth shut, their eyes open, to keep constantly busy making the coffee, helping out here and there.
 
Then there are the real salty old veterans. This might be someone who has 25 or 30 years as a firefighter, and they are the senior person, most of the time, very well respected, okay, could have a variety of personalities. A lot of them would sort of just sit back and have their coffee and just watch things, you know, sort of as an informal supervisor. perhaps step up and teach and help some of the younger firefighters.
 
Some of the older guys, not many. But some were nasty. They were just nasty individuals that, for whatever reason, were not very helpful to new people, were very critical of new people. And then you have a lot of people in between, you know, who were just normal walking around Joes and Janes and they functioned and did their job. It is overall a blue-collar world. Many of the firefighters who work, at least in my experience, were from a blue-collar background. Many of them had relatives who had been firefighters, and, certainly my case, my dad also had been a New York City firefighter, which kind of, you know, even though I didn't know a lot about the job, definitely was an influence in my, doing what I did.
 
The variety of personalities who choose firefighting 
[00:35:07] Thomas: That being said, there were, there is an amazing variety of people who choose this type of work, and I throw this out because if a writer wanted to introduce a character who maybe was different, who maybe didn't exactly fit in. All right, who maybe was sort of, you know, alienated by some of the things they were experiencing. Feel free to do it. For example, I worked with, over the course of my career, I worked with, a couple of actors. I worked with several lawyers, you know, guys who had gone through law school and were practicing law on the side. I worked with an architect. I worked with a couple of writers. Alright.
 
In fact, in my novel, one of my initial characters initially he was a minor character, was a would-be author. He was actually sort of a failed author and in my scenario, the way I set up the storyline, he was this guy who was, had illusions of being a New York Times bestseller. He was kind of out of most of the firehouse activity, was not especially liked. And over time, as the story evolves, he eventually changes and becomes a major player towards the end of the book. So, if an author wanted to introduce a typical person from a blue-collar background, by all means, do it, but don't be afraid to stretch that a little bit. Okay, there, there can be an amazing variety of people who do this type of work.
 
I worked with some of the most intelligent people I ever met in the fire department. You know, as I said, the architect, the actors, the lawyers, one of my firefighters, had been a jet fighter pilot in the Navy, I believe. So there's a lot of this going on, as far as, Leaving the door open to establish a character that you want to be in there. He doesn't have to be 6’ 4” and full of muscles. He or she could be five foot eight and maybe had been a, a tax lawyer, maybe still works on the side as a tax lawyer, maybe fits in with the mores and values of the firehouse, maybe feels like a total misfit. I would say feel free to play with that because you're not being unrealistic. There are a lot of different varieties, a lot of different things in terms of the type of people who do this type of work, even the quality of the individuals.
 
The motivation for many firefighters I worked with was simply, it was a job. It was a reliable civil service job. They were going to make an adequate salary, have medical coverage, and eventually a pension. That motivated a lot of people. Other people viewed it entirely differently. There were people who approached this job like it was the priesthood. You know, where they just viewed it as this commitment that they were going to make and perhaps their father and their grandfather made a totally different approach to the work. So the motivation was different. The reason for joining the fire department was different.
 
Even the, I hate to say, the morality of individuals could vary greatly. I actually worked with a firefighter who in fact eventually became a priest. I worked with another firefighter who eventually became a murderer. So again, don't be afraid to throw in something in describing or creating a character that might seem utterly ridiculous, because that person who does fit in or doesn't fit in will become a priest or a rabbi or a murderer. It's happened, you know, and you can create that character and that storyline and not totally divorce yourself for reality because these were the realities that I actually saw.
 
[00:39:00] Matty: I like that idea of understanding the common gestalt of the firehouse and then playing around with how different characters would react to that. Like I can imagine a young man or woman who is one of these kind of alpha personalities, going in and how difficult that would be for that person to be having to you know, be in their probationary period and having to be making the coffee and, mopping the floor, whatever, and maybe being mistreated by the old timers, that could be very interesting. Or someone who had, is going into it because they have a family history, but they're far from being the alpha type and how that might pan out. It, there are all sorts of interesting, Plotting and character development opportunities there with such a strong emotional background for it.
 
[00:39:48] Thomas: Just what you said there, that particular thing, if you are third generation, and your grandfather, your father were firefighters, and you're from an Irish section of Queens, New York, let's say, and the expectation is you're going to take the firefighters test, civil service test, and as soon as your number comes up, you're taking that job. And you do this because well on some level you didn't want to do it but this was kind of like the family it's almost like an arranged marriage and now you find yourself in a loud, aggressive environment where perhaps on your previous job you were treated as an equal and respected Now you're almost being yelled at, and your job is a probie, make the coffee, hey, make that bed, hey, remake that bed, and the bathrooms need mopping, you know, there's an ego check going on there, and I can see where a person, a character may have some issues with that, you know, something interesting to play with in a storyline.
 
[00:40:46] Matty: I think a common trope in crime fiction is the person who joins the fire department because they're a pyromaniac or they're an arsonist. And they either want to use that experience to learn how to perfect their unofficial profession or they just like the experience of being at the fire but maybe not for... Well, let me frame it up. I would think there would be people who would be attracted because they like to be around fires, and then there are people who want to become a firefighter because they like to help people, and then a whole spectrum combining those two. Can you comment about those, especially when writers use that trope of someone's joining the department for nefarious purposes?
 
[00:41:24] Thomas: I'm not going to say outright it doesn't happen. Because there, there certainly are recorded cases of where it did happen. I'm trying, I'm thinking of the title of a non-fiction book I read recently about a fire officer in California who did exactly that, you know, he was a fire officer; he was setting fires over and over again and eventually got caught, I don't like it only because, well, it certainly can exist and does exist, it seems kind of trite; it doesn't happen that often, and it's been done a few times. I almost get the sense that that would be a television movie, you know, rather than a good movie or a good novel. So I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying that realistically, does it happen often? Absolutely not. Could it happen? Yeah.
 
On the other hand, as I just said, there is a real variety of motivations for being a firefighter. And I suspect that... Well, I can talk in my case, to be brutally honest, it had nothing to do with family tradition. It wasn't like I was trying to save mankind. I joined for my own self-centered reasons. I had, at the time, a job that was boring the heck out of me, and out of the clear blue, the fire department offered me a job, and my attitude at the time was, that sounds pretty exciting. You know, I'm doing something that's very boring. This is a job that is completely off the scale, that I've, I'll never have a chance to do again. I went into it thinking, I'm going to do this for a year, just to have the experience of doing it, and then I'm going to move on with my life. And obviously, 33 years later that was my motivation, and certainly I loved it, and I'm glad I did it.
 
But you could have that motivation, you could have the simple motivation that I've got three kids, or four kids, or whatever, and I have to provide for them, and this is the most “secure,” ironically, it's a secure job in that sense, a very insecure job in another sense, in the safety sense, that might be your motivation, and yes, there are people like the fellow I work with who was a firefighter, left the fire department and became a priest. In fact, he even gave his pension to the priesthood.
 
So, you know, there are people who come in, for very high, other-directed type of reasons. a person can join for any reason. Could they join to gather information that would help them for criminal purposes? Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, if you have the arsonist point of view. There are people who have that, you know, affliction, and I can see where the fire department might be something of great interest to them. It has happened.
 
You're also placed in a position in the fire department where you will often be in areas that are secure areas that you shouldn't be in. You have to force an entry into a bank, into a shoe store, into some type of occupancy. Mid-Manhattan was loaded with places like this. I wound up in places in the middle of the night where I was surrounded by stacks of money. You know, you could join the fire department and be one of the world's greatest thieves if you have that motivation. So, your motivation, your character's motivation for being a firefighter could be a whole variety, a whole spectrum of reasons, and you can play with that to create a character who accomplishes a lot of positive stuff, right?
 
Or on the other hand, maybe accomplishes and does a lot of negative, negative stuff. You know, it's, you have free range with that, I think, as an author. And you're not going to be unrealistic if you create the bad guy. You know, obviously, you don't want a character, a cardboard character, but if you can create a bad guy with some depth, and there's a reason for him being that bad guy, as opposed to the good guy, Again with some depth who is a good guy because his dad or grandpa or whatever was this tremendous influence and he wants to live up to that expectation. That's kind of like the motivational aspect of it which leads, you know, into the character development.
 
[00:45:37] Matty: That's so great. Well, Tom, I could continue talking with you for hours about this topic, but, we need to wrap up, but I really appreciate you bringing both 33 years of experience as a firefighter, but also your experiences as an author. I think you had some really invaluable advice about how people can pull those two concepts together.
 
[00:45:54] Thomas: Again, thank you. Thank you for inviting me, and I hope that we threw out a couple of bones that might help a couple of the authors out there a little bit.
 
[00:46:02] Matty: I know we did. And please let everyone know where they can find out more about you and your work online.
 
[00:46:08] Thomas: Yeah, the best way to get in touch with me is through my website, www.chieftomdundunne.com. And, if you have questions, comments, complaints, I always return. That's the best way to get in touch with me, or to order the books, and I always return any emails. If you have specific questions about the fire service or, writing about the fire service, feel free to contact me.
 
[00:46:34] Matty: Great, thank you so much!
 
[00:46:35] Thomas: Thank you.