Let’s talk about writer’s block and what we can do to combat it. At least one of these will help you!

Rest, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

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TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:

Kat

Hello. Welcome back, everyone, to Pencils & Lipstick. This is episode 191 of the podcast. And today we’re going to be talking about ways that you can get rid of writer’s block or at least try to overcome it. I have quite a few points and quite a few things that you can try that I think you’ll probably find at least one or two that will work for you. Writer’s block can be a real pain for a writer. And it was sent to me as an email, somebody asked me about it. So I thought, I answered them, but then I thought, well, this would be a great episode topic for the podcast as well. Before we go into the podcast, I want to just let you know that we are going to be streamlining the podcast process quite a bit. We’re going to be focusing more on the video type. I know that’s not necessarily a podcast, I guess, people have so many little definitions for things. So we are over on YouTube, in case you didn’t know, we are putting out little shorts on social media or even on TikTok, although I’m not as consistent with that over then TikTok as I should be. But we are going to keep trying, right? This is what we do. So as far as audio goes, we will still be on the same platforms as before. You will just not get the musical intro as you do right now. But it’s just one of those things that we have to do. The podcast is awesome. I really love it, but it is a money spender, not a money maker. So that’s all right, we got things like that in our lives. I enjoy doing it. I will still be having interviews. It will just be a little bit more streamlined. So hopefully the sound will not drop off too much. I got some different things. I will be the one doing it at this point. Laura has been lovely as a replacement. It’s honestly just money, so we’re just going to be streamlining a bit. So if you like watching videos, you can find us over on YouTube. In fact, you can find me sitting in Spain right now in a rather bland room because I don’t want to show you the mess behind me. So there’s nothing interesting to see.

Kat

Before we get into the interview as well, I want to let you know that I had an interview with Lisa Shaughnessy over on her website, the Writers Retreat Sampler. And I talked all about the Toledo Writers’ Retreat that is coming up that I am going to be I’m putting together with Marci Renée, it’s called the Write With Us Writing Retreats in Spain. We have one in September. It’s pretty much closed at this point. There are only so many people that we can admit, but we’re going to have more, another one in April. We’re going to do it in Segovia and we’ll have another one in Toledo next year at the beginning of October. So if you want to know more about that stuff and want to figure out when I am on other people’s things, like I will be on Daniel David Wallace’s Summit this summer and fall as well. So if you want to see me on those different summits and listen to those interviews, you should join my writer’s list. Because if you’re on my writer’s list, you would have already known all about this stuff. You can find the link below in the show notes if you’re listening to audio or right below in the YouTube area there. Youtube doesn’t really let you click links. You have to copy paste it, which is annoying. But whatever, you can find it there. So if you get all my writer’s newsletter, you get different topics than… usually different topics than what is on the podcast. Sometimes it’s a little bit of the same, but we’ll also be shutting down the podcast website, not that you know that it’s there because you all never go there. So anyway, we’ll probably be shutting that one down as well. Other than that, nothing really is going to change. I’m going to keep interviewing people, but we’re going to focus on the visual a lot. I’m going to have a web designer who specializes in making web pages for authors come in. And so you’re probably going to want to watch that on video, although I’m sure the audio will be helpful as well. But we will stay on the audio, the podcast platform. So if you are on an app listening to this right now, please subscribe. You’ll still get every Monday, it will just automatically download for you. If you could review the podcast, that would be awesome. We had a couple of new reviews come in, which is just fun to see. And if you guys want to be interviewed on the show, if you think it would be a good fit. I just want to go over a couple of the… I’m thinking in Spanish right now, like the guidelines, I guess, that we go for the show, especially as we’re finishing up the fourth year, within a month and a half or so, and we’re going into the fifth year. So if you are an author and you think you want to talk about your books for this show, for Pencils & Lipstick, you have to have published at least three books. There are other podcasts, other video interviews where you can go to. And if you need help trying to find them, I can help you try to find them. Emma Dhesi has one called Turning Readers into Writers. It’s a YouTube interview place, but I’m not so much focused on the beginning, and I know that we’re all really excited with our first book, which I think is great. It’s just that this is really focused on the craft of writers writing and publishing and marketing, and you don’t really know all those things with the first book. Now, I think the only exception to that would be if you just blow it out of the water with your first book, you just do everything perfectly and just amazingly well. Maybe you’re a marketing genius and you want to come on and share how you did that. I would probably consider that for sure. So you could get a hold of me at writeyourlife@katcaldwell.com. If you are somebody who does something, a service, or has created a product for writers to make writers lives easier, whether it’s a software or product or course, you have a higher chance of getting on than a writer who’s just published one book. So that’s a weird vague guideline, I guess. And honestly, even with the three books, I put that as a guideline there. It’s really about authors who want to come in and talk about their process in the journey and the successes that they have found. So you might be a little bit confused if you’ve been listening for a long time. In the first couple of years, I did bring on people who had just written one book, but we are shifting that a bit. I really want to give people new things to hear about. A lot of indie authors need to learn about marketing and selling. And so we definitely want to hear from you if you are just blowing it out of the water on ads or marketing in a different way or anything like that. That we definitely want to hear about. And just in general, that usually comes with the more books published. But again, if you like doing an amazing job with one book, hit me up, we’ll see. We can talk, we can always talk. And even if I say no, it doesn’t mean that we can’t be friends.

Kat

So let’s get into breaking down writer’s block. I think this is a great topic to talk about in the summertime when we’re inundated with family and friends and traveling and going to the pool every day or taking your kids to the park or just kids, at home, all the time. And your mind is probably just going a million miles a minute. So writer’s block can definitely happen. It can It can happen a lot of times when you’ve been away from your work for a while, which can happen in the summer, right? Or it can happen when you’ve really pushed yourself to work a lot and you just haven’t given yourself time to think of the whole story or it can just happen out of the blue, right?

Kat

So the first thing that I want to say is if writer’s block happens, take a break. And I have talked about this in so many different interviews in so many different ways. But walking is an awesome thing for you to do. It is scientifically proven that walking is great for your brain and not only your brain, but your creative brain. Some of the most creative people in the world were walkers, and they would solve their problems while walking. One of my favorite books in the world is Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, I think that is, but I think I also might be getting that wrong. Let’s look this up. It is the best book ever because it talks about walking and resting and how you can stimulate your creative brain so that you can finish your work. Right, it is Rest, where you get more done when you work less by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. That is really hard for me to say. I’m very sorry if I didn’t pronounce that correctly. I will have the link in the show notes. How’s that? Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. You can find that on Amazon. It’s an amazing book. So take a break, take a walk. If you are writing and you’re in front of your computer and you’re like, No, Kat, I don’t want to get up and take a walk. I just sat down. I just told my family to leave me alone, and yet I still don’t know what to write. Fine, be stubborn.

Kat

So jump ahead in your story. One of my favorite things, and in fact, one I just told a writer this past week is jump ahead. He was stuck in his story. He had all these characters coming in and had their backstory lining up, and then he just got stuck. And I said, jump ahead to either the climax or the ending. And not only that, but write it two or three times in a different way, whether it’s a different point of view, whether it’s from using a different character to do things or just completely different. The climax is really important in your story and the ending is really important in your story. So if you are stuck wherever you are, jump ahead, write out the climax or write out the ending, but write it in 2-3 separate ways. And give yourself the freedom that that doesn’t have to end up being the climax or the ending, for real. Now, I have done this before and I found an amazing ending for my book Crossing the Mota. I’m really happy with that ending. And that is what I visualize as I write the book to finish it. That’s the place that I want to finish it at. So that’s why this is helpful, because if you get the climax and you do find the thing that you want to have happen, even the written out part needs to be changed or edited or just redone in general, you have the idea, you have the seed, and that is where you’re going to write towards.

Kat

Number three, pretend you’ve never read your work before. I’ve never done this before, but I saw it, I think, on Masterclass.com or something like that. And I just thought it was interesting. I think this would be a really difficult thing to do for certain brains, like my brain. I’m not sure I could trick myself into thinking. But if you print it out or if you make even your draft into an eBook and send it to your Kindle, a lot of authors do that. And that way you can read through it. I feel like the Kindle would work better because you can almost trick your brain into thinking that you’re reading another book. And then you just allow yourself to get immersed in the story and you’ll probably find like, oh, what’s going to happen next? You know how you always try to jump ahead of the characters of the books you’re reading? I think that’s the idea behind this.

Kat

All right, number four is write something else. Just go on and write something else. Not everyone agrees with this idea. I always have a couple of things in the works, and I wouldn’t necessarily say start a new novel, but write a short story, write a poem, write a flash fiction, pick out a random photo and try to make up a story about it. I really like short stories. I think they’re really cool. You can practice your story craft with short stories, hitting all the points that you need to hit. So yeah, write a short story. It doesn’t have to be fiction. Write a memory about your childhood and see if you can make it into a short story that has a climax and an ending. And then it’s something fun to share with your readers, right?

Kat

The next one is create a deadline for yourself. So visualize yourself as a professional writer, somebody who’s full-time writing, who is only going to get paid if this deadline is hit. You are in that time of Fitzgerald or whoever that you admire in the classics and you’re sweating and you’re going to stay up all night, come hell or high water. So visualize this deadline and write towards that deadline. The this is tricky in your brain a little bit, right? But it will also probably cause you to overwrite, just FYI. But that’s okay too. If you just visualize that deadline, I got to get this done. I got got to get it done. I got to get it done. And something will probably happen at that point.

Kat

The next one, I think we’re on number six, get crafty, do something else creative, do a puzzle. Puzzles are awesome for just letting your brain relax. That’s not even what I want to say. Get crafty. Get out your paint, your glue, and draw out your characters or your plot map, or make a diagram of the relationships in your book, but not with words. Do it with stickers and glitter and markers and crayons and have fun and allow yourself to be immersed in that. You’ll probably find that you’re just going along with the story in a whole different way at that point.

Kat

The next one is do something that requires no “real” thinking. I have puzzle in this one or even more mundane, shower or clean your kitchen or fold your clothes. Now, puzzle, I think is in this, although all you puzzlers are going to get mad that I call that mundane, but really just shuts down your brain. You’re so focused on finding that same blue that turns out it’s not the same blue because it’s shadowed and the way that the puzzle is cut, it doesn’t look the same. You’re so focused on something else that you’re shutting down that pressure in your head to figure out the story. Showering, cleaning up, folding clothes, that’s also the same thing. You’re focused on something else. And a lot of times you will get ideas that will just come to you all of a sudden. And you’re like, That’s so easy. You just need to shut down that other part of the brain.

Kat

Another idea is to free write for 30 minutes or try writing, free writing, with a writing prompt. This is a really good way to just find a different thing to write about. We talked about this with writing something else, but if you’re so stuck that you can’t even find an idea for a short story, just free write. Find some prompts. There’s tons of prompts out there. Story-a-day.org has lots and lots of prompts. I have a short prompts course, it’s free, it comes to your email. Lots of people have prompts. Or if you like to free write, just set the timer and write about whatever. Like sit on a park bench and describe all the people and just get it out. Just get out some words on the page.

Kat

Now, this other one is interesting because I hadn’t thought of this before, but this next one, it’s write for 10 minutes about everything that you did that day. And if you can’t fill the 10 minutes, then that week or that summer, this summer or this month or your life, for goodness sakes, if 10 minutes starts being really, really long. But the point of it is not the words. The point of it is to notice what distracts you while you do it. So do you pick up the nail polish bottle while you’re writing because you can’t think. Do you pick up the empty box? I like picking up all the things around me. Do you pick up your phone? Does your computer have notifications still on even if they’re silent?Do they show up in the corner? Do people call you? Is the cat meowing? Is the outside too loud? Whatever it is, notice what distracted you and then set about to rid your area of those distractions. Interesting, right?

Kat

Next point is talk to a friend, but better yet talk to a writer friend. Talk about your stories. Have an exchange time in which you are not really looking for feedback, but you just need someone to tell your story to. And then you agree to hear about their story, I guarantee you, you will figure something out. Something will come to you. Now, I listen to Shonda Rhimes talk about writer’s block, and this next point is from her. Shonda Rhimes says that when writer’s block used to come to her, it was crippling. And so she just started to refuse to believe it existed. She literally told herself over and over again, writers block does not exist, so it’s impossible that you have it right now. I know that’s crazy, right? But she claims that it works. She also says that she starts writing something else. So my point above is stamped and approved by Shonda Rhimes. I mean, what else could be better than that? So trick yourself into believing that writers block doesn’t exist. And so you are not blocked. You are a writer and you’re going to keep going.

Kat

Now, this next one, try dictating. That’s like talking to a friend, but dictating as many of you probably have heard me say, I like taking walks now since I can’t run and just talking through my characters or talking from the point of view of a different character. That’s the book’s not in their point of view. And just, I don’t know, what would she say? What did she do after that scene and just dictating it out. And it’s interesting because it’s not a dictation in the sense that I expect it to go word for word back onto Scrivener. It’s a dictation of just rehashing the characters or again picking them up, maybe through the eyes of a different character and just having fun with it. Writing that out might feel like work, whereas dictating it while I’m getting some exercise just feels more fun.

Kat

My next point is to just sit down and write even if it’s crap. And anyone who likes to be very concise in writing isn’t going to like that point. I’m an overwriter, as you know, and I am trying to not be an overwriter, but there are times where you just need to write even if it’s crap. I don’t know how many times days in my life where I force myself, especially during the school year, not in the summer, to write five times a week. And a lot of times it’s crap, y’all. Really, it gets thrown out. But it’s just writing. You’re still putting words on there. You’re still trying to figure something out. And there’s always something that comes out of it. So set a time of day and stick to it and write, even if it’s crap. And I can’t even tell you how many quotes there are from writers on the internet who are like a writer is somebody who sits down and writes, whether it’s crap or not. I don’t think they say it like that, but there’s a lot of writers who basically say that. Some of us might see it as a hobby, but the reality is most of us want to see our work published, and so you have to treat it as a job in some way. So you’re just going to have to write. But really, if writer’s block is really bothering you, sit in a comfy chair and read a book, not on the craft of writing. Read a book that will just take you away. Whatever your favorite genre is, pick it up. Maybe you’re rereading a book that you love. Maybe it’s a book that you just really were going to use as a victory book for having finished your manuscript. Just pick it up and read it and give yourself a break and have some fun.

Kat

You can also change the music that you listen to while writing. And if you don’t listen to music, you can add music to your area while you’re writing. I don’t listen to music. I know Carissa Andrews listens to like, it’s not even music, it’s like a monotone tone. You could try that as well. But yeah, change it up. Either change the music or add music or maybe shut off the music.

Kat

Something that could be fun instead of picking up a book, is watch a fun film. I especially love finding short films that people have made, especially I think they win, like the Cannes Festival short films. Some people are super creative. At these short tiny films and just enjoying somebody else’s creativity can really get your brain moving and you’re just like, That’s so awesome. I want to write a story like that, too.

Kat

Get up from your desk. Even if you are the person who’s like, no, this is my time to write. Okay, fine. Get up from your desk. Don’t let anybody make eye contact with you. Go get something to drink, get an elixer to drink, maybe a cayenne pepper lemon honey elixir, wake you up. I also like coffee or a tea, get something cozy, close your eyes, run around, whatever, and go back to your desk. Other than that, you don’t have to be at your desk. Even if you’re in your office, you could do this, too. You could exercise or you can meditate. So I am crap at meditation, but I’m trying. So we can all try meditating. And there’s a couple of different YouTube videos that are free to help you meditate. Exercise, do some jumping jacks, push ups, high knees, I don’t know, work on that core. Again, it’s something that will move your hormones around, get your energy level up, and that will probably shift your brain thinking a little bit more.

Kat

Also, last point, and this is a shout out to all the writers out there, whether you are writing blocked or not, eat something nutritious. Yes, eat something nutritious. Your brain needs to be fed by nutrients. I know when we are frustrated with ourselves or we are just anxious as humans, many of us reach for the salty crappy snack or the sugary crappy snack. I am just as guilty as anybody else, but realize that your brain, your creative brain and your body need nutrients. And so get up and eat something nutritious, even if it’s like avocados toast or tomatoes toast. We’re half Spanish in our family, so a slice of toast with some olive oil and slices of tomatoes with a little pinch of salt is probably the best thing ever in the whole world. I’m telling you, do it. If you want something sweet, cut up some fruit, even add a little bit of cream to it, maybe, or some Greek yogurt, eat something nutritious, add some pumpkin seeds or some pecan nuts, maybe. Feed your brain, feed your body.

Kat

These are all my ideas for helping you break writer’s block. I hope that you can find one of them and that one of them works for you. If the first one doesn’t work, try the next one. The truth is, you are a writer, you have a story within you and you you can finish it. Before we go out and into the sunset or to the pool or wherever you’re going, I want to encourage you that writer’s block is completely normal, but you can finish your book. You can keep going and you can overcome writer’s block. I will see you next week.

The post Ep 191 Beating Writer’s Block first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.

Today I speak with Mary Adkins, best-selling novelist of Palm Beach and Privileged about her writing journey and the business she created to help other writers find success called The Book Incubator. Want more information about Mary? Check out her website: https://maryadkinswriter.com/ her IG: https://www.instagram.com/adkinsmary/?hl=en

And for more information about The Book Incubator visit: thebookincubator.com

Sign up for my writer’s newsletter here:https://katcaldwell.com/writers-newsletter

Sign up for my reader’s newsletter here: https://katcaldwell.com/readers

Find me at https://katcaldwell.com or on Instagram as @katcaldwell.author or @pencilsandlipstick

TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:

Kat

Welcome back, everyone, to Pencils & Lipstick. I’m excited to have Mary Adkins with me, whom I’ve heard a couple of things about, and I think I’ve even heard her speak before. But she is an author, a novelist, and the founder of The Book Incubator. So I’m excited to have her on. Thanks, Mary, for coming.

Mary

Thanks for having me, Kat. I’m glad to be here.

Kat

Yeah, I’m glad to have you. I think during COVID I heard you speak. COVID is like this nebulous time, right?

Mary

Yeah, right, you’re like I think I did, but I don’t remember.

Kat

I’m pretty sure. I think it was about when Palm Beach, your third novel, was coming out. I would love to have her on and life gets busy, so I’m glad we’ve connected. This is exciting to you have such an incredible story to talk about. So let’s let you introduce yourself a little bit to people about who Mary Adkins is and then we’ll get in deeper.

Mary

Sounds great. So I am a novelist. I’ve published three novels. My first one was called When You Read This and my second one was Privilege, and my third one was Palm Beach. Two of those came out during the pandemic. So not a great time to launch a book. But I did my best. And I live in Dallas, I just moved. I was living in Nashville, but I literally moved a month ago, so brand new. Brand new for having just moved.

Kat

Oh my gosh.

Mary

You’re seeing the part that looks good, right? No, you’re right. The whole thing looks just like this. And I have a five-year-old son, and I live here with him and my husband, and I teach writing, of course. I work with novelists to finish their novels through a program that I started a couple of years ago called The Book Incubator.

Kat

That’s awesome.

Mary

So that’s who I am now.

Kat

That’s who you are now. But you started out as a lawyer, did you not?

Mary

I did, yeah.

Kat

Did you get to practicing law or were you like burnt out by the time you finished all those years or what happened?

Mary

Okay, I want to back up a little bit even farther because I wanted to be like many writers, I think I loved writing since I was a little girl, since like twelve years old is when I remember starting to tell people that I wanted to be an author, like, I wanted to write books. And so when I got to college, it was like, yeah, I even remember when I applied to college, I applied to a bunch of creative writing scholarships. I was just, like, very into, I was like, that’s what I am. I’m going to write. And so when I got to college, I signed up for a creative writing class, and I was so excited about it. It was a short fiction class, and it totally gutted me. It was the worst creative writing class experience I ever had. I got B minuses on my stories, which, just to be clear, that was, like, a very low grade at my college because we had crazy grade inflation. So B minus was, like, not good.

Kat

Especially with something creative you feel like it should all be.

Mary

Yes. And I just left that class so deflated, to the point, that was the only creative writing class I took in college. I didn’t sign up for any more after that because I was like, I guess I just can’t do that well. So going to walk away from that. I think it was partly, like, a very natural response and partly fraud syndrome, imposter syndrome, and just being like, I can’t keep putting myself out there. I’m embarrassed, kind of, because I was used to being a good student. I could usually figure my way out in most classes, or I avoided those classes.

Kat

Our grade system is what gives you validation, right?

Mary

I mean, yes.

Kat

What they teach us.

Mary

Exactly. And so it was like, well, if I’m not good at that, I’ll just avoid that. So I ended up I majored in public policy. Long story short, applied to law school, went to law school. I’m like, I’ll just go this route, because that was, like, where the action was. I was good at that stuff. I could get As it was like, I’m just going to do that. And so I went to law school. Law school was fine. I liked it because I liked being in school, and I liked my friends. But as soon as I got out of law school and started a job as a lawyer, it was like, what am I doing? It was like I had landed in the real world, and it was not what I had ever thought. I think I had just never truly known what a lawyer did. I mean, law school was interesting. And reading cases and talking about them. You were in a classroom. It was like, this is interesting. But I think I was never truly understanding of what a lawyer is. And it turns out I didn’t like it.

Kat

A lot of it’s like, corporate in an office, trying to figure out what laws, I’m not a lawyer, but most of my friends are like, yeah, I’m just figuring out tax laws for this company. That doesn’t sound interesting. I’m sorry.

Mary

No. And I was in litigation, which is like the antagonistic kind of law. So it was like representing this side, and we would talk about the other side as if they were jerks or something, which was weird when they were banks. The whole thing was just so strange. It was like, I cannot get my heart into any of this. This all just feels like just a way people are making money, which is great for them, but it wasn’t a good fit for me. And I also think a large reason I felt this way is because that twelve-year-old was still in me. I still wanted to be a writer, and I had just managed to avoid it for like over ten years. Yeah, keeping myself busy. And I felt like she started screaming. Like, once I was in a law office, I felt like my internal creative kid was like, what are you doing? You want to write? You should be writing stuff. And so I tried to write. I’m like, okay, well, I’ll just write in the mornings before work and at night after work.

Kat

As like a book or just like…?

Mary

Or just anything creative, because I hadn’t written creative in a while. I just want to come back to that. And so I did start to do some of that, but my job was so all consuming that I didn’t have very much time. And so it didn’t take me very long to realize, like, I don’t think I can stay in this job. So I started applying for jobs that would well, this makes it sound better than it was. I was actually much more reckless. I called my parents, I’m like, I’m quitting. And my dad’s like, please have another job first. He’s like, I don’t care if you are a barista. He’s like, go get a job at Starbucks. Just please have a job before you quit this job. I was like, fine, deal. So I waited until I applied to a ton of jobs and finally I got this tutoring job. I’m like, great. I have a job. I can quit. So I started tutoring and quit my job right away, my law job. And the tutoring job turned out to be perfect because I just tutored people for like a few hours a day. It added up, but tutoring, you kind of tutor on other people’s schedules are supposed to be evening, so I would work a lot of times at night, which meant I have a ton of time during the day to write. And that was when I really got to start focusing on my writing. I do want to say sorry, I get a little carried away talking about all this. So it’s been a long time on my story. But my internal fraud syndrome around writing fiction, though, that had not changed. So I was like writing creatively, but I had so ingrained from that college creative writing class that I couldn’t write fiction, that I was only writing nonfiction. I was like, I’ll write personal essays, and I’ll write humor from my real life. But I’m not a fiction writer because I learned that in college. Can’t do that. We’ll never try that again. So I wrote a proposal for a memoir that I started submitting to literary agents. Because if someone had told me, like, this is how you get published. You have to get a literary agent, I’m like, okay, I’ll just do what everyone’s telling me to do. So I was sending that out, and they were saying no, but one agent said, he goes, no, I can’t sell this. But I like your writing. What else do you have? Do you have a novel? And I did not have a novel, of course, but I had had a novel idea, and I was like, I don’t have a novel, but here’s an idea that I had for a novel that I was thinking of writing, which isn’t true. I wasn’t thinking of writing it because I didn’t trust myself. But I had this person’s attention.

Kat

You got to answer.

Mary

Right. And so anyway, he wrote back, that sounds really great, or something like, that sounds fascinating. Write that and then send it to me. That’s what he said, write the novel and send it to me. And this person never became my literary agent, but I think ultimately he ended up ghosting me later when I did write the novel. But I’m still so grateful to him because he gave me permission. That’s the only reason I ever started writing fiction, because this person said, write that and send it to me. So in my head, it was like he was waiting for it. Which of course he wasn’t, like, he was, I’m sure, moving on and doing other things. But I was like, oh, this person is waiting for something, and said it was a good idea, so now I’m going to do it.

Kat

Do you think that gave you, like, a deadline too, of like, I got to figure this out?

Mary

Yeah, because I didn’t want too much time to pass. It was like, I’m going to knock this thing out. So I just became obsessed with getting this novel down. And ultimately, that was my first novel that became.

Kat

Oh, that’s awesome. You have three novels out, so tell us a little bit about each because are they standalones? Do you write in series or standalone?

Mary

They’re standalone. They’re all standalone. Yeah. So they’re contemporary fiction, and they’re all different. So the first one is, it opens, the main character has already died, and she has left behind a printout of a blog that she wrote in her final few months that she left it behind with her boss, who is also a good friend of hers, asking him to try to get it published. So it’s the story of him trying to get this thing published that she left behind. And we also read her blog as part of it, so it’s sort of like a book within a book.

Kat

Oh, that’s cool.

Mary

So we get to know her after she’s gone. Yeah. And we kind of see how she left some little Easter eggs behind for the people that she loved. So that’s the style of that one. The second novel is a sexual assault on a college campus, a Southern college campus. And in the wake of this assault, the victim initiates a judicial proceeding at the university. It does not go her way. So then the second half of the book is really about how do you find justice or how do you recover your power when you don’t have it. It’s been taken from you.

Kat

That’s a pretty heavy topic. Was that hard to write?

Mary

That’s the heaviest, I would say, of the three books. Yeah, I would definitely say that one is. And then the third one is called Palm Beach, and that second one, by the way, is called Privilege. The third one, Palm Beach, is set in Palm Beach, Florida, and it’s about a young couple that moves from New York to Florida when half of the couple, the husband, gets offered a position running the household for this billionaire in Palm Beach. So this young couple’s lives get sort of enmeshed in the lives of this billionaire family, and things go south.

Kat

Yeah. I would imagine that he’s got to go south. That’s the energy.

Mary

It’s got to go south.

Kat

Yeah. You were talking about how, with the memoir idea, you were trying to push it out to traditional to get an agent. I guess. So did you decide to go traditional?

Mary

I did for all three of my novella, yeah. So my publisher for my three novels was Harper Collins. Same publisher.

Kat

Okay, cool.

Mary

For all three.

Kat

Oh, that’s awesome. So is that like, the agent route? Like, you have to find an agent and then they sell it to Harper Collins?

Mary

It is, yeah. It was definitely, looking back, I have no regrets about going that route. I think I also didn’t even know there were other routes, though.

Kat

Right.

Mary

So it worked out well for me, but if it hadn’t, I think it would have been helpful for me to know, like, oh, but this isn’t the only you didn’t have to go this way because it took me six years to get a literary agent. Like, I was querying literary agents for that long before signing with mine. So it was long. It was a long road.

Kat

Did you keep writing the other books, like, while you were querying? So did you have, like because your last two came out pretty quickly, like, pretty…

Mary

Yes, exactly. Like, the three my three books came out three years in a row. Boom, boom, boom. And so they were not like, you write so fast. I’m like, no, I don’t I’ve been working on these a long time. I mean, the third one I wrote pretty quickly, but the first one I was writing and rewriting for, like, seven years. The second one several years because, exactly, I was, like, working on the second one while I was querying the first one.

Kat

First one, okay.

Mary

Yeah.

Kat

And then how did you? So you’re a lawyer. You’re, like, licensed as this lawyer and you decide to become a novelist because the guy told you that you should. Which I think is great. But was it difficult to… there’s a lot to learn. So sometimes people are just really intuitive and they can write out their novel and there isn’t that much to change about it. And then there are those of us, like me, who you write a novel and then you realize you should actually learn some things.

Mary

Exactly.

Kat

How was that journey? And from being a lawyer to, like, I’m writing a whole novel, like, 1000 words, if not more. That’s a lot.

Mary

Yeah. I took a bajillion writing classes and so I definitely was like, I need to educate myself on this. And I always like school anyway, so I loved taking classes. But I also think, I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about this lately because I’ve been having ideas for my fourth novel and I’m almost finding this one the hardest one to start. And I’ve been thinking about how there was something beautiful about being kind of cavalier in my early writing days and being like, how hard can this be?

Kat

I was just talking about that to a friend of mine. We’re both on our 4th, 5th novel. And I find it harder. I don’t know if it’s the expectations people have or the expectations you have on yourself or the like, I don’t know what it is.

Mary

Interesting. So you relate? You relate to that?

Kat

I completely relate, yes. I think I agonize more and I was telling her it’s like, I wish I could go back to that. I’m writing a book and I don’t know what tropes are, and I don’t know what structure is, I kind of know what dialogue tags are and how to invent a paragraph. But other than that, it was like, whatever came to my head. Of course that came with problems.

Mary

Yes, it did. It came with problems. Writing a really messy first draft. I didn’t know anything. And then having to rewrite it over and over again. But, yeah, there was also something really beautiful about the innocence of being like, oh, I just have to hit a word count. I wasn’t quite that naive, but it was close.

Kat

I was close to that. Yeah. And I’m trying to figure out if it was easier to delete 40,000 words of my way overwritten novel or if it’s easier now of like, no, let’s try to not overwrite, Kat. Let’s try to stay in the line. I don’t know.

Mary

That’s such a good question, right? Yeah, it’s almost that. I wonder, too, if there’s part of it that once we’ve been through it a few times and we kind of know what the end kind of final, polished product is, you’re, like, looking for ways of maybe getting there faster this time.

Kat

Oh, true.

Mary

When really, maybe we just need to be a little bit more humble and be like, the first draft will be bad, even though we’ve done this several times before.

Kat

It’s so easy to say. And you say it to all your students, and then you’re like, no, but mine should be better. Yeah.

Mary

Oh, that too. And maybe that’s it, too. You’re like that’s, actually, I feel like you just nailed a lot of it for me because you’re like, well, yeah, yours can be bad because you’re new to this. But my first one is supposed to be good because I’m supposed to be the expert.

Kat

True. It’s a lot of self imposed pressure, I think, because I’m not sure really expect that, but yeah, I have to be careful, too, not to look at other people and be like, gosh, you write fast. Because, like, you I’m a mom, so I started writing when my when I had a newborn. And you did as well, right?

Mary

Yes.

Kat

We’re either insane or I’m not sure.

Mary

Or brilliant. No, my husband would say it was brilliant. We’re brilliant.

Kat

We’re totally brilliant. So was that just, like, a coincidence of time? Like, you were pregnant and this guy tells you, gives you permission to start writing. But what was that like, to realize, I mean, pregnancy-wise, if you don’t feel sick, you can keep writing. Right. But then this little thing comes along and expects you to all the time.

Mary

Writing with a newborn. Well, I got a book deal, right, when I had a baby. So then I had to write the book, was the idea.

Kat

Yeah. You sold it before?

Mary

I sold it because this was actually my second one that I wrote, so I felt like I had no choice. But I also because my husband, we were recently talking about this, he was like, I really feel like that was the best thing that ever happened to you. I mean, at the time, it was a lot of pressure, and it felt really kind of stressful. But looking back, I think he’s onto something, because it does feel like it would get me out of the house, which meant I had to put on clothes, which meant I had to think about something other than just keeping my little baby alive or how little sleep I had had, or like it forced me to use my brain. And I don’t know, I think it might have been really good for me. It felt like complete chaos. It felt just crazy. But I don’t know that it was a bad thing. And I never felt I still loved writing, like, it was harder because I was tired and I was like, right hormonal, and all that, but I feel like I always felt like a little bit charged by it. That was actually kind of nice to get away, which I think would have been I just know my personality. I wouldn’t have justified, oh, I need to go take 2 hours to, like, read a book or get a massage. Like, I just wouldn’t have done that, probably because it would have felt selfish or something stupid. I mean, it would have been a good idea.

Kat

Because we’re women. Exactly.

Mary

Yeah.

Kat

But we always think it’s selfish. Yeah.

Mary

This felt like work. Like, I had to do work so I could justify it to myself.

Kat

You didn’t really have to justify it to anyone else, honestly. Yeah, that’s nice, actually. That’s very cool. But then do you think that led you to this whole philosophy of carving out time for your creative self that you teach your students?

Mary

Yeah, definitely. Because I think the cool thing that I discovered through that the other piece of pressure for me during that period was my husband had gone back to school, so I had a full time job so that we could get health benefits, so that I could have a baby. So I had a maternity leave, and I was like, I don’t think I can write a book and be in a full time job and have a newborn, so I have to write this book on my maternity leave. So I gave myself that deadline. I was like, you have ten weeks. By the end of this ten weeks, you will have written this draft. But I couldn’t write for more than a couple of hours a day, tops, because and usually, honestly, not even that, like hour and a half, maybe because I was nursing, I was tired. We had childcare in the sense, like, my husband would watch him a little bit. My mom was in town for some of those weeks, and she would help out, but other than that, we didn’t.

Kat

You had 8 hours of child free.

Mary

No, exactly. But I think the thing that I learned through that that was cool was that I wrote a draft. I wrote a draft of my book in ten weeks in like a little over an hour a day, and it was like, okay, that’s doable. I just didn’t know that was possible until I did it, and that was really empowering. So I explained that to people,. Now you don’t have to overhaul, a book sounds like such a big thing, where they’re like, well, I’ll probably have to take a leave from my job. And it’s like, I mean, you could do that, but you may also just have to find a little bit of time every day. Or like a few hours a week total. Right? You can actually make good progress.

Kat

So do you teach your students in the Book Incubator to outline or to do you have a certain way that you think is the best way for them to do it? Or do you just sort of work around what their creative process is?

Mary

I guess I teach them my creative process, which is not outlining, and then help them find what’s best for them.

Kat

Okay, that’s cool. So you don’t outline?

Mary

No.

Kat

Wow. Okay.

Mary

I do have some tools that I use, like something called the Big Question, where you think of, like, what is the big question that your story is going to explore and a story destination. Like, you’re writing towards something that’s going to happen. What is that thing going to be? And it doesn’t have to be at the end, but just have something in mind, and then we talk about characters having unfulfilled wants. There are things that we’re working with, but it’s not an outline.

Kat

Okay. One of my questions that I always philosophize with my writer friends is, like, I’m not sure it’s so much the outline, because an outline can be good on one hand, but it’s also the thinking, like, an outline of what’s going to happen, sure. And some of your questions are probably like, that going towards a moment that’s sort of going to bring everyone together. Like the realization or something. Something like that. It’s good to have that there, but I’m almost convinced that it’s the thinking about your book more than everything else that will help you write. I don’t know what you think about that. I love that.

Mary

So you mean just like, kind of getting obsessed with it in your head so that it’s just what it’s like where your brain goes?

Kat

Yes, because otherwise, I don’t know about you, but when the years that get really chaotic, like, we moved in 2020, I was re-editing a book. Of course, it took longer than it should, so we’re moving, looking for a new place to live, all that stuff. It’s a pandemic. Three kids on zoom is what’s insane. I was distracted, so I was thinking back of like, why did it take so much to edit that? And there would be pieces that didn’t make sense, and my editor would be like, what is this? And I would just like, I wonder if it’s because I wasn’t present in the book.

Mary

Yeah. Yes, I completely agree. And I inversely, too. I love when I just had this idea for a new novel, and it’s that fun thing where you like, it becomes the default that your brain goes to. Instead of like, what color rug should I get in my living room now? It’s right where you’re like, what should be her motivation? Why is she doing that? But why did she marry him in the first place? You get to just mole over those things. And I love that. That’s like my when it’s like this private puzzle that you’re doing in your mind.

Kat

Yes. And I think that should count as your writing time. You don’t want to elongate that too much to not get words on the page. But it’s good to know that stuff because I’ve worked with students who don’t know that stuff and then they finish the novel and they still haven’t answered any questions because they never asked any in the beginning.

Mary

Right. No, that’s a great point. And maybe that is also playing into what we talked about earlier, like your fourth or fifth book being one that’s hard because you kind of know, okay, there are some things that will make actually writing this better and easier if I can figure them out. Now, what is this character’s motivation? What’s actually going on here? Let me figure that out first.

Kat

Yeah, that’s a great scene to think of at 11:00 p.m.. At night, but what are they doing?

Mary

Yeah, exactly.

Kat

Real angsty there. But I don’t know. So within the Book Incubator, do people have to come already with the book, like already with a draft? Or how do people approach you and be part of this?

Mary

So pretty much everybody comes with an idea because it’s an application based program, so people do have to apply and they don’t have to send a writing sample or anything. It’s much more just kind of we just want to make sure we’re curating our community. So people are like serious writers. So people will say we basically say, what’s your book idea and what are you hoping to get out of a writing program? Just to make sure it’s a good fit. By the time they are admitted to the program, most people have an idea. It may just be a little fledgling idea, but it’s like, okay, but I just had this thing about this, or whatever, and then we help them flesh it out from there. And then other people come in. Actually, a number of people come in with like part of a draft written, sometimes even a full draft written, which is great. So then we just start helping them with revision. I mean, we can kind of pick we we just pick up wherever somebody is.

Kat

Okay. Okay. Yeah. And is it like group classes? Like, do you teach classes or is it like what is the sort of structure what would somebody expect, when they’re applying for it, of how it’s going to help them either take the idea forward or maybe they need to finish the novel?

Mary

Yeah, it’s really customized. It’s a twelve-month program. Everyone’s in it for one year. So I kind of talk about it like a candy store. Like, you come in and you kind of pick what you want. I mean, I do teach a live writing class every week. I have a fellow teacher, Ruffy Thorpe, she’s also a novelist, but she teaches a revision class every week. And people are invited to come to both of those, but I encourage them to come to the one that they’re currently doing so that they’re not clouding their brain with irrelevant things because they get those recordings. They can watch all that later, but then they can submit. We have a couple of editors they can submit to editors for critique their work as they go. They can schedule one-on-one meetings with us or with a couple of other team members that we have to talk about specific things like troubleshoot a plot point, stuff like that. When they have a full draft, they can have the editor read their entire draft and give them notes. It’s very much like you take what you need when you need it.

Kat

It’s like turning a light on in a very dark world of writing. Because otherwise am I doing this right?

Mary

Exactly. And that’s why I started it, because I had felt like that I was, like, hobbling it all together for years. And then because I went the traditional publishing route, when I first came up with the Book Incubator, I included resources for teaching people how to do all that, how to query a literary agent, how to find a literary agent to query, how to read between the lines of their responses, what to do when you get one, all of that stuff. And increasingly, we’ve added other support for alternate publishing paths because I just feel like things are really moving, actually, in that direction, like I said before I even existed.

Kat

Yeah. So you don’t have to be a traditionally seeking writer, I guess. Okay. That’s cool. Yeah. Our art world is always changing. Who knows what’s coming down the line, right?

Mary

So how did you know you wanted to go indie when you started?

Kat

I got 50 to 60 rejections, but to be fair, I just didn’t know what I was doing, honestly. It’s one of those things. Like, I kept sending them out. I also lived in France, so I had to come home, buy the envelopes and the postage because you used to have to put the postage back in so that they could send you the letter, international.

Mary

It was snail mail!

Kat

It was snail mail. And then it sort of like into email a little bit. Like some of them started this was like 2010, I guess. They started some emails. And then I got a Kindle because I lived in Europe in 2011 because I wanted to read English. Yeah, this is pretty cool. Although a lot of it was traditionally published, people putting their ebooks on. But I think at one point, I was just like, I just can’t handle any more rejection.

Mary

Yes.

Kat

It could have easily gone anywhere had I gotten someone that was… there was no Twitter pitching or anything like that. Or maybe there was and I didn’t know.

Mary

Doubt it. Yeah.

Kat

Who knows what you know?

Mary

Well, it’s like feeling around in the dark. Yeah. And I was in the same boat. It just was like, I guess this is what you do and then you just keep doing it until and then.

Kat

If they say yes or something happens. Yeah. So my six years ended with me being screw it.

Mary

Yeah, basically. It’s really funny too, because sometimes writers will ask me if they are going the traditional route. They’ll ask, how do you choose between agents, literary agents who are giving you offers? And I’ll be like, I’ve never met anyone who has faced that choice, I think, ever.

Kat

It’s a nice dream, though. I went through the Author Accelerator program for the fiction, and you have to put together things for clients. And I was like, I’ve never seen anyone get two acceptance at once. Better that way. But if you do, I mean, that’s great. I guess you do.

Mary

If you do, amazing. I’m sure it’s happened to someone. Someone out there has had it happen.

Kat

If it’s happened to you, come on my podcast. Whoever’s listening.

Mary

Tell us what you did.

Kat

So with the Book Incubator. So you can be whatever, like seeking whatever publishing goals. What about writing goals? Like, do you only work with fiction? Do you only work with a certain genre of fiction? How does that work?

Mary

We work with all genres of fiction. But we have had a few memoirists come in and I’ve been happy to support them, but as best I can. But I’m trying to move away from that just because it really is tailored toward fiction. Our lessons are really so I end up feeling a little bad because I’m trying to explain to them how to apply it to memoir. And I’m like, I hope this works. Anyway, so we have had a couple that are coming in, but we’re really focused primarily on fiction, all genres. So we recently took a survey and we have kind of people just to kind of truly scattered across genres. I think literary fiction is our biggest genre, which surprised me a little bit. Women’s fiction is also really big. And then YA is pretty big too. And by big, I mean like 15 writers. It’s a pretty small group.

Kat

That’s all right. Are they categorized as women’s fiction or literary fiction or like a cross between them?

Mary

Mine are categorized as contemporary fiction. And then I think they’ve been categorized as women’s fiction too, just because I’m a woman generally marketing. They’re so weird.

Kat

I envy the people who write thriller, mystery, right? Where’s my book? I really don’t want to go literary because I want people to actually read it and not right. I’m not that good with turn of phrase. But I have a contemporary when people ask me, I was at a conference in London, they’re like, what do you write as a contemporary? That sounds so boring. What does that even mean?

Mary

I know same. And I always say that because it feels the most accurate. But you can tell people, they kind of look at you like, what?

Kat

What is it about? I don’t know. Okay, give me 2 seconds, and I’ll tell you what it’s about. All right. But you guys are working with I think it’s really cool. I talk even on the podcast a lot about brainstorming. So it sounds like you get to even come in and brainstorm something, because otherwise with your computer and you’re like, I think this works. I don’t know. And I don’t know how many times it’s, like, one in the morning. And I’m like, that totally doesn’t work.

Mary

Yes.

Kat

After the scene is written. So I think that’s really cool that people can interact. It’s not just, like, go home and write it.

Mary

Exactly. Because I feel like we end up having, as writers, a fair amount of interaction after we already have right. Because you can share and then get feedback. But yeah, I feel like the interaction can be the most helpful when you’re just talking before you even have written a word. Just like, let me bounce some ideas so they’re not just in my own brain.

Kat

Right. And other people can ask questions of, like, well, why would they be married in the first place? Why would she be in jail?

Mary

This conversation is making me want to do even more of that myself because I just think it’s so helpful.

Kat

It is. It is very helpful. And I’m, like, just encouraging people to find that I don’t know, wherever. But this sounds pretty cool with the Book Incubator. And do people mostly interact with you and those who work with you, or do you guys have, like, a Facebook group or where the writers interact together, or is it mostly just writer with the professional?

Mary

They all interact together, but we’re on Mighty Networks. I don’t know if you know what that is. It’s not Facebook, but it’s kind of like that. Like there’s a forum, a little more personal. And it’s separate, private. Exactly, it’s private.

Kat

That’s nice. I’m on two of those, but I kind of forget about it when I’m talking to other people.

Mary

There’s the downside. It’s not like somewhere people are already going, like, Facebook, that I feel like that’s the downside. They have to remember to go there.

Kat

Right? Yeah. But still, once you remember it I do think they came out with an app, didn’t they?

Mary

They do. They have an app. So that’s helpful.

Kat

Exactly. All right. Very cool. So people, we’re going to have the links in the show notes. Where do they go to look at the Book Incubator. And to apply. If they want to start with you.

Mary

They can just go to thebookincubator.com. Yeah, and they can apply there. And if they want to just kind of see a little bit of my teaching and stuff first. I also have a YouTube channel now. They could just search my name there, and it should pop up. It’s Mary Adkins with a “D”. And I do some teaching on my YouTube channel, too.

Kat

Awesome. Very cool. So we will have the links in the show notes for thebookincubator.com and then you guys can find out more about mary@maryadkinswriter.com and then I’ll have the link in the show notes to YouTube, especially for everyone listening and that doesn’t have a pen right now. Thank you so much Mary, for coming on and talking to us about the book incubator and your novels.

Mary

Thanks Kat. It was so funny.

The post Ep 190 The Book Incubator with Mary Adkins first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.

The 10 Things I Learned at SPS LIVE (and throughout my years as an Indie Author).

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TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:

Kat

Hello, everyone. This is Episode 189 of Pencils & Lipstick. And it is mid-July, and you have me today to talk to you a bit about what I learned at the self-publishing show. Now, that was about three weeks ago, but I’ve been traveling back and forth, and I’ve been organizing my thoughts about it. Plus we had a great interview last week with Jeff Elkins. And so as we’re halfway through summer, I thought that this would be a great time to pause and reflect a little bit. Now, I learned quite bit at the self-publishing show. I highly recommend if you can get a digital pass still, which I’m not sure that you can do. But if you can, a lot of the talks were really great. And what I enjoyed about it was that they weren’t just for people at the beginning of their career, because I am not at the beginning. I need some pick me up and encouragement because I feel like I’m past the beginning, not quite to the middle. I know a lot of stuff. I’ve been in it for a while, but I need to know more. It’s also for indie authors, so those of us who are not going the traditional route. And that’s needed because our marketing and our business and our writing is going to be focused differently because we are indie writers, because we are people who are entrepreneurs, we’re building our own business and we are directly getting our books to the readers. And we have more direct contact with our readers as well. And so things are different for us. We are not looking for agents, we are looking for readers more than anything. So it’s good to have a mix. It’s always good to learn from anyone. But specifically having a conference for indie writers, I think is a needed thing. So I learned quite a bit. There were lots of writers speakers there. There were lots of writers there as well. But I broke it down into 10 things, and so we’re going to go over them a little bit.

Kat

Now, number 10, we’re going to count down, is you cannot get past learning your craft. We need to learn our craft. And like we talked about last week with Jeff Elkins, aka the Dialogue Doctor, there’s always something more to learn. And you don’t need to be overwhelmed about that. You just need to know that and understand it and be okay with it. And we have little sprints on our marathon of being an indie author. So there was a great story at the conference of a woman, Britt Andrews, who claims that she didn’t really know what she was doing. She was in lockdown. She thought she’d write a book, had a lot of fun doing it, put it out there. And readers really loved her book. And then she wrote five more. Now, I would say that she must have just innate talent. And I would say that you, too, probably also have some talent because I don’t think that you would want to write if you didn’t. Now, just because we have talent doesn’t mean that we can’t get better. I always bring it back to there is no amazing artist out there, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, everyone in all the arts, they learn from their masters. They always have a master. Opera singers are always training their voice, they have a trainer. Professional athletes, they have a coach, they have a trainer. Writers are no different. We need to take workshops. We need to reinvigorate our creativity and work on something else and challenge ourselves. Because as much as Britt Andrews found that success very quickly and with just one book and then was encouraged to write more, the majority of us are not going to have that rush to stardom and fame. And every other speaker that came to talk had spent years honing their in their craft. So they were either journalists or they were screenwriters or they were writers in some other sense, copywriters, whatever. And a lot of them had written five, six, seven, eight, nine books before they found the series that really catapulted them into the six or seven figures. So what I gleaned from that is we all have talent, but we always need to learn our craft.

Kat

The next one, number 9. Now, this might ruffle some feathers, and it kind of ruffles my feathers. If you don’t know, I am an eclectic writer. I have four books out there. One’s a novella, so two of them are historical. One is a speculative fiction and another is a contemporary family drama. But here’s the thing. We have to accept what sells, choose the genre that we’re willing to write in, and and learn that genre. Now, I know I am telling you this and you say, Kat, you haven’t chosen a genre, and I agree with you. The duology that’s coming out is a contemporary family drama. And I am going to add on to the historical romance as a series. So I am picking two genres, which is possible to do. You can do that, but just understand what sells. And so what I understand for myself is most likely the historical romance is going to sell more than the contemporary family drama. Now, especially because contemporary family drama, what is that genre? Come on. It’s easy to know what historical romance is, right? So I just need to accept that we need to know that the romance genre, as big as it is because it has so many different niches, has rabid fans and sells pretty easily. Much easier than thrillers, than mysteries, than contemporary family drama. Now, that’s not to say that you cannot make money with the other genres because there were many people on stage that were not just romance writers. There were thrillers, action, mystery, retelling of Greek mythology, lots and lots. I really loved how Mark Dawson brought a slew of different genres onto stage to show us that it’s possible.

Kat

But that does bring me to number 8, which is the question you really need to answer for yourself. Is this a hobby or is this a business? Now, for me, this is a business. I love writing. I am determined to push forward in it as a business. I have spent the last 18 months, about if not two years, really learning business. And I did this again in 2018, right after I published Stepping Across the Desert. I delved into my first level of learning business and learning entrepreneurship. And I learned a lot. And now I had to take it to the next level. I’m learning direct sales, I’m learning marketing, I’m learning, even better, how to make images and how to do ads. Is this a hobby or is this a business? For some people that I work with, it is a hobby and they honestly don’t care if they ever get published. And that’s okay. That is your choice to make. But you definitely have to make that choice. Now, I am going to assume that those of you who are listening are on my route and you want to make money with this. So we are going to choose business for the last seven points that we’re going to go over. So if it’s a business, you need to act like it’s in a business. You need to learn your marketing. You need to learn how to set up a website. You need to discipline yourself and have set hours in which you work on this business. You need to learn advertising. You need to learn how to write copy. You need to learn how to talk about your books. You need to be present on social media just like every other business. So you need to decide where you’re taking your business. The first step, choose one of them. If the first step is learning to be on social media talking about your book, do that. If your next step, let’s say, might be learning how to sell direct or it might be learning ads. I didn’t hear one person on stage actually say that ads were not important. And I know that hurts a lot of us. Now, ads are in acquired taste and they have to be learned. You cannot just boost posts. Several people have told me, do not do that, that’s a waste of money. You need to learn. You need to take a course. You can learn from a lot of people. You can learn from Mel Cooper and the Writing Wimes. You can learn from Steven Piper. You can learn from, I think, Russell Nolte also teaches them. You can learn from a lot of people. Oh, Brian Cohen does Amazon ads. And I’m talking Amazon and Facebook ads are the top ones. But as TikTok Shop comes in, man, they make tongue twisters, tiktok Shop comes in, that’s going to be a different ad. So you have the main ones, Amazon, Facebook, and then you have TikTok, you have Instagram. I mean, if you use your social media ad anyway, that’s two different levels, right? Kind of a professional ad and then your person-to-person ad. But if it is a business, if you want to make money from it, you need to understand it. You need to understand marketing, you need to understand your book. Yeah. You need to understand how to present yourself as a brand because then you are a brand. And set up your website and have all the good things, right?

Kat

Now, what I also took away, number 6, is that it is possible to make money from writing. And a lot of people will disagree with me on this one. It takes money to make money, right? So we’re talking about making a business. And there’s rarely a business out there that you don’t have to invest something into. You have to invest a lot of time because you can’t afford the bigger things, but you also have to invest money. There’s just no way around that. Even Britt Andrews, and look her up, guys, especially if you like paranormal normal romance. I think it’s like paranormal normal fantasy romance, I think is her niche now. But she had no money. Her story is she had no money, she had no job, she put ads on is up for two dollars a day. She was willing to make a sacrifice on her business, in her personal life for her business. So yeah, you can make money and work for her. I’m not going to make not saying that it will work for everyone that quickly, but it takes time. So it takes money. It does take money. You are going to have to invest some money. You are going to have to invest your time in order to make money. You are going to have to market the book. I know that a lot of us writers don’t like hearing that. You are going to have to become a marketer. You are going to have to learn. You’re going to have to learn business tactics. You’re going to have to learn how people make money. You’re going to have to learn to accept the fact that making money is not a bad thing. I know all of us artists want to just get our art out there. The way that the world works is they give you money in exchange for your book and you deserve it. And if you need to work on that mindset, I highly encourage you to work on that mindset. Tom Hanks does not do his movies for free. None of those actors out there. Taylor Swift does not sing concerts for free. People are paying hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to see her. She does not do it for free. Harry styles, you cannot name one person who is doing it for free, and you don’t have to do it for free either. But you have to learn how to market it, and you have to learn how to make the money. And it definitely takes perseverance. You can make money, but it’s going to take perseverance. And it’s going to, after you learn all of this. It’s going to take perseverance to keep up with it, to keep going, to remind yourself that it’s okay. And yeah, learning takes time. You just have to keep going. I have to say, ever since I… let’s see, 2017 I hit publish. So it’s been about six years since I have been published. And I was in it before that, learning how to do author newsletters. So it feels like a lot of years. I always say, 2015, I started really being serious about writing and starting my author newsletter and creating it as a business. And that’s when I decided I was going to go indie. So it’s taken me a while. I had little kids, we moved around a lot. It’s taken some perseverance, but it’s okay. I feel like you have two choices. You can quit or you can keep going. So that’s it.

Kat

Number 5, find a cohort of writers, find people who write, whether it’s online or in person. Emma Dhesi and I finally got to meet in-person, but we’ve known each other online since 2019. And we just click. There are people that you just click with. Stacy Juba is another one. We just just click. We have the same goals. We’re not the same person, right? But when you just understand people and you just click with them and it’s easy to talk to them, you need to find people who are writers that you can talk to because you’re going to need feedback. You’re going to need feedback on your writing, on your marketing, on your social media. You need to bounce ideas off of people, and writers are going to have a different idea on your ideas than non-writers. So they’re going to have a different take on it. They’re going to, as Emma Dhesi told me a couple of times during the conference, no Kat, that’s a shiny penny because she knows me enough where my eyes get real big. I think we were a little bit listening to a talk on translations and she was like, no Kat, that’s a shiny penny. First, you need to finish your books. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You also need them to encourage you. You need encouragement. You need to see people like Rachel McLean and Britt Andrews. You need to see that it’s possible. You need to be around people like that to just receive encouragement and say, You know what? They’re doing it. I can do it, too. They can also encourage you. Most writers are great people. They understand where other writers are and they understand what it feels like to be in that spot. Most writers are really great people and they’re willing to encourage you. Find the those people. You need a cohort. You need other writers.

Kat

Number 4 is yes, you need to edit. This question was asked of Britt Andrews. This question was asked of somebody else, I can’t remember who, and every single person was, yes, you do. You need to edit. You need to proofread. You need to edit. You need to have beta reads. And I think it was Britt Andrews that said it the best. She said, you know what? Your readers deserve a close to perfect product. They are giving you money, they deserve a quality product. So you need to make sure that it is as good a product as you can get it. And that goes back to the investment, right? You are treating this as a business and it’s going to take some investment. It’s going to take some money to invest. It’s going to take some time to invest. Of course, the more you learn about your craft, the less editing you’ll need. So it feeds back into you. But yes, you do need to edit. Yes, you do need to proofread. And I’ll just tell you, as I’m going through the beta reading process for Bended Loyalty, yes, I got it edited. Yes, I fixed the edits. Then I ran it through ProWritingAid, okay? And still, there are typos that we are finding that my awesome beta readers are finding. So yes, you need to edit. Yes, you need to proofread. I know that that’s hard for a lot of us, and a lot of people are going through hard times. But again, going back to number 5, if you find a cohort of writers, they can help you. You guys can exchange out services. You can proofread for each other. You can take books about grammar. You can learn grammar. You can figure out where your comma should go. But, yeah, you can exchange services for each other. You can beta read for each other. You can developmental edit for each other. As long as you guys are learning story structure alongside of each other, you should be able to help each other out. And then you sell that book and you write the next one. And of course, it’s going to be better. And then you make a little bit more money. And then maybe then you find a professional editor and you learn something else and you make an even better book the next time around.

Kat

Number 3, take care of your newsletter subscribers and your fans. Even Rachel McLean, she’s a crime mystery writer. She was talking about getting on Tamela Brooks courses and learning, taking her newsletters up another level. And that just reminded me that even somebody who is doing really well, she’s making six figures, if not seven figures, she knows that there’s more she can do for her fans and for her newsletter subscribers. So don’t forget about them. And especially as an indie author, you need to curate this list and treat them well. Treat them like people who have just exchanged money for your book because they have. Give them fun things, give them maybe personal lives, maybe record videos for them, maybe write short stories for them, but really treat them well because they are going to be your fans. And the greatest thing about being an indie author is that you have really close access to your fans if you want. And the more access you give your fans to you, the more fan-like they’ll be. Does that make sense? They just readers love that. They love being close to you. If they love your work, they want to hear from you. They want to know more about you. So really take care of them.

Kat

Now, this goes into number 2, find the correct readers. Do not go out there and just grab every reader out there. I’m a very eclectic reader, and yet I don’t read horror and I don’t read paranormal romance. At least for now, it doesn’t interest me. You don’t want me on your list because I’m going to take up space from somebody who loves that. Find the right readers. David Gochran has a great book about this, and I’m pretty sure it’s free, if not maybe a couple of dollars. You want not just anyone on your list. When you’re swapping your newsletter and you’re entering promotions, you want to make sure your book is in the right genre, that it’s finding the right readers, and you want to find the readers who love what you’re writing, and you want to really curate that list. You are going to spend too much money on the email servers if you have 10,000 readers that maybe half of them read what you write. Numbers mean nothing if they don’t read your work, if they are not going to buy the next book. So really take your time to understand where to find those readers and how. Talk to other authors in your genre, go to workshops in your genre, attend conferences in your genre, find other people to swap with, the writers. Find the promotions that are for your genre, find the correct readers.

Kat

Number 1, this will surprise nobody, write. Write, write, and write some more. Now, some of us have more time than others. So I will say, if time is an issue, which I feel like it is for everyone, learn another way to write faster. And I’m not saying that you have to write super fast. You don’t have to put five books out a year. Certainly, I am not encouraging you to burn out. That’s not good at all. But one thing, and this is me putting a mirror up to myself, focus on your writing, really try to focus on the story that you want to write and write it and get it out into the world and then write another one. One really great idea was to write short stories around the book that you have, whether you have a standalone or you have a series. There’s probably more that you could say about the world that you just built. So once you’re done with your book, I would encourage you to write a short story and your readers will love it. In fact, it’ll be a great data point for you to put at the back of the book, see who finished it, and then who clicks and puts their email in there to download that free short story with whatever character, side character that you decide to write it with. But overall, you need to write. Now, Britt Andrews found some success with her first book, but she probably would not have sustained that success had she not written more books. Because her fans were rabid. They wanted more. They loved her characters. They still love her characters. They want more of them. So if she had just said, well, that was just a standalone, and I don’t really want to write anymore, she would have had a really great year financially, but it probably would have eventually gone off. So if we’re going to treat this like a business, just like any other business, you need another product at some point. I’m not going to say that you need X amount of books a year. That is up to you to decide. I’m trying to go faster. I’m trying to learn dictation. I’m trying to learn different things in order to use my time more wisely so that I can get more books out. I made a conscious decision to bring the duology out at the same time. So that’s taking a little bit longer. Yes, I’m much slower than I want to be. So this is me talking to myself here. But in the end, what you have to do is write.

Kat

I know that we all want to get to the five, six, seven figures next year. And of course, it’s going to be possible for some of you to do that. But you can also look at it long term. A business takes time, it takes investment, and pretty soon it will start earning money. Most businesses don’t earn a ton of money the first few years. They really have to keep going in order to really make a net income. You have to write. This will help you learn your craft, which is the very first one I talked about, number 10. It will help you grow. It will help feed your fans, your newsletter subscribers. Writing, writing, writing is what is going to get you to where you want to be.

Kat

There were a couple of other things that I learned. I’m going to be making shorter videos and they will be on Instagram or TikTok. I know. I’m going to TikTok, you all. If you’re on Instagram, follow me @KatCaldwell.Author. On TikTok, it’s KatCaldwell. I’ll probably put you put these links in the show notes.

Kat

I highly encourage you to attend a conference if you can. I know not everyone likes flying to London. I got a really cheap ticket, went over there. I paid for it with my back, but that’s okay. If you can get a digital ticket, I would highly encourage you to do it. It was a really great conference. There are other great conferences as well all throughout the year. I know for marketing wise, Book Brush is doing a conference in August, which is all digital. So you might check that one out as well. But I just want to encourage you guys, it was great to see that indie publishing is not dead, that people are making money, that you just need to persevere. You need to look at this as a business, that you are a brand and you just need to keep writing.

Kat

If you guys have any questions or you need encouragement or you just want to know something about me, you can find me on Instagram, @KatCaldwell.Author on TikTok, on Facebook. You can find me at KatCaldwell.com. You can join my newsletters there. There’s lots of links in the show notes. I would be glad to encourage you guys in this endeavor that we’re all on, this journey that we’re taking together. Our roads are going parallel and maybe crossing at some point, but it is a great time to be an indie author. It really, truly is.

The post Ep 189 10 Things I Learned at SPS LIVE first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.

Jeff Elkins, aka The Dialogue Doctor, has finally written a book! Over the last two years, Jeff has done more than 200 editing sessions with writers. This book is a collection of the tools he built together to solve problems around writing dialogue. Reading it will help you write dialogue and create characters that connects with readers. Want to find out more? Listen in or find the book here. Find more about Jeff at https://dialoguedoctor.com/.

Sign up for my writer’s newsletter here:https://katcaldwell.com/writers-newsletter

Sign up for my reader’s newsletter here: https://katcaldwell.com/readers

Find me at https://katcaldwell.com or on Instagram as @katcaldwell.author or @pencilsandlipstick

TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:

Kat

Welcome back, everyone, to Pencils & Lipstick. I am very excited to have my friend Jeff Elkins with me today. He has written a new book called The Dialogue Doctor Will See You Now. I love this. I love how we were talking about it. You’re like, I’m so serious. Obviously, you’re so serious that you called your book The Dialogue Doctor Will See You Now.

Jeff

I had so many long titles that were like, how to write dialogue and characters that will engage readers and improve your writing. I was like, these are just dumb and boring. And so I asked my wife, I was like, what should I name this? I love it. You should call it something about the Dialogue Doctor. I was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. She’s like, you have this brand. You’ve built this podcast. You should use it in the title of the book. I was like, oh, yeah, that works.

Kat

Yeah, so that people know who I am.

Jeff

Yeah, so that people, when they go to buy it, they’re not like, who’s Jeff Elkins? Oh, yeah. The Dialogue Doctor. Okay, I know that.

Kat

Yeah. Does anyone know your name? So if nobody knows you, obviously your name is Jeff Elkins, but actually your name is the Dialogue Doctor, right?

Jeff

The name is the Dialogue Doctor. Yeah, no, I’m Jeff. Thanks for having me on, by the way. I appreciate it.

Kat

Of course. So we wanted to talk about this book, but before we get into it, who are you? So that how did you become a dialogue doctor?

Jeff

Who am I? Isn’t this the existential question we all struggle with forever?nWho am I?

Kat

Let’s go through a deeper question of life.

Jeff

That’s right. I know an old poem from my theology days. I know an old poem by Dietrich Bonhoeffer that is very sad and serious. He wrote it from a Nazi internment camp called. I will not quote that right now.

Kat

Let’s keep things lighter, Jeff.

Jeff

Keep things lighter. Okay. All right. We got to be here positive. I am the author of 12 novels and I started coaching writers in 2020. And since then, I’ve done over 200 one-on-one sessions with writers, coaching sessions with writers, which is a badge of honor I am proud of.

Kat

That’s awesome.

Jeff

I podcast and coach as the Dialogue Doctor. Trying to think of what else you need to know about me. I don’t know. We talk a lot about dialogue.

Kat

You do workshops. I’ve had you doing workshops for me.

Jeff

I do masterclasses. I have a masterclass coming up in August that’s going to be fun. It’s four and a half hours on the Enneagram. We’re going to do the first half hour. I’m going to introduce everybody how to talk about how to use the Enneagram to create unique character personality and voices. And then we’re going to spend the next three and a half hours talking about how to use those voices to develop a cast and to build a character growth arc in your book. That’s going to be fun. That’s the crap that I do at the Dialogue Doctor. We go deep into dialogue, characterization, character growth, all that stuff.

Kat

Yeah, which is important. I was telling you before, I just came back from the self publishing show in London, and there’s a lot of fantasy writers, whether it’s fantasy romance, fantasy, fantasy, sci-fi, but they have huge cast of characters. And all of them said at some point, the importance of having each character sound different was key it’s huge.

Jeff

Yeah. And lining up cast personalities is super important. When we look at master works and master writers, even master screenwriters, because I find that it’s easier sometimes to talk movies because people, they have more familiarity with the same movie. So if you think about master big cast screenwriters like James Gunn, who put together the Guardians of the Galaxy or put together the Suicide Squad. He is a master of these 6 to 7-person cast. It’s not just about having different voices, it’s about understanding how those voices combine and what they do in a scene together. So if you take two shy characters and put them in a scene together, you’re going to have a very reflective and quiet scene. If you take a commanding character with a shy character, you’re going to have a scene where the power and balance feels weird. If you take a… well, since we’re talking fantasy because these are super popular in fantasy. You take a lone wolf, snarky character. That’s the fantasy sci-fi bread and butter. She’s got a big ax and she’s super capable, but she goes it alone and she makes 80s references and jokes. So you take that like, snarky lone wolf character, if you put them with a shy character, the scene is going to feel weird because the shy character is going to disappear behind the bigger personality. So you have to know, okay, if I got this snarky lone wolf, then I probably need someone who’s sarcastic but craves community. And then I probably also need somebody who’s a little dense and can’t quite catch what’s being said. Maybe has a big ego. Well, so now you’ve put Rocket, Drax, and Star-Lord together in a scene.

Kat

You got to love Drax and Star-Lord.

Jeff

And that’s funny. When you put those three characters together because you’ve balanced the personalities, you’ve understood how to combine the characters, you get comedy. That’s why all of the comedies we watch nowadays are, since really, Seinfeld and Friends are these big casts because they know, hey, this making funny is much easier if I just throw the right personality combinations in the room.

Kat

Right. Oh, that makes sense.

Jeff

And after you’ve written a cast for a while, you can get half a book done. And if you have strong personalities and you understand how their character voices sound and work, you’ll start to get like, a lot of authors I coach will be like, okay, I need a dramatic scene here. So I need characters A, B and C in this scene, and I need to get D out of there because if D is in the scene, it screws it up, because their voice doesn’t fit in the drama. But yeah, I think the best if you really want to look at this, I think the best ones to look at right now are the superhero movies that come out because they have such big cast. So Marvel is great at it, too, especially in their Avengers movies. They know what characters to put in it and what scenes to make scenes draw emotion. When Iron Man is dying, you have 20 choices to come and kneel down next to him. The right choice is, you have to put his wife next to him, but she’s not the right choice, because she’s stoic and strong. She’s just going to hold his hand while he dies. That’s not moving. You get the innocent, naive kid who has a has verbal diarrhea, and you put that character next to him. And now the entire movie theater is crying. And that’s what understanding cast and personality does, which I actually go into a little bit in the book. I touch in it some of the book is we talk about engine anchors and vehicle characters and hazards and starting to understand how characters connect to each other as you’re developing a plot line and as your character develops character growth. So vehicle characters are the characters that you’re following through the book. They’re the characters that your reader is emotionally connected to, most typically the point of view characters, because they’re the ones whose story we’re following. You’re going to have next to them engine characters, engine characters are characters that encourage positive growth in your vehicle character. So they make your character go. That’s why we call them engine characters. Or anchor characters are characters that weigh your vehicle character down and make them want to be the worst version of themselves. And so they’re anchor characters. So if you think of like talking romance, if you think of Bridgette Jones’s diary, in the movie, she’s got two options. She’s got Colin Firth or Hugh Grant. And Hugh Grant is an anchor character. Whenever he’s around, he encourages her to be the worst version of herself. He’s always lighting up her cigarettes. He’s always telling her not to speak her mind. He’s always questioning what she wears and makes her feel self-conscious. Even though he’s the fun boyfriend, he’s the boyfriend that makes her revert to her self-conscious nature that she’s trying to get over. Whereas Colin Firth is the engine character. Now, she doesn’t get along with Colin Firth like she does with Hugh Grant. Colin Firth isn’t as exciting and fun as Hugh Grant is. In fact, most of the time when she’s around Colin Firth, they’re fighting. But when she’s with him, she speaks her mind. She says exactly what she means to say. She has the confidence she always wants to have, and she’s never smoking around him. So it’s this engine and anchor of these two characters. If you want a scene where Bridgette is empowered to be her best self, put her with Colin Firth. I think his name is Darcy because we just keep writing Jane Austen over and over again. Put her with Colin Firth. If you want a scene where she is going to be self-conscious and going to fail. Put her with Hugh Grant. And that’s understanding those character relationships so that you can navigate through your plot.

Kat

So do you think one of the biggest mistakes we make as writers is not really understanding the need for that? I don’t know if you hear it all the time, but the artistic idea, side of us, thinks that there shouldn’t be a mathematical side almost.

Jeff

That’s interesting. I don’t think of these as necessarily art versus math. I think of these as tools.

Kat

Which is we should. I just wonder how many… It’s like the newbie writer thinking, I’m just going to write whatever I want. But a lot of times the characters we want to write, I don’t know if you see it, I see a lot of characters from the beginning being who they should be at the end. And I always have to tell my writers, no, okay, they have to be weak at the beginning and they have to grow at the end. Or I guess if your anchor character, he needs to always be an a-hole.

Jeff

Well, not always. Sometimes your anchor character can be the nice guy. That’s why we use engine and anchor instead of ally or protagonist or antagonist or villain. Because for example, in the Batman movies or in the Batman saga, even in the books and comic books, his anchor is typically someone he’s trying to save.

Kat

Oh interesting.

Jeff

Okay. Because they want him. His engines are always his villains. His villains make him the best version of himself. His anchors are usually the people that are like, well, so like the Heath Ledger Batman movie, which I think everybody saw. His anchor is Harvey Dent, the prosecutor, who’s encouraging him to move into tactics and do things that you don’t want him as the viewer doing. Right. So a lot of times, especially in young coming adult novels. Well, so I just read, as the Dialogue Doctor community, we just read the Hate U Give by Angie Thomas as our book club book. We do a twice a month call and we’re always reading short stories and books, and that was the one for this month. But in her book, the anchor characters are Star is the lead character and the anchor characters are Star’s two friends from school. And they’re not villains, right? There are villains in the book. There is a gang lord that’s causing all kinds of problems. There’s police that are causing all kinds of problems. When you’re thinking about the plot, those are the antagonists. Her friends are actually the anchors. When she’s around these friends, she’s the worst version of herself.

Kat

Okay, that’s an interesting. So you’re talking like, this maybe crosses over into plot sometimes, but not always.

Jeff

Not always. Ideally, all of these things align. Ideally, your plot aligns with your character growth and your genre conventions and your theme. And so I think going back to the tool analogy, and going back to new writers, do new writers need to know all of this at once? No. Does a writer need to know this at all? No. There’s natural writers who just this stuff just comes out of them. They sit down, they write a book and you’re like, oh, my gosh, the themes are amazing. The character growth is astounding. The plot is expected, yet surprising. And somehow you hit all of the genre conventions. Go write another one. Great job. But for the rest of us, we’re going to be strong in a couple of areas, and then we’re not going to understand our tools and others. I think about my kid who’s 20 now, who’s a really fantastic artist. He helped me do the cover for the book, actually. But when he was first learning to do art beyond just doodling in the sketchbook, he was really big into pencil. He really liked pencil drawings because it was what he was comfortable with. But then he wanted to do something that would require more, so he moved to charcoal. And it was like, oh, this is a new tool I have to learn. This is a new thing I have to learn to play with. And then he wanted to do something with color and more dynamic, so he started moving into painting. And he tried to play with the watercolors and he hates them. He’s like, I don’t have enough control over these. So he moved into oil painting. But as he progresses, what I watched was him finding the tool and learning the tool. Were his pencil drawings better than his paint or vice versa? I don’t know. They’re just different. He’s learned a new tool and it gives new texture to his work. And it’s the same as us as authors, as we go, I hope we’re constantly learning new tools. And so usually plot and genre conventions are the first two you learn. And I think that you asked, what mistakes a lot of authors make. I think the mistake I see authors making a lot are like, okay, as long as I hit the genre conventions, I’m going to have a good book. That’s not necessarily true. You can hit the genre guess good is a term that we need to define. If you hit the genre conventions, you advertise it well, you have a great cover, you will sell that book. Is that book a good book? Is anybody going to pass it to their friends? Is anybody going to be like… No. Not necessarily. Are you just going to sell? Are you going to write something that gets passed around and people cherish and love? Neither of those goals are better or worse than the other. You just have to decide what you’re doing. So that being said, picking up and putting down new tools, you might capture the genre tool. Sorry, that’s where I was going. A lot of authors I find are like, okay, if I understand, I can Google the genre conventions as long as I have these scenes in my book is going to be great. And it’s like, not necessarily.

Kat

I’ve thrown a couple of those books out.

Jeff

Yeah. Now, your book might… and again, your book might sell because we need to distinguish. Great is really about what your expectation of the book is. But these authors come in with like, my book is going to be great. I’m going to be the next Jane Austen. My book is going to stand the test of time. Everybody’s going to read this for the next 50 years and it’s going to be amazing. And then they get a bump of sales, they get a nice quick buck and then the book disappears. They’re like, well, why didn’t that get passed around? Why didn’t that stay? Why didn’t that have this last? Why wasn’t this the next to Kill the Mocking Bird? Well, you got to use some more tools besides just genre conventions. So part of what the book is and what I do at the Dialogue Doctor isn’t necessarily teaching people craft. We look at problems and we solve them. And the way we solve them is by trying to understand what tools do we need to solve this problem? With genre conventions, part of the thing that we started… this isn’t in the book, but part of the thing we started talking about is, what are genre conventions? Well, if the story is an emotional journey that readers are going on, because that’s what story is. Story is an emotional journey. Whether it’s an audio story or a visual story like a movie or TV series or an imaginative story like a book, which I call a book an imaginative story because Robert McKee says in his book Dialogue that the book is the only one of the few vehicles left that puts you in direct connection with the consumer of the story. Whereas when you’re making a movie or when you’re making a radio program, you’ve got producers and you’ve got directors and you’ve got actors. You’ve got all these people in between you and the consumer of the story. It’s more a team effort. Writing a book, depending on how involved your editor is, writing a book really does put you in direct connection with the reader’s imagination.

Kat

Right. You only have the ink and the paper.

Jeff

The ink and the paper and the personality. All that to say, like genre conventions, if the book is an emotional journey that connects directly to the reader’s imaginations, genre conventions be the emotional expectations that reader expects when they’re coming to the book. Romance readers have certain emotional expectations when they’re coming to the book. They’re like, these scenes need to make me feel this way. Now that you know that, you have the freedom to meet them or surprise the reader by playing with them. Because if you know how the reader wants to feel when they’re reading your book, you now have the ability to manipulate the reader a little bit.

Kat

Yeah, that’s an interesting way to… Writing is so much more complicated than we sometimes think it is. But you’re making me think of a book and it was a romance book, I guess. I guess that was the genre it would go into. But I knew that the writer was trying to make us feel sad but hopeful, like, she was the main character is trying to get over the death of her husband. But I think what was missing in that book is a difference in voice in the characters. And there was no like, you’re cheering for people, but it was more a reliance on the plot rather than what you’re saying where like, I was telling people, this just isn’t believable. But I think it’s more the terms you’re using, what she needed was an anchor. She needed to have somebody pulling her back into the I’m alone, my one chance at love has died. And then more of an engine, maybe that would have made… Because it just felt like this hovering.

Jeff

It was just spiraling. It was just circling around.

Kat

Is this worth my time?

Jeff

Part two of what I talk about in the book and what we talk about in the community is that a scene… This is actually, I’m going to retract my previous statement. If you’re going to ask me what writers get wrong most often, it is they think a scene is a plot point. A scene is not a plot point. A scene is a group of characters interacting. Now, if they interact and something happens, then something that happens is the plot point. But you have to start with the characters interacting. And oftentimes when a book feels like it’s spiraling, it’s because the author is trying to get things to happen but doesn’t understand that those things only happen when characters interact. So you get chapters where there’s a lot of sitting and one person reflecting on something or long memories of like, oh, this… And as the reader, you’re just like, okay, what is happening here? Why do I need to keep… can I skip this?

Kat

You feel like they’re talking a lot, but they’re not.

Jeff

They’re not. They’re just reflecting. And it’s like, okay, have the characters interact around a conflict. Ideally, that conflict is going to accomplish something in the story. And what the plot actually is, so likewise, we’re redefining tools. When we talk about plot, what we’re talking about is things that happen on the journey of the character’s growth. But a lot of times what we do is we’re like, okay, I understand genre conventions, and there’s a lot of books about plot, so I’m going to hit my genre conventions, and I’m going to follow the hero’s journey, and I’m just going to hope that the character grows.

Kat

Yeah. You’re relying on your imagination at that point of like, I’m going to hope that I know what I’m doing.

Jeff

Yeah, it’s like cooking. We’re like, okay, I’ve got potatoes here and I’ve got flour and I have a frying pan. So I’m just going to put them all in there and hope that whatever happens is edible. And it’s like, well, probably potatoes are great. And if you put them in oil, something will happen.

Kat

It’ll be fine. It might be edible. It might be horrible.

Jeff

It might be amazing. It might be terrible. But so we can get more strategic about our success.

Kat

And can you replicate it?

Jeff

Yeah, and we can understand our tools. So that’s what my personal mission as the Dialogue Doctor is like, hey, let me create tools that can help you solve the problems you want to solve so you can tell the story you want to tell.

Kat

Okay. And to anyone writing, let’s just… I went back and relistened to the Harry Potter. Everyone gets better as you go. You’ve said, do we have to know this all at once? It’s hard to know all of this at once.

Jeff

You can’t know it all. You have to get so good at a tool that using it is not even thinking.

Kat

Yeah, it’s like just reflex, right? So who do you help? Do you help people from the beginning? Do you mostly help people in the middle, in the end? I would.

Jeff

Say the Dialogue Doctor community is actually all and above. What we do is coaching. And I say we because there’s three of us now that do coaching. But what we do with coaching is we assess where you are and we’re like, what do you want to learn? What do you want to work on? We read your work and we’re like, Okay, let’s work on this. And a lot of times people are like, usually the starting places, character voices. People tell me all my characters sound the same. I’m like, okay, well, that’s something we can work on. And this Enneagram class, the masterclass we’re going to do, is going to help a lot with that because we’re going to talk about what does it mean to have different sounding character voices? And so we use a tool we call the dialogue daisy that helps you understand character voice. And that’s in the book, too. And then we use a character voice chart that helps you just think about your character voices differently. And then I would say once you start getting character voices, the next stage in that is like, okay, how do these characters interact? And specifically, how do voices modulate to express emotion or change? Once you’ve got a character voice down, again, once you master a tool, you can start playing with it to do fun things with it. Once you understand that Spiderman in his normal scenes is plucky and anxious and uses jokes to situate himself in a world where he feels like he doesn’t belong. So once you have the voice of like, I’m telling one-liners and I am occasionally panicking in my voice. My phrases are pretty short, sentences are pretty light, and I don’t talk about myself very much. Once we have Spiderman’s voice down, when we need him to destroy the consumer of the story as Iron Man dies in front of him, now you know how to modulate his voice. Jokes go away. You keep those sentences short, but he can’t quite finish them. He’s still not going to talk about himself. He’s going to talk about what’s happening. But he’s going to panic. And you’re going to rev that anxiety up a thousandfold. And now, because the reader knows what he normally sounds like, or because the viewer knows what he normally sounds like, the viewer goes on this emotional journey with him because we’ve modulated his voice to this big extreme. So the viewer feels that modulation. And that’s what happens in our books, too. I was talking about the Hate U Give with Angie Thomas. Her character Star, the theme of the book is how do you interact in these worlds? Because her character Star stands in two worlds. I would say the theme is how do you bring justice into these two worlds? What’s the appropriate way to do that? And what should your voice be? And Star is constantly in both worlds in the world of the private, suburban, wealthy high school she attends and the inner city, lower socioeconomic class neighborhood she lives in. It’s like she has two voices. She modulates her voice for each world. And she’s trying to figure out how her voice sound. And as the book goes on, she starts confusing the two worlds, and she uses a voice in one world that actually belongs to the other. And by doing, by confusing the modulation of her voice, as the reader, we really start to feel the trouble that she’s going through. What’s funny is that Angie Thomas will actually comment on it. She’ll be like, oh, crap. That was my other. That was the voice that was supposed to be in my home community or like, oh, crap. I’m talking like I should at school. So her character, the reason I’m using this example is because her character openly struggles with it. She talks about like, oh, my gosh. My voice is modulated in the wrong way. She doesn’t use the word modulation. But then at the end, the big climactic scene, she takes to the roof of a car with a bullhorn and finally discovers her voice. And it’s a voice of strength and confidence and honesty. And it’s this first authentic expression where she’s not worrying about what she’s going to say. She allows herself just to be in the moment and to experience all of the emotions she’s felt through the whole book. So it’s that voice modulation. Once you understand character voice, then you can start playing with the modulation. And once you get the modulation down, now you’ve got two really powerful tools to take your reader on a journey.

Kat

Right. And that climax probably wouldn’t be the same if she hadn’t started messing up.

Jeff

If Angie Thomas didn’t understand when she was writing the book that this is about Star fight… I’ve never talked to Angie Thomas, but I actually asked if I could talk and she was like, they’re like, she’s not doing interviews right now. Well, put me on her list. But she didn’t understand that Star’s voice had to modulate. And part of what Star’s struggle was going to be was finding her voice. And that final scene isn’t as powerful. But because the theme has aligned with the character growth and the character growth, and the plot points have worked out beautifully to take us to this moment, the points along the road have worked out to take us this big emotional climax, when the voice modulates, all of the tools work together. And you’re like, oh, this is a powerful moment. But again, the key is not that you have to master every tool, but let’s master some. And so that as you master them, you can use them in a powerful way. And again, can you write a powerful story without thinking about any of this? Absolutely.

Kat

But I feel like the more you write, almost, the more the expectation of the reader. I always tell people the more that you can do on purpose, the easier for you.

Jeff

Yeah. We become one-trick ponies. If we’re not constantly improving how we do things, if we’re not studying our tools, if we’re not understanding, okay, I need to pick up a new tool. I need to play with this tool a little bit. We become like, Yeah, this is what I do. This is the thing that I do. And there’s a lot of authors that have had great careers around.

Kat

And it really, like you said before, at some point, it’s like, what do you want to do? I mean, I’ve had people who are not writers comment to me like, how can people read fantasy over and over or romance over and over? And really, the way that you can do it because there’s a lot of well written books is because they take the tools and they take the genre, the expectations and they twist them and they know how to use it.

Jeff

And they know how to play with them and they know how to make them expected and surprising, which is the goal.

Kat

Which is what we love. That’s what humans love about story.

Jeff

We love it. We’re like, oh, I thought it was going to go this way.

Kat

Why are there four John Wicks? I don’t know. We can’t stop.

Jeff

There’s an emotional journey there that we absolutely love. I was talking to my boys last night because they wanted to watch a movie. I have three teenage boys in the house right now. They wanted to watch a movie and I was going to bed. And they were trying to decide and I was like, They wanted an action movie. And I was like, well, why don’t you try to watch Extraction? I was like, that’s a new one on Netflix. Well, it’s not new. It’s a couple of years old.

Kat

Yeah, but Extraction 2 is out now.

Jeff

Yeah. So I was like, why don’t you watch Extraction? And they were like, what’s it like? And I was like, huh, it’s like John Wick, but it’s grittier. And they’re like, oh, but it’s that I’ve taken a specific genre and I’ve turned it a little bit and given you a new perception of it. And that’s what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to be like, okay, I know how to write a John Wick, or I know how to write an Extraction. Now I’m going to take it and make it smooth and maybe a little humorist, which is what I would say John Wick does. Or I’m going to take the genre and I’m going to make it gritty, which is what Extraction does. And it’s that, again, understanding the tools of what we’re using. Part of the reason I keep caveating, and I should say this, there’s no right way to do this, is because I don’t want anybody to feel judged.

Kat

We always feel judged.

Jeff

This is hard enough. The last thing you need is some dude who’s like, I’m a doctor, but I don’t have a PhD, walking around making you feel like you have to pick up all these tools. That’s the worst. So I don’t want anybody to feel like this is stuff you have to have. You can tell great stories just from your gut. You have them in you.

Kat

Well, I bet if you think about it, because I’m thinking now, as my mind thinks of a million things. Yeah, I know exactly who my anchor guy is in the novel I’m working on. I know exactly who my engine character is. Oh, but now that I know that and they have a specific name, I can go, okay, now I know exactly how he should act and she should act.

Jeff

Now that you know it, and you look at a scene that’s not working, you’re like, this scene, there’s something in my gut that tells me this scene isn’t working.

Kat

Yeah, the gut ones are the worst because you’re like, What do I do?

Jeff

Once you know your tools, you’re like, oh, I’m using the wrong tool here. I’m using the wrong tool in this place. I need to use a different tool. Or something in my gut, I want this scene to be funny. Something in my gut says this isn’t funny. Well, you’ve put the wrong characters in that scene.

Jeff

You need Drax.

Jeff

You need Drax. You need Drax to make it fun. Star-Lord and Rocket just hack each other off. We really need Nebula standing there to be for this scene to be funny. You got to have that third ingredient. And it is like cooking. It’s like, oh, this is too acidic. What is wrong? Well, you got to add something that has more of a base to it to smooth out the flavor. But if you don’t know that that’s how flavor palettes work, then you’re just like, I don’t know, add more salt.

Kat

Just keep adding it, it’s fine or more oil.

Jeff

Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. But it is about empowering, understanding our tools is about empowering you.

Kat

Yeah, I think so.

Jeff

To be able to connect to the reader in how you want to do it, right?

Kat

Yeah. I think the more that you do things on purpose, the less you will take it personally if somebody doesn’t like it, I think. It’s like, Well, I was trying to do this, so the fact that you don’t like it’s fine. But actually, I was exactly trying to do that, so I’m pleased with it. I just think that writers are empowered, like you say, when they know these things, they do it on purpose. We might do it better or worse than other people, but at least it’s not like… I mean, we can go on that downward spiral after 10 reviews come in and they all say something different and we’re like, now what do I do?

Jeff

I think part of what I’ve loved most about coming to understand my tools as a writer is that it really enhances my reading. I was reading a John Grisham book today. He’s got a new book of short stories out. And he did this thing in the middle of one of the short stories where he transferred the POV from one character to another over a phone call.

Kat

That’s tricky.

Jeff

And I was like, damn, way to go! I think once we understand our tools and we understand our point of view. I caught it because I’ve been really focusing on point of view lately because it’s a problem we’re having in the Dialogue Doctor community. A lot of writers are like, can we talk about point of view? So I’ve been thinking about point of view lately and focusing on point of view lately and when you switch and how you switch and how those switches work and how you bring the reader along to those switches if you’re going to. So I don’t think if I hadn’t been really trying to understand that tool that I would have noticed what he did. It would have seemed just like something that happened in the story. But understanding tools helps us really appreciate what other people are doing in their world. Yeah, that’s really cool. I saw it this morning. My kids were at a swim meet, and the worst part about swim meets is that they swim and then there’s 20 minutes of just waiting for their to just leave. So I was sitting in the chair reading the book, and it happened.

Jeff

I was like, oh, look at that. Look at what he did right there.

Kat

It’s what you want to tell everyone.

Jeff

They’re like, great. I was looking around. I actually put it on the Dialogue Doctor Slack. I was like, I hate this thing because they’ll appreciate it. But I think for me, coming to understand tools is a celebration of life. It’s a joy of like, let’s look at what we can do and what’s possible and this stuff. I think it does remind me, too, of good chefs. Like you were saying, I’ve known some great chefs and they’ve made things for me. And I was like, oh, I don’t like it. It’s bitter. And I’m like, Well, it’s supposed to be bitter.

Kat

Yeah, exactly.

Jeff

And then they’re feeling sorry. They’re like, oh, yeah, that’s what I wanted it to be. I was like, oh, mission accomplished. I don’t like bitter things. I won’t tell you that again. It’s not like… But they knew what they were doing and how to create it. And as I’ve cooked more, I’ve come to appreciate, oh, what they were doing to create that bitter thing was actually really hard. And I can’t do it. You start to understand why we call masterworks masterworks, why they stick around for… I was teasing about Jane Austen, but what Jane Austin does in Pride and Prejudice is really hard. What she did in that book is amazing. And you’re just like, oh, and she has her anchor and engine characters. And she has in a time where books weren’t necessarily dialogue centric, but were very heavy in the description, she has a book that’s like, massively full of character interaction. And it’s so impressive. It’s like, yeah, this is what you know. And you’re thinking about like, filling a book with character interaction like that before visual media was a big deal is shockingly impressive. It’s like, this is something that she… And that’s why that book stood the test of time because she understood tools in a deep way. And as we come to understand them, we read her work and it’s like, oh, it’s not just that this has a good plot. It’s that there’s really great craftsmanship happening in this piece of art that she made.

Kat

Right. So you mentioned that she has a lot of dialogue. And you are the Dialogue Doctor. I’ve heard you talk before why dialogue is important in your books. There’s a couple reasons. Was it you that says the majority of the chart topping books has 80% of what, I don’t want to mess it up?

Jeff

Yeah. So back in 2020…

Kat

They’re heavy on dialogue, right?

Jeff

They are. Back in 2020, right before I started the Dialogue Doctor, I had all these assumptions and I was like, I need to test them. I need to look at them. So I started taking just what people think of as masterworks and not like, oh, these are high literary fiction. Not like, oh, I’m going to go find James Joyce. But American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

Kat

We all have him on the shelf, but we’ve never actually finished his stuff.

Jeff

Let’s just say it. American Gods by Neil Gaiman or The Road by Cormac McCarthy or Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I looked at Hail Mary by Andy Weir. These books that we just celebrated, we’re like, oh, my gosh, this book is above and beyond. And I just took a highlighter. And I was like, every time characters are interacting, which is dialogue, characters interacting is dialogue, I’m going to highlight it. And every time I get exposition, which usually looks like a paragraph, but it’s descriptions or reflective material or a summary of action. I’m going to highlight it in a different color. And without fail, books that we love are 60, 70, 80% dialogue.

Kat

That makes sense, though, right? Because it’s not tiring to see somebody come into an idea or a realization or make a decision through dialogue.

Jeff

That’s what we show up for. We’re showing up for the character interaction. That’s what as readers, we’re coming to imagine characters interacting with one another. And that’s what happens in dialogue. And so we’re coming… a better way to probably say it to help people understand this, we’re coming to experience a moment. That’s what we want.

Kat

Oh, I like that.

Jeff

Yeah. We’re coming to live in a scene. We talk about it, or I talk about it at the Dialogue Doctor as like, there’s a… well, this is a good example. The first time I took my teenagers to New York City, we took the ferry over from New Jersey. And we’re on the ferry and we’re looking… You can take in all of Manhattan. You can see all of these buildings and they look far, they’re far away and it’s awe inspiring. And it’s majestic in some ways. You’re like, wow, look at this giant creation of humanity over the ages. Look at what we’ve done. This is insane. This is wild. All of these buildings, they reach so high, they’re so big, and you’re taking them all in. That’s what exposition does. Good exposition pulls you back, brings you to a moment of reflection, helps you feel outside of the moment, and you take in big things. But when we got into the streets, when the ferry landed and we walked a couple of blocks, and now we’re in the middle of New York City, and there’s smells and there’s sounds and there’s texture to stuff. You can touch the buildings and you can see the people walking around and there’s action.

Kat

Metro, steam, and the…

Jeff

Yeah, all of it. It’s all happening.

Kat

And the dog poo.

Jeff

And we went to Bryant Park and we ate black and white cookies. And we looked at all the people. We people watched, the people interacting and we listened to the birds. We were in the life of the city. There’s an energy there and there’s a passion there that you don’t get when you’re looking at it from the ferry. Being in the city is dialogue. That’s characters interacting. Your reader is showing up to sit in Bryant Park and get the black and white cookie while they’re watching.

Kat

Yeah, they want to be in between your characters. Just like head shopping, right?

Jeff

That’s what they want to be. They want to be in it. They want to feel like they’re in these scenes and like they’re in this moment. But again, these are two tools that we have to come to understand because does that mean exposition is bad? No.

Kat

No, we need it, right? Otherwise, it’s a screenplay.

Jeff

Yeah. That means the majority of your book needs to be dialogue because that’s what your reader is showing up for. And if you have too much exposition, your reader starts to skim. They’re flipping pages. They’re like, When do we get back to the characters interacting with each other? When we get into the character interaction, you can have too much of it. There is an overload of sitting in Bryant Park. You’re like, All right, I’ve already.

Kat

There’s an overload of Drax and Star-Lord.

Jeff

You need to take a step back and you need to take in and you need to reflect on what’s happening and you need to summarize what your character is experiencing. You need these moments. You need to describe the room. It’s things that we have to do to establish, to ground our reader in the moment, which is what exposition does really well. It zooms out and it’s like, hey, this is New York City.

Kat

It’s not Baltimore, it’s not DC.

Jeff

Yeah, this is where we are. This is what it is. Get ready. This is the big Apple. And then we zoom into the streets and we actually experience it. Part of what I talk about in the book is when to use Exposition and when to use dialogue. I talk about like, hey, these are the two different tools. This is what they do. And so understand that when you get to breaks in your dialogue, which I won’t go into detail here, but in the book, I call them segment breaks. But when you get to a segment break, it’s really important to have some paragraphs of exposition to back up and to be like, okay, I got to take a step back and I got to let the reader’s mind slow for a minute. We’ll give the reader a breath from the craziness of Bryant Park. Give them a breath to breathe and take it in. And now we can go back. And it actually enhances understanding that where to put that exposition and how to use that exposition in relationship to your dialogue allows you to craft a more strategic emotional journey.

Kat

Which is what we want, right? Which is what.

Jeff

We want. So when you get to a place where you need to have a big emotional moment, you’re going to find that you’re going to be using more exposition there because you want to slow the reader down. Slow them down. Make them sit in that emotional mess that you just created.

Kat

Yeah, right.

Jeff

If you want an action scene, and this is something that writers get wrong a lot of times. They’re like, okay, I’m going to write an action scene, so I got to write paragraphs and paragraphs of what they’re doing with their arms and legs. No, that makes the reader feel heavy and slow and reflective. They’re not a part of it. Make that action scene feel more like a back and forth. Get their voices in there a little bit. They don’t have to be saying full sentences, but just let them vocalize a little bit. Use that action scene or that sex scene as an exchange between two characters. Make it feel like people are talking to one another physically. And your reader is going to be really into that. It’s that get them in the moment. And they don’t get into the moment. I say don’t, but again, I’m going to caveat with, are there master exposition writers that make us feel present with a paragraph of text? Yes, there are. But the tool that what they’re doing is they’re such a master at this one tool. They’re using it in a way that we wouldn’t use that. So make that action scene, that sex scene, that feel more like dialogue in exchange between two characters. And your reader is going to move into it with the characters.

Kat

Right. And I think you said about your son learning a new tool with art, writers can also… We don’t have to start with a novel with this. You can write a little novella. You can write a short story practicing and honing these tools. Because it’s a scene, a short story is usually one or two scenes, maybe, and just practicing. So in this book, is this a workbook? How do we use this book? Is it more informative?

Jeff

The book is a manual. Hopefully, it doesn’t feel like a manual. Each chapter talks about a different tool. And we start like, hey, this is dialogue and exposition. This is what they’re for. This is how you use both of them. Let me show you some examples. And then at the end of each chapter, there’s a summary, like here’s what I want you to take away from these tools. And then there’s two exercises. There’s a reading exercise and there’s a writing exercise. And then the next chapter is like, here’s this, let’s break down dialogue. Here’s the seven different components of dialogue. Here are the pieces of it. Here’s what each piece does. Here’s why we describe each piece. Once you understand what a segment is, here’s why it’s important you know where segments are and what happens. This is a vocalization. This is what a vocalization is like. This is body language. Body language enhances the emotional texture of a vocalization. So starting to understand, here’s what these different components of dialogue do. And now empowering you to use them strategically. That’s what the book… and it’s short, it’s eight chapters. In the book, I cover… sorry, I struggle with we and I because we do have more coaches at the Dialogue Doctor, so I never want to take credit away from them. But they didn’t write the book. I wrote the book.

Kat

But the Doctor wrote the book.

Jeff

What I go through in the book is we do dialogue and exposition, like what dialogue itself does. Then we go, here are the components of dialogue. Then I go to, once you have the components of dialogue, let’s get down into the different types of scenes. And I’m like, so there’s four different ways to start a scene. We talk about the four different ways to start a scene. Again, knowing your tools, knowing the four ways to start, what each one does to the reader, and what happens when that thing doesn’t land with the reader. And what the danger of using that tool too much is. Here’s the four types of ways to start a scene, and then we go into, here’s the three different types of scene based on the number of cast members in them and how you as the writer need to manage scenes differently when you have different numbers of cast members in the scene, and the power and the weaknesses of each size of cast. And then I go into specific character voice and I’m like, here’s what a character voice is. We go through the dialogue daisy. I explain, here’s the five components of a character voice, and we break each of those down. And then I give you, I think I do eight different character voices and how they sound. Here’s a shy voice, here’s a commanding voice, here’s a bubbly voice, here’s a unhinged voice, here’s a… we just go through, here’s all the different… So you can start to understand, oh, I can compare and contrast these. And then we start putting them together. Here’s a bubbly yet anxious voice. And you start to see how to combine character traits to build the voice you want to have. Then we go into modulation. There’s a chapter on modulation, like how to modulate the voices. And then we do character growth and engines anchors, hazards and vehicles. Here’s this tool too. I try to take you from big conception of dialogue down to, let’s get small down to what’s actually happening on the page, and then do the same with characterization. Here’s the big understanding of what a character voice is, and then let’s get real small in how to use it.

Kat

Nice. I like that. And do we need to read this book before we participate in your workshops?

Jeff

No, not at all.

Kat

Really? Okay.

Jeff

I would actually say the book is… The workshops are like, let’s take one thing from the book and go much deeper in it. Whereas the book is like, hey, let me give you an overview of all the tools we’ve discovered in the Dialogue Doctor. It’s one of those things of like, I really think you’ll appreciate that reading the book is going to… So the Dialogue Doctor community has been going for two years. There are several authors, many authors who have been on this journey with me for all two years. And we’re routinely communicating around what our problems are, what we’re struggling with, craft wise, how we can improve our work, craft wise. I do a weekly podcast and every other week it’s just an editing session I have with an author where I’m like, let’s talk about the tools and how they’re being used and how we can use them differently. So what this book does is fast forward your two years in the journey. Here’s all the language.

Kat

Catch us up.

Jeff

Yeah, here’s all the stuff we’ve learned. Here’s the first two years of what we figured out about dialogue working together.

Kat

Okay, so then we can come into the community and not feel completely lost.

Jeff

Not feel completely lost. Not have to be like, hey, you said the word anchor. What’s an anchor? Which we don’t get all. We get some, but I also tend to overexplain everything as you probably noticed in this interview. So there is that… It’s not that you are going to come into the community and get lost. This is just like a booster shot. Some people don’t want to be a part of the community. That’s what I found. They’re like, hey, look, writing this hard enough and it takes enough time, the last thing I want to do, Jeff, is be on a Slack channel with you. This is also for people who are like, I want this stuff.

Kat

But I want all your info so can you write a book?

Jeff

Yeah, I want to learn this stuff, but I don’t want to listen to two years of podcasts to understand it.

Kat

I have to say, though, your podcasts are pretty good. If people are walking or just like… You have interesting ideas that I haven’t heard other people talk about in bringing in the dialogue. I always use the example of how you say every person that wears a uniform at work should speak differently when that uniform is on their body.

Jeff

Yeah, modulate the voice to the uniform.

Kat

Right. That is an interesting… yes, it seems obvious when you say it, and yet unless you really put it out there, it’s like lifting weights. Unless they tell you how to lift it properly, you’re just like, Well, I’m just doing it.

Jeff

Great example of that that I saw this week. The Bear season two is out. I’m not going to spare anything. I’m not going to spoil anything. I love, love, love, love that show. And this season takes you into many of the characters who are side characters in the first season. And you spend an episode with each of those characters. When you’re watching, pay attention to when they put new uniforms on. Every character puts on a new uniform. And when they put the new uniform on, they take on a different persona.

Kat

Which is perfect, right? Because we know what that means intuitively. And you want your reader to just figure it out, to just roll with it.

Jeff

I’m not going to spoil it, but there’s even a character closer to the end who he won’t take his uniform off. And he’s like, no, this is me. I’m this guy now. This is what I do. I like that. Yeah, and it’s great. It’s like, oh, that’s perfect. You have put on this uniform and you’ve modulated your voice. And you like it. It’s not that your personality has changed. It’s that you’ve decided, well, in this case, decided. Sometimes they don’t decide, but sometimes characters don’t decide. It’s just a natural reflex. But he’s decided that this is how he’s going to present himself to the world now. His personality is the same. He’s not a different character. He hasn’t changed his personality, but he’s deciding to present himself differently, which is character change. You don’t have to change a character’s personality to show character change.

Kat

That’s a masterful way to do it, though, right?

Jeff

Because they’re modulating different aspects of their voice across the story. And if they sound differently from the beginning of the story to the end of the story, we go, They’ve changed.

Kat

Yeah. Okay.

Jeff

And that’s what you want.

Kat

That’s interesting.

Jeff

All right. And the Bear nails it. Season 2 of the Bear, so great.

Kat

You don’t need the book. You just need to read it. I’m just kidding. You got to go watch the Bear. Just go watch the Bear? Yeah. Okay. So where could people…

Jeff

Read the book and then you’ll appreciate the Bear 10 times more. You’ll be like, oh, man, this is right.

Kat

You’ll become me. And I’ll be like, it’s because he has the most to lose. That’s why they made him. My whole family is like, shut up.

Jeff

Stop ruining this for me. Yeah. No, it is. And that’s what, just going back to what we were saying, it’s weird that a show about cooking in a restaurant, right? That is such a mundane everyday thing. Cooking in a restaurant is that there’s no spy thriller to it. There’s no goblins or gnomes. In the first season, there’s no romance. There’s nothing that should make that show be an international hit. But the writer of that show understands their tools. And they’re like I’m going to show you character growth. The writer of that show knows that this character has experienced a deep trauma and tragedy. And because of that, this is how their voice needs to be modulating. And as they deal with that trauma, I’m going to modulate their voice to open them up more to the people around them. And as they open up, we are all going to be captivated by these intimate moments between these characters.

Kat

And that’s what we want to do, no matter what genre.

Jeff

It doesn’t matter what genre it is. We love it. We’re like, we’re all in for this.

Kat

That’s awesome. So where can people find the book? And then when is the workshop again?

Jeff

Book? You can find the book in all places. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo. Go grab it. Ebook and paperback are out, by the time this drops, they’ll be out. And it’s called the Dialogue Doctor Will See You Now. The workshop, you can find it at DialogueDoctor.Com. It’s happening August 1st. It’s going to be a blast. You can attend it live, which I recommend because it is a workshop. So if you attend it live, we talk, we ask questions, we cover things. You get to slow me down and be like, wait, what the hell did you just say? So you’re just like, oh, yeah.

Kat

It’s all right.

Jeff

I just said they’re Manhattan versus Bryant Park, and now you can stop me and be like, hey, can you explain that to me? So that’s the value of coming live. But you can also just buy a recording of it if you’d rather be like, I can’t come on August first. You can just buy the recording.

Kat

Okay. And then the dialogue doctor, dialogue, not thedialoguedoctor.com.

Kat

DialogueDoctor.com.

Jeff

Yeah, everything’s there. DialogueDoctor.com, you can find everything.

Kat

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jeff, for coming on. Congratulations on this book. The Dialogue Doctor will see you guys.

Jeff

Thanks so much.

The post Ep 188 The Dialogue Doctor Will See You Now first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.

Want more help writing better book blurbs?

I hate writing them, but like most indie authors, I also don’t want to pay someone else to write them for me. Today we’re talking tips to make your book blurbs even better than before so you can sell more books!

Want to find out more about Stacy Juba’s Book Blurbs Made Simple course that I used? Check it out here: https://katcaldwell.com/blurbs-made-simple

Are you a writer looking for my weekly newsletter to writers? You can sign up here for free: https://katcaldwell.com/writers-newsletter

Want to join my reader’s newsletter and read my historical novella for free? Sign up here: https://katcaldwell.com/fans-of-good-stories

TRANSCRIPT BEGINS HERE:

Kat

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode 186 of Pencils & Lipstick. I’m Kat Caldwell. And today you have me talking to you about book blurbs. We’ll probably be back in July with one interview of Jeff Elkins, but the rest of them are just going to be short and sweet. And today we are going to talk about book blurbs, as I said, because I just finished writing a pretty satisfactory book blurb, and I hate book blurbs. So we’re going to talk through this. Book blurbs, for anyone who is new to writing, they are the back of the book. They are what entices the reader to read. Once they have picked up that book of yours. I always envision people in a bookstore. I know most of us buy books online, but it’s all right. So let’s say they pick up this book, Eleanor Elephant is completely fine, pretty good book, by the way. But what they’re going to see on the back is the book blurb. So you might get some quotes by people endorsing the book, but the book blurb is what it’s about. So a lot of times on a hardback or a nonfiction, it might be on the inner cover. So book blurbs are usually, for any indie writer, are usually written by the author, and most authors hate doing them. Maybe I’m just going to say that because I hate doing them. There are services. There are people who help you write them, but you really have to find a way to bring the entire story down into a couple of sentences. So whether or not you pay someone to write it or you write it yourself, you’re still going to have to do some work on it. And why do we find it so difficult? I think it’s because we spend so much time in this world that we’re building in our book that it’s really difficult to put it all into 150 words. What is the most important thing to tell your reader?

Kat

So let’s start with something fairly easy. I’m going to read a couple of book blurbs to you because the interesting thing about book blurbs is that they don’t really tell you a lot about the story. So if you have read The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, very good book if you haven’t read it, pretty popular. I assume a lot of you have read it. So this is the blurb. “It is France 1714. In a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever in his cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, in a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.” Okay, has anyone read this book? Because that’s the very beginning of the book. I mean, sure, we see Addie quite a bit, but really, the thing that catapults the rest of the story is her meeting that young man. There is this set up. There’s a lot of set up. So the inciting incident, to get Addie into this moment is that night of a Faustian bargain. And then we have to see her walk through this curse that she’s living in. And then she meets the boy, I think his name is Henry, and he remembers her name. And he’s the only person that’s ever remembered her. So this is getting to maybe a third of the book. And I think that’s what really confuses us as writers and confused, I say confused lightly, it’s really difficult because we know the full book and we feel like we want to give people a bigger picture of that. I mean, don’t you almost want a bigger picture than that? But the whole point of a book blurb is to get you to want the full picture and get you to buy the book. Okay, so maybe you picked up The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue because it was so popular.

Kat

Have you ever read, well, I’m in my 40s, so I miss the kid Harry Potter time, but I read it with my kids. So here is the book number 4, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Now, remember, this is a YA, because I’m surprised at how blah this book blurb is. “The Triwizard Tournament is to be held at Hogwarts. Only wizards who are over 17 are allowed to enter. But that doesn’t stop Harry dreaming that he will win the competition. Then at Halloween, when the Goblet of Fire makes its in the election, Harry is amazed to find his name is one of those that the magical cup picks out. He will face death defying tasks, dragons, and dark wizards. But with the help of his best friend, Ron and Hermione, he might just make it through alive.” If you have read that book, or even seen the movie, but the book has even more information, it doesn’t talk about his and Ron’s fight. I really hope that’s the book. And how Ron is jealous of him. It doesn’t talk about the kid who’s dying. It doesn’t talk about the conspiracy that they discover. It doesn’t talk about any of that. First of all, this is written to entice technically 14-year-olds, although we know that Harry Potter is one of those books that has transcended age limits. So it’s really just getting them with the death defying tasks, the dragons, and the dark wizards, and then bringing in the friends that by book 4 everybody loves. That’s a really short book blurb. Now, imagine if you have written this huge book in which all these intricate details are happening, and Harry’s even continuing to find out who he is, right? And you want to tell everyone about this, and yet that is not the point of the book blurb. So really, the point of the book blurb is to not summarize, it is to tease.

Kat

Now, partly the problem with writers is that they want to summarize. So we have spent so much time writing this thing that we want to really give a good, juicy summary. And that’s usually too much. We want to put everything in there. And it’s not going to work as the book blurb. This is like your two-minute elevator pitch. I bet there are now conferences again after COVID. But before COVID, when I was living in Europe, I would always hear about these writer conferences where agents and publishers would be there, and you would get to five minutes to pitch your book and see if they would want to take it. That’s about all you have. You have a very small moment of time to hook a reader. So first thing that you want to think of is that you are teasing them. You are really teasing them into picking this book up. Now, usually people are going to know what genre the book is in. So if they pick up Harry Potter, they know it’s a YA fantasy. If they pick up… I mean, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is technically fantasy. I think it got put in women’s fiction quite a bit. It was also book club book. That’s not technically a genre, but that’s what some people categorize books as now. So you usually know what should be inside there. But let’s go with Outlander. One thing that you want to keep in mind as you’re writing your book blurb or about to write your book blurb is the genre. So you need to know what you need to tell people. If it is a fantasy with dragons, people are going to want to know that it’s a dragon fantasy because that is how you’re going to get the ideal reader to pick it up. So for women’s fiction, you’re going to want to lean into the emotion and all that. For historical fiction, you’re going to want to lean into the history. But let’s read Outlander as well. This is also a very short blurb. And technically, this would be a historical fantasy. It’s time traveling, right? So I guess it would also hit the book club. It’s interesting how things that become so famous, we don’t really put into certain categories anymore. But it’s definitely historical fiction. There’s a lot of history in there, that is true. It’s also a fantasy. It’s also a romance. So historical romance. “The year is 1945.” So we’re talking outline of the first book. “Claire Randell, a former combat nurse, is just back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient circles that dot the British Isles.” So there you go. She summed up the first 10 chapters into one, like two sentences. “Suddenly, she is a Sassenash, an outlander in a Scotland torn by war and raiding border clans in the year of our Lord, 1743.” Imagine, oh, my gosh. “Hurlded back in time by forces, she cannot understand, Claire is catapulted into the intrigues of lairds and spies that may threaten her life and shatter her heart. For here, James Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior, shows her a love so absolute that Claire becomes a woman torn between fidelity and desire and between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives.” Okay, have you read Outlander? Because it doesn’t talk about how her husband’s great, great, great, great ancestor is there and how he looks like her husband, which is real creepy. And it doesn’t talk too much about the clan and how she’s trying to fit in with them and how she’s trying to learn the rules. And it doesn’t get into hardly anything. It really focuses on Claire and this inner struggle that she has, the overall inner struggle. So the intrigues, yes, there are spies, but more than anything, she really becomes torn between a young Scot warrior and the love that he’s willing to give her and possibly going home. We do end with between two vastly different men. So she is still married in 1945. So really focuses on her inner struggle. And interestingly enough, even though it is a historical romance, the book blurb doesn’t go into James Fraser’s point of view, which is interesting because these days, a lot of the modern romances will have a two point of view book blurb. So yes, you want to have this tease, right? That is a big tease. There is so much left out from this blurb. So when you’re looking at writing your book blurb, and I had to write mine like 1,500 times. I mean, that is a slight exaggeration, and I had to constantly be telling myself, I want to tease, I want to only put a little bit in there.

Kat

So we’re talking about the tease, and what we’re really talking about is the tease of the main character. Yes, there are other characters in the book, most likely, but what you want to do is only talk pretty much about what’s happening to the main character. You don’t really want to add too many characters in there because you have such a short space that you can start confusing the reader. With Harry Potter, it talks about Ron and Hermione way at the end, and that’s probably because it’s already the fourth book. Let’s see, with Meet Eleanor Elephant, the book blurb only mentions two people. So it says, “she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life, where weekends mostly consist of frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with mommy.” Okay, there’s two. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling IT guy from her office whose big heart will ultimately help Eleanor find a way to repair her own profoundly damaged one. So I didn’t see the mummy before, but pretty much you know that Eleanor and Raymond are going to be main characters, right? Now, have you read this book? Because from this, you almost get the idea that she’s like a mom’s girl. And she’s best friends with her mom, which couldn’t be further from the truth, right? So we’re really teasing it. And I don’t want to say that it’s okay that you give readers the wrong idea because that’s not what you’re trying to do. But you’re trying to not tell them everything. So we do know that her heart is profoundly damaged, but we’re not sure who damaged Eleanor the Elephant’s heart. I think I, like many people, probably assumed it was a man, but it’s not. So I don’t want to give too much away if you haven’t read hers, but you just won’t want to give them enough to pick it up.

Kat

So a big thing that you can also do that is becoming more and more popular is to have a hook or a tag line. This is really popular in romance books. You know how the movie posters have that one little hook thing that will tell you what the movie is about? You can do that in which you want to tell the reader right at the top what this book is about. And sometimes that is enough. Sometimes you can say dragons, romance, what more could a girl want? Something like that, right? But taglines can be pretty popular, especially in the romance section. So if we go to Happy Place, this is just something on the top of the Amazon charts. It says, “A couple who broke up months ago pretend to still be together for their annual long weekend vacation with their best friends in this glittering and wise new novel.” That’s a bit of a long tagline, but you could have the tagline being, “A couple who broke up months ago pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation.” You can see right away that’s going to probably be an issue. So if you have a tagline, if you can figure out something that will already hook the reader, then do that. This is also a big thing in the thriller mystery world, like Death at Willbough, though, the hook is, “Would you risk your life to find a killer? Would you?” I don’t know. I’m going to have to read that book. So remember, it’s a tease, and you can start with a hook or a tagline. That’s not the beginning of the first chapter. This is just a separate tagline.

Kat

And then you really want to usually appeal to the emotion of the reader and what the ideal reader is going to like. Just like we talked about, Harry Potter is written more for YA. If you are writing a dark, gritty thriller, you’re going to want to use the appropriate words, dark and dangerous and thrilling and mystery baffling. Can they survive? Will they get there? Have these different questions there. A couple of years ago, the questions were a big way to write your book blurb. I don’t see them as much now, but I think it’s still a possibility to put questions in there as a way to entice or to bring in the reader. You also want to use very strong words. We can get really wordy when we start talking about what our book is about, which is interesting. We really want to bring in all of these different elements and long sentences. It’s almost like we don’t want to take a breath in case the reader interrupts us. So let’s just look back at Eleanor Elephant, so she struggles with appropriate social skills. She has a carefully timetabled life. Those three words right there really give you a sense of she’s very organized with every meeting in place and has a schedule for all. No, she has a carefully timetabled life. We know that she is probably obsessed about having her life very, very organized. And then she meets Raymond, who is described as the bumbling IT guy. Bumbling brings up a very strong image of who this Raymond might be. And then, of course, it ends with her profoundly damaged heart. Those are really good, strong words. This is probably 100 words as a book blurb. If we look at the Light on Farallon Island, we get really strong words like treacherous secrets, mysterious man who seems to recognize her name, embeds herself in the island’s community. Okay, so that embeds yourself in the island community is much more concise and stronger than she joins the club and seeks to volunteer and does all this, no, she’s embedded in the community. So you see how we might want to go into the details of how she embedded herself, as the writer. But really, what we want to do is just bring that down to as few words as possible. And then the other words in this book blurb are deadly cliffs, shark infested waters, disorienting fogs. We might need to read this book. In Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, we have the Faustian bargain. So right away, we know what the Faustian bargain is, right? You exchange your soul. The curse to be forgotten by everyone she meets, right? The extraordinary life of dazzling adventures played across centuries and continents. And then everything changes. And so there aren’t as many strong words here, but here we have the, she meets a young man in a hidden bookstore. So already we get the idea that perhaps the young man she meets is not really out there to be met. He’s hidden away. So it gives that connotation there. Claire Randall, she’s a former combat nurse, from World War II, 1945. So we assume she’s been doing something. She’s reunited with her husband on his second honeymoon. We understand right away what that is. They’re not going to get reacquainted with each other, which they are, but we’re not saying that. They’re going back. He’s also wants to go and study his family history and all this. No, second honeymoon. That’s what we’re doing. Those are strong words. We know what’s happening here. Now, then we use, Claire is catapulted into the intrigues of lords and spies. That may threaten her life and shatter her heart, very strong there. She is torn between fidelity and desire. See how we’re using these very strong words to not only describe the emotion, but to really to bring in concisely what is happening in the book. Now, I keep saying concisely because the general rule for a book blurb is 150 words. I didn’t want to say that right out because I know some people will just have a heart attack when I say that. It’s really nothing, 150 words is really short. And so that’s why I keep trying to say concise, concise, and bring it down.

Kat

So there are tons of articles out there and blog articles. There’s a great course by Stacy Juba that I actually bought. It’s nine dollars. She really brings it together and goes through pretty easy steps. And I have to say she made it more or less painless. I mean, not really painless because I still hate writing book blurbs, but it made a lot of sense. One of the things that she says, and I highly recommend her course, I’ll have the link in the show notes, to just go and read a lot of book blurbs. You just need to get that idea. It’s like anything that we do that we immerse ourselves in, we’re more easily able to do that thing right away. So the more you dance, the better you’re going to become. The more you read these book blurbs, and the more you write the book blurbs, the better you’re going to become. But you can take them and you can do this at home with Goodreads or with Amazon. Maybe even print a couple out and highlight these really strong words or these very concise little tidbits or just three, four words that are really giving you a strong idea of what’s happening. Now, I would look into book blurbs of books you’ve already read so that you can really get an idea of what actually happened in the book versus what they tell you on the back of the book. It doesn’t mean that you can’t read other book blurbs. Definitely go out there and read them as well. But I think that that will give you an idea of how much information you got at the beginning versus how much information you got once you read the book.

Kat

And then the last thing I have to say, which people might not want to hear is you’re probably going to have to write your book blurb several times. But I don’t want you to write your book blurb by yourself. What really helps in the book blurb writing world is feedback. And because it’s only 100 to 150 words, it’s pretty easy to get some feedback from people. Now, definitely you want feedback from people in the writing world, people who can help you make things more concise and bring sentences together. But you also want your book blurb read by readers in which you ask them, is this enticing? Is this exciting enough for you? Would you want to read this book? What questions do you have once you read this blurb? Because you actually want the reader to have questions because you want them to want so much to answer that question that they read the book. So it is good to get both feedback from writers and from readers on that. And just take everything, of course, with a grain of salt. And don’t trick your readers, but definitely tease your readers because that is what you are trying to do with a book blurb.

Kat

All right, so this was a really short episode. I know I’m just trying to get you encouraged to write a book blurb, but the whole reason I want to do this as well is even if you’re not done with your book, it’s summertime. You might not be getting as much writing done as you would hope you would get. If you have kids, especially, or if you’re just a very active person and you want to be outside, I am not getting as much writing done as I would like to get done. But a book blurb is something that you can research while you’re at the pool and the kids are busy. You can start trying to write it out or you can start highlighting strong verbs. It’s work that you can do on this side. So you can feel like you’re still working on your book and you’re going to need it. You’re going to need the book blurb. So it’s not time wasted, it’s not work wasted. So I wanted to get this to you at the beginning of the summer so that you don’t feel frustrated. Sometimes I feel frustrated in the summer that I’m not really working on the book. The book blurb you’re going to need, and you’re probably going to need it sooner than you think. So I encourage you to try to do this. If you’re not getting as much writing done, try to do work on your book blurb in the meantime, in those little pockets of time that you have. Maybe you can’t get back to your main characters and get back in your head, but you can work on the book blurb. So I also encourage you to check out Stacy Juba’s course. It’s only nine dollars. It has a lot of information in there for a nine-dollar course. I’ll have the link in the show notes below. I did the whole thing. I really think it was quite good. It was step by step. And so what I did was just follow her steps as well. But just remember, it is a tease, not a summary. It’s pretty short and you are using very strong words and you’re appealing to the reader’s emotion.

Kat

All right, that’s it for this week. Of course, if you can, please share this podcast with any other writer out there that you know who you think would benefit from this. We really appreciate it. If you’re listening on the podcast, please subscribe to the app that you listen to it on. Give us a review if you are so inclined, it would help us out. If you’re on YouTube, please subscribe there as well and share it with everyone that you think would like this. We’ll be back with another short episode next week, and then we’ll have Jeff Elkins a couple of weeks from now. So keep listening. Have a wonderful summer.

The post Ep 187 Tips for Writing Book Blurbs first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.

My guest today is Claire Taylor, author and creator of FFS Media and co-host of the Sell More Books Podcast Claire wrote ether book Reclaim Your Author Career in which she explains how understanding the Enneagram can be helpful in creating a successful and fun author career. Today we talk bout that and more. Check out Claire’s free author alignment mini course here https://ffs-media.teachable.com/p/5-day-indie-author-alignment

And for more information on the Enneagram check out Claire’s YouTube channel: www.ffs.media/yt

Find Claire’s books here. https://www.hclairetaylor.com/

Find Reclaim Your Author Career here. https://www.ffs.media/

Check out Claire’s writing workshops here. https://www.ffs.media/classes

The book of the Week is Fighting Tragedy by Ashely Kay. Find it on Amazon! https://a.co/d/9OB2Ch5

Want to support the podcast?

You can support the podcast at https://pencilsandlipstick.com/support-the-show/

Sign up for my writers’ newsletter to learn more about the craft of writing, know when my workshops are and be the first to get exclusive information on my writing retreats. https://www.subscribepage.com/katcaldwellnewsletter

Want more information on my books, author swaps, short stories and what I’m reading? Sign up for my readers’ newsletter. You can always ask me writing questions on instagram @pencilsandlipstick or on Twitter @PencilLipstick

TRANSCRIPT BEGINS HERE:

Kat

All right, welcome back, everyone, to Pencils & Lipstick. I’m excited today to have with me Claire Taylor. She is a writer, she is a podcaster, and she helps authors with their career. Is that good? Hi, Claire. How are you?

Claire

Hey, I’m doing fine. Thanks for having me on.

Kat

Yeah, you do so many things. I’m like, Okay, she has the head of FFS Media. She’s the Sell More Books Show co-host. You have a million series. I mean, maybe a little less than a million series. You’ve got the credit behind you. So tell us a little bit more of who you are, before we get into this.

Claire

Well, I think first and foremost, I’m a fiction writer that’s just wanted to do this my whole life. And I’ve wanted to do it the right way. I want to make sure that I have the most on point way of approaching it. And so in doing that, I made a lot of mistakes.

Kat

As we all did.

Claire

Yes, a lot. I have years of mistakes behind me that I’m very grateful in my more enlightened moments and annoyed by in all the other moments. So in creating my own fiction career, I really had to figure out how to do it so that it worked for me. I’ve been called stubborn or she has to do things the way she wants to do them.

Kat

You’re Texan. It’s in you.

Claire

Yes, I’m going to do it the way I think it should be done. Very independent over here. I had to figure it out for myself. And in doing that and building my own career, and I have quite a few pen names because I won’t be contained. You can’t fence me in. But in doing that, I started using the Enneagram, to build my own career, to make sure that I had some criteria for, okay, this works really well for this person, but I can see why this would not work for me. And so I was using that for my own career. And then it slowly became a thing that I found myself helping all of my author friends with. And then it blossomed into this Enneagram consulting and coaching that I do now for authors.

Kat

This side project that you do?

Claire

Yeah, just another side business, just two full-time businesses. So no, I am working. This is the phase of my life where I’m working to do less work.

Kat

I like that.

Claire

I’m still practicing.

Kat

So when you say you wanted to do fiction writing, correct, what did that mean to you? Following rules or going traditional or what did that mean?

Claire

Well, I did go to school for writing and college.

Kat

Your parents let you do that?

Claire

They did. Well, my dad’s a music teacher. He doesn’t have much ground to stand on. My sister did the whole business thing, and so she went to get her MBA and all that. So I got to be the liberal arts letting everyone down. And so I went to school for that. And it made me want to stop writing because it was very much like you can only do the traditional path. And literary fiction is the only real form of writing, and everything else is just playtime. And it’s not true writing and all of that. And I just didn’t have much of a desire to write literary fiction.

Kat

We don’t even know what that is, really, honestly.

Claire

Right. Yeah. It’s whatever your professor says it is, frankly. And so I was put off for a while from the traditional publishing route, but I just couldn’t stop writing. And I write comedy. And that was not super respecable. And so I said, screw it, I’m going to go do this my way. And then I found out about the whole world of indie publishing. And it was like this. This is how I’m going to do it. But this was back in 2014, and there wasn’t really a roadmap. There still isn’t a roadmap, frankly, even though a lot of people pitch there being a very clear roadmap to your dreams. It can be a very profitable thing to pitch. So I was having to figure it out and there are just a million ways to decide. So I was asking myself, well, how do I decide what is right for me? And this process of the Enneagram made it a lot clearer. But before I found that I was really working with the Enneagram. I was stumbling all over the place. You’re never guaranteed success, financial success, whatever that means to you in this industry. So why would you sacrifice what you want to be doing and what works for you to try and get that? Why? Because it’s not guaranteed.

Kat

No, it’s honestly not. And that’s what I feel the worst when people come to me and ask me things. They’re like, well, first of all, you’ll spend a lot of money and you might not make it back. That sounds terrible. Come join us over here in the indie publishing world. But did you feel like you were successful before you found the Enneagram? Was the Enneagram something that you did for your personal life, or did you go straight to it to try to figure out the author life?

Claire

So I had first encountered the Enneagram back in high school. My mom and my sister were really into it, and I couldn’t have cared less about it at the time. And they had me take the test, and I tested as what I now know is not my type. And so I read about it and I was like, well, this is bogus. Because when you get mistyped in any way, at any form of any part of the process of finding your type, you’re like, well, this is obviously not useful. And it’s like, well, of course it’s not useful. That’s not your type. So that was what I experienced. I knew about it and I’d heard about it. And it wasn’t until I got into a mastermind with some other indie authors back in 2015, 2016, somewhere around there, that we started talking about it again. We started going through together and figuring out our types. And then that helped us talk to each other. We do hot seats, we do these sorts of things each week. And so we started to be able to figure out, okay, why is the advice that I’m giving to you not clicking with you? Well, we have different motivation. But then we were able to better tailor our advice to each other and give suggestions and not just waste each other’s time by being like, no, you should do it this way. And the person being like, I don’t want to do it that way.

Kat

That’s very smart. It’s very insightful.

Claire

It was very useful. So then it became this language. And it was my friend, Alyssa Archer, who’s a really good author and an editor as well, a really great editor as well. And she was the one that was into it at the time and brought it into that group. And then I was like, oh, yeah, I’m familiar with this. But as soon as I tested and got my correct type and read about it, it was like light bulbs. It was like, oh, this is my whole life explained. These are all of my problems and why. So then I started using it for just life stuff and business stuff. And then I was like, well, why wouldn’t I be using this for my characters too? And to help me get to know my protagonist, my antagonist. And so then I started using that when I was writing my Jessica Christ series. And it was just very, very helpful. And so then I started doing it more. And then when people would call me because I was an editor. After college, I was an editor for a long time. And so I have a lot of experience with that and with teaching. I taught for a while. But people would call me asking for story advice, and it kept coming back to like, well, your character has mixed motivations here. They’re part you and they’re part this other Enneagram type. So let me tell you about this Enneagram type, and so you can keep that consistent motivation. And so then that’s how it started. And then I realized, oh, I should just make this an offering to everyone so you don’t have to have randomly met me at a conference to get this help.

Kat

So that’s why you started writing the Reclaim Your Author Career book, or did you do something before that?

Claire

Yes, that was years later. That was years later.

Kat

I feel like COVID is a hole. So when you say 2016, I’m like, That’s not that far away because I forget. Right, seven years ago. Yeah, that was a long time ago. All right, so you were already consulting on this, on the side, not being paid as we do.

Claire

Yeah, well, I was getting paid. I was getting paid and I was creating courses and that thing. But thankfully, I have friends who have different Enneagram lenses from me and are a little bit more savvy at this whole business thing. And we’re like, there’s a hole in your funnel. You need to… your sales funnel. And then I was like, oh, yeah, you’re right. I don’t have just a book. And for me, it was like, Well, obviously, I’m going to publish a book. I’m a writer. Why don’t I have a book about this? This is stupid. So I started writing it, and I figured that it was a good way to introduce people because book is much, much cheaper than coming to a workshop or anything like that, so that people can see if it works for them or not. I wanted the book to be something that a person could sit and read from cover to cover and not necessarily need to come do more work with me or pay for the next thing. It needed to be standalone. So it’s not a sales pitch. For me, that was very important because I don’t like it when it’s like, oh, this is a great book and you read it and it kind of shows you the problem. But it’s like, If you want the answers, buy this next course. That irks me.

Kat

It’s like Scienceology all over.

Claire

I don’t want an MLM. I don’t want to start a cult. The idea of starting a cult, it’s like, so many people looking to me and relying on me for answers. No, thanks. Not this child-free writer. So yeah, it was just like, well, this can help a lot more people. I can scale that help for people. And so I started writing it and it was, yeah, it’s the first nonfiction I’ve done, actually, the first nonfiction book.

Kat

Was it easy?

Claire

No.

Kat

Okay. There’s a lot in here. I feel like it’s one of those books when you know a lot about something because you’ve personally gone through it, it would be hard to bring it down to… I mean, it’s not a very… like 220 pages? That must have been difficult to be like, I know all these things. How about we just talk?

Claire

Yeah, I know. It was a very difficult process to go to nonfiction. I think there are probably people who are better at doing that. But for me, I’m like, I want to just give you all that I know about this. I want to give you all of the tools because I can’t be helping everyone, but I want everyone to have the tools.

Kat

That’s smart, though. Yeah, it’s really smart.

Claire

So yeah, it was really hard. And once I had finished that book and was done with it, I was like, I’m never writing nonfiction again. So obviously, I already have multiple other projects in the works for nonfiction.

Kat

Especially for a writer. You can’t say that. I will never write it again.

Claire

Absolutely amnesia about all of my sworn statements.

Kat

Yes. Good thing nobody’s recording us when we say these things. So I told you before, but I’ll tell the audience, I started reading it because of Troy from Plottr, Troy Lambert, and he was like, you have to get this book. This will just open your eyes as to what is wrong and what’s going wrong in your author career, why you’re frustrated. And there were so many… He was correct, first of all. And I was like, oh, Enneagram. I think it’s because it was such a big deal in 2016. And I was like, people that were talking about it around me, I was like, oh. I know why you’re into that, because you want to tell me what to do. And I don’t want to do that because I’m an achiever and I don’t want anyone to tell me what to do. But I trust Troy and I was like, okay, you know what? I should probably figure out my resistance to something and give it a go before I say no. And I have to say that I now recommend it to everybody.

Claire

Yes. That makes my little Type One Reformer heart so happy.

Kat

You are reforming me as I go. So there’s several things in here, especially, and I think you’ve talked about this with Brian Cohen on the Sell More Books Show. I feel like I hear your voice instead of reading your voice. But especially in the indie author career, I think you’ve said something of like, everyone who goes on stage is a certain Enneagram type, and what they’re doing is working for them. And all the rest of us are frustrated in our seats because we’re like, why is it not working for me? And that was like, That is so true because it takes a certain person to get up there and to get to a certain level and to be just telling everyone what works for them. And then when you’re in the seat and you’re like, I think I tried that and it’s not quite working for me. And it might be because you are completely different personality, right? And that was like the first eye opening thing for me. I was like, why? It’s not bad to listen to them, right? But you have to understand who you are and how it fits with your career. Is that true?

Claire

Yeah.

Kat

Is that in the book? If you put it in the book, it’s true.

Claire

I feel like you said this. Yeah, absolutely. There are certain types that are… Listen, it takes a lot of time and effort to get yourself onto a stage and to prepare for it and to do it. So to do that, you have to be very motivated to be on a stage. And that motivation tends to lean towards Type Threes or Type Eights who like to be up there and say, be in front of a crowd. Threes are very motivational by nature. They love to motivate people to work hard. That’s what they’re good at. That’s a gift. They’re very inspiring. Oprah is an Enneagram Type Three Achiever. Taylor Swift is an Enneagram Type Three Achiever. So that’s a personality that likes to be on stage, but there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re not that type, the motivation that they’re trying to give you doesn’t always hit, or it’s fleeting. You can leave feeling very charged up. Like, oh, yeah. If I just work hard, I can do this. And that can work for a little while. But if that’s not your motivation to have the same things that they want to have, it’s not going to motivate you in the same way. And you’re going to leave and you’re going to be like, sometimes that crash afterwards turns into, I’m just a failure, I just don’t work hard enough, I must not want it bad enough, that negative self talk. So that’s the problem that arises from it. But yeah, a lot of the teachers are similar in any of their time. types, like the same Enneagram types. A lot of the leaders, a lot of the people telling you you can be a six-figure author if you just do X, Y, or Z, tend to be type Threes. And the people who are still making money, really in this industry, tend to be type Threes. And at least those are the ones that are highly visible because visibility does tend to matter to that type. There are plenty of other types who are making money and just don’t talk about it or that thing. And this is not to dunk on Type Threes, obviously.

Kat

I’m a Type Three.

Claire

So that’s right. Yeah. So nothing personal here. Yeah, you’re not on the stage. But you do have a podcast.

Kat

This is true. Oh, my gosh.

Claire

Yeah. And my podcast was started by a Type Three as well, and I just jumped on. So yeah, it’s just to say that as an example, not everyone is motivated by the same things. And so there’s no defect in it if someone is motivated by a different thing from you.

Kat

Yeah. I think that’s just really important to keep in mind. You also have your Type Three, and you talk about your motivation and your whys and getting into your background, taking time to figure out what you want. Because like we said in the beginning, a few minutes ago, success isn’t guaranteed in this business, like any business. And it’s a hard business to find success. So it’s well, depending on what success means to you. And to be honest with yourself and to really… It’s for your author career, but it’s a bit of a soul searching, as far as books go. But I think because the career is so difficult and it’s a lot of times just yourself, it’s really necessary to do this and to understand yourself. Otherwise, you’re going to burn out or you’re going to feel like a failure because you’re not like whoever. Like whoever you’re looking up to. They might be a great writer, but they’re not your type. And you might not be trying to achieve JK Rowling status. You’re just trying to sell your book.

Claire

Right. There’s a big middle ground between books not selling and JKR. There’s a big middle ground where you can make a very robust living, or you can make a little bit of a side pot off of this. And maybe you have a nine-to-five. Some types prefer to have a nine-to-five because it creates that security. It allows them to have the money they need for the freedom they’re looking for and so on and so forth. So yeah, there’s just a big range of ways to do this. And you can also do this in the full… There’s the full range. You could do it at any point in the full range and still be miserable doing it. So it’s really not about how much money you’re making, how many books you’re selling. It’s about learning how to be happy. And with whatever it is and not fearing that if you are happy or satisfied in the moment, you will lose all of your drive because that’s just not how it happens. And I think that’s a fear that people are like, well, if I’m not dissatisfied, if I’m not a little bit miserable the whole time, if I’m not struggling, then I don’t know what will be motivating me. There’s that fear that nothing will be motivating you, that you’ll just say, well, if I’m not afraid of failure, then I’m never going to try for more. Or if I don’t care about the details, then I’m just going to give up and produce the sloppiest work ever, and I’m going to tank my career and blah, blah, blah. People are often motivating themselves with this fear, this core fear that is the definition of each type. And in doing so, they’re making themselves miserable rather than trusting that if they confront that fear and think it all the way through and dismantle it and deconstruct it a little bit, that there’s still something that is bringing you to writing, and you will still want to write. You may want to write in a different way, and it may just feel a whole lot better when you do it.

Kat

Yeah. And to really understand those fears and what you actually want from success. I don’t know about you, but I tried all the personal motivations when I hit 30, it was like, Oh, my gosh, I have to reevaluate my life. I’m going to do all these things. Maybe it was a big deal then. I don’t know. But this is really focusing mostly on your author career. Of course, you can bring it into other things in your life, right? But to really take the time to understand what motivates you, what success means to you, why would you keep writing, at what point would you keep writing? And I think that it then helps you in this author space to be comfortable with what you’ve decided to be comfortable with. Because the idea it, people have different motivations and different success levels. And are you actually going to be okay with seeing your series consistently sell and making an extra X amount of money? If that’s true, and then to be comfortable with it and to be like, you know what? It’s okay if your motivation is different than mine. But I think if you understand it, then you are less likely to change your motivations and your idea of success just because somebody else at a conference said something different.

Claire

Yeah. And there’s a lot of good information at any conference, right? It’s a little bit like a fire hose. So once you know your motivation and know what you’re trying to achieve and what your strategy is based on your motivation, you are able to easily filter out anything that’s not relevant and find stuff that could be relevant and asking yourself, how do I change this so that it’s relevant to me? How do I do this in a way that’s going to support what I’m trying to achieve here? So it may not just be a hard yes or hard no to different techniques and tactics, but it could be a, I like that, but I have to figure out how to do that in my way.

Kat

Yeah. And to know that that’s an option.

Claire

Right. Yeah. That’s a lot of it. It’s just people don’t feel like they’re allowed to do things the way they deep down would love to do them.

Kat

Right. So you not only wrote the book, which I, once again, the links will be in the show notes, but I think everyone should read because I think it definitely helps with this overwhelm that can come sometimes with this job. Summer is about to hit, probably by the time this is out, everyone’s kids are out. That is a ridiculous time of year. If you have kids and you’re a writer, you’re just going crazy. Learning to know who you are and what your author career should, what you want it to look like, whatever. But then you have other workshops and retreats. Is that to go deeper or is that… What is that difference there?

Claire

Yeah, these are to go deeper. So the book can only be so individualized, right? Because we’re only talking about nine types, but within each type, there are subtypes that I don’t get into in the book because that’s like, let’s not make everyone’s head explode just yet. There’s all kinds of different ways of expressing it. And of course, Enneagram isn’t the end all be all. It’s the base level of the person upon which there’s these overlays from other people and other values put on them and background and past trauma and all these other layers. So when we do stuff like the workshops or the masterclasses or the retreats, we’re really… It’s a smaller group so we can get more individualized. So the two that I have coming up are masterclasses this summer. And these are just fun story nerd stuff. So we’re doing Enneagram and fiction, so how you use it for your fiction, for creating protagonist, antagonists, developing your themes, all that stuff. And then the next one is the hero’s journey of the Enneagram. So for those big story nerds, we’re going to talk about how the Enneagram type of your protagonist actually determines what the supreme ordeal will look like for them. What the elixir will be for your hero or heroine. And so those are the two. It’s very fiction-based. But yeah, there’s retreats. I have a new course coming up that’s going way deep into it, but we can talk about that later.

Kat

So I like how you use this for fiction because I do think this is… There’s a lot of information out there. There’s a lot of great books on writing fiction. But this is interesting because it’s going really deep into understanding your characters in a way that is different than what I have seen. And I have developmental editing quite a few manuscripts by now. And there’s always… Before I read this book, I was like, There’s something off, your character wouldn’t do this. The way that you’ve set them up, now all of a sudden they’re doing something completely different. And when I read the book, I was like, yes, we should have some psychology and personality information in our brains as writers, because that is one of the issues, I think, with when you put a book down because you’re like, what? Why is this character suddenly so different? And why did they do that? I have thrown a couple of books across the room in my lifetime of like, no, I don’t know why, but no, now I know why.

Claire

Yeah, exactly. So the different types are defined by a core fear and core desire. And so that is really what helps you determine what your character is going to do in stress points. And so what I found, and through my developmental editing and looking at just reading a lot, is that the problem seems to be when the author is writing a protagonist who is a different Enneagram type from themselves. So then they’re writing this protagonist, and the Enneagram types are very intuitive. We’ve all met these types. We’ve seen these clusters of patterns that arise from the core motivations. And so it’s familiar to us even if we don’t have the language for it. The Enneagram is just the language for it. And so once we start to understand how these correlate to the behaviors tend to arise from the feelings and the beliefs that arise from this motivation, once we understand that, we can deconstruct why that character would not do that thing. So what happens is the author is, let’s say a Type Two, and she’s writing a protagonist who’s a Type Seven, and something stresses out the Type Seven protagonist, and you’re like, Why would it stress them out?

Claire

Well, it wouldn’t. It would stress out a Type Two. And so the author has gotten to the point of thinking, Well, what would I do in this situation? And it’s a different thing because the stressors are different for different types. What’s going to freak out a Type Seven is not going to freak out a Type Two necessarily, and vice versa. So it’s that mixing when we’re not clear on the different types and we haven’t really sorted that in our brain and attached the language to it, we tend to mix these. And sometimes it can be a product of, I need to get this character to the next scene. So I’m just going to make them do this thing to get them there. Once you know their type, there’s always a way to get them to do exactly what you need to do because you know the stick and you know the carrot. You know the fear and you know the desire. So if you need to get your Type Six, the Loyalist, whose core fear is to be unsupported and without guidance, and if you need to get them to move from Seattle to New York, well, you know how to get them there. You scare the crap out of them in Seattle and you promise them safety in New York. So that is going to motivate that character. If you do that to a Type Eight, it’s just the Challenger. Theirs is very different. They’re looking at how can I be strong? So if you scare a Type Eight, they tend to want to fight you. They’re not going to move from Seattle to New York. They’re going to be like, oh, you think you can scare me? You think you can hurt me? Well, I’m going to show you. Don’t try and exert power over me. So the different motivations are going to be there. But once you know it, it’s like, I can get them to go and do whatever I want.

Kat

Right. And we talk about fear and desire a lot in the indie world. And I feel like there’s a lot of information out there that will just make you feel like you’re insane. You have to have a fear. You have to have it. And it’s true. But this makes it very easy to figure out those fears and those desires. And then what’s interesting is I think a lot of writers are scared that that’s going to become formulaic, which is interesting. No, it actually just helps you then not freak out about if you’re writing your character correctly. Then you have the freedom to be very creative in the plot because you’re secure in how your character is going to get there because you understand them. You don’t have to write a first draft just to get to know the character now.

Claire

Right. It’s absolutely not formulaic because humans don’t appear formulaic to us when we go out. Humans are complex beings, and yet these Enneagram frameworks are still at play. So any type can look a lot of different ways. They’re going to be similarities, but they can change based on culture, how those fears and desires play out. What is a good person in one culture? So if you’re a Type One, the Reformer, you’re worried about being good and not evil. And so that decides what you do. If you think that that’s the right thing to do, you will do it. But what is the right thing to do? That’s going to look different in different situations. It’s going to look different in different cultures. It’s going to look different for men versus women, a lot of the times. Women have doing the right thing looks very different for a woman, or it’s expected to look very different for a woman. So there’s so many other factors that it is just this easy thing. I know it’s going to seem overwhelming, but the Enneagram has been developed from thousands of years of wisdom. It’s been developed intensely in the last 100 years by people with PhDs and MDs. They’ve done the work for you. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel now. You can just work from this because it’s used by clinicians. My therapist uses it. It’s a thing that just has been proven true. So you don’t have to worry about it. It’s just a useful… It’s the closest thing to a character hack that you can find, really.

Kat

Right. And like you said, we know it intuitively, so your readers are going to know. So you might as well just I just find it helpful, and I would encourage people to do it. And if you understand personalities and why people react the way that they do, you are going to be able to write your characters and your books better. Just like, I don’t know how else to say that.

Claire

You do need to know people to write people. It’s the unfortunate.

Kat

Even personified animals.

Claire

Yes. Oh, yeah. I have a cozy, paranormal, normal, cozy mystery series. All my familiars have types as well.

Kat

Yeah, you got to do that. And it actually makes it really rich. Your story is very rich instead of having the characters that are all Type Two, all Type Three, all type… A lot of times, I think at one point you say you usually marry or date, or your partner is the opposite. And that’s why me and my husband do it. And I was like, look at that. This is why we don’t understand each other.

Claire

Yeah. And it’s so fun because every pairing of types, you’re going to have some overlaps where you’re 100% agree, couldn’t agree more. And then you’re going to have some differences where you’re like, I think you might be from a different planet. And so it’s like every pairing of characters you can throw at each other is going to have those differences and those similarities. And so you can play on that with your protagonist’s antagonist, with romantic partners. And it’s just good fun because you know what to bring out when you need conflict and you know, okay, I need these enemies to become allies. That’s one of my favorite troops. You know where they’re going to overlap and have a shared action based on what their motivations are.

Kat

It’s going to be believable. And to know how to team them up. It’s going to be believable. It’s not going to be like, what?

Claire

When they need to break apart again, you just put them in different directions by motivating them in two different directions.

Kat

Right. Because they’re not going to change. That’s the thing, too, that people don’t change 180 degrees by the end of a book. We learn. We don’t change.

Claire

And that’s the thing that’s important with the Enneagram is that there’s nine levels of development for each type. So you don’t have static characters just because you’re using the Enneagram. They’re going to move up and down just as humans do. We move up and down these levels of health, and it’s based on self-awareness and self-knowledge, where you are in that moment. And so you can have a character that starts in these low average levels of health that they’re not very aware of their patterns of behavior and thought and speech and everything. And then because of that, something happens that jolts them in your inciting incident. And then you have them have to search for answers for the rest of it. And by the end, maybe they’re at more of a high average developmental level or a healthy level. Or if it’s if it’s a tragedy, then they’re probably starting at or they’re ending at a lower health level than what they started at. So yeah, it just gives you a lot to work with. And there’s all kinds of resources. So if you’re like, how am I supposed to remember the nine developmental levels for nine types? Well, you don’t. There are lots of books on this, lots of research.

Kat

And there’s workshops.

Claire

And there’s workshops, yeah. And I’ll show you how to use the tools, and then you can go get your references for it.

Kat

Yes. And you even touched on writing series because you write series, right? Yes. So how to keep consistent with the series and whether you’re planning it now, you go into that or whether you’re stuck because you didn’t plan it before and now you have to keep going. But that’s what I find really interesting about the Enneagram, because I had studied the big top five personality types, which I think is somewhat helpful. Because by the end of book one, a lot of times we have our character really high, they’re writing a high, they’re so healthy, they’re doing great. And you’re like, oh, no, I have eight more books. And I love how you don’t shy away from that and how you go through a series, especially if you are not yet stuck in it, but then how to get out of it if you’re slightly stuck.

Claire

Yeah. I mean, the great thing about writing these characters is that they are just people and people have to learn the same lessons over and over again. And in new ways, it’s like, I may have learned a lesson in one small part of my life. That doesn’t mean my brain has applied it to every other part of my life. And it doesn’t mean that I necessarily learned the full lesson. And it doesn’t mean that I’m going to remember the lesson. And then there’s a bagillion lessons that we need to learn. I get that question a lot when I’m presenting on this thing, like, well, if you have them learn, what they need to learn by the end, what do you do in the next book? You teach them something else. We’re done in a lot of ways. Your protagonist can learn a lot of things. They could learn 100 books worth of things and still have more to learn. You might likely get sick of writing them at that point or before that point, but if you were really into it, you could just keep going.

Kat

Right. Yes. I have learned a lot from this. I know that for fiction, it’s really great. So I would highly recommend people go and check out the masterclasses. I might have to check out one, honestly, just to see what I can do because, as you talk about people not learning all their lessons, sometimes for the next book, I’ll probably have to start at square one. Okay, let’s take an Enneagram test and just figure this out again. But I also thought, once you’re done with your book, for any listener out there that’s like, Okay, great, I can figure out my fiction characters better. Maybe it will help me write faster, whatever they’re dreaming about right now. What’s also interesting is that you talk about how to market. And that was one of the biggest points for my Enneagram type that I was like, oh, my gosh, I feel so much better now. I don’t have to market to everyone, which yeah, you know that. Your book isn’t for everyone. But when you break it down with the Enneagram, it’s like, all I have to do is find my people. I don’t know why it took me this long, but it did.

Claire

Well, I mean, it probably didn’t take you as long to figure out as it took me to figure out. So we’re all figuring it out together. And that is a big thing because you just want people to read your book so bad. It’s not abnormal for an author to become a little bit thirsty, in that way. But the truth is that there’s that 1000 true fans that we need. And if we got 1000 true fans, that’d be great. You’d be off to a fantastic start in your author career. And you can find 1,000 people that are into anything, frankly. If the internet has taught me anything, right? If the depths of the internet have taught me anything, it’s that you can find 1,000 people that are into anything. So it’s really about starting from what you’re into, what you want to produce, figuring out the words for it, who it is for, which the Enneagram helps us with, and then blasting that out, in whatever way is comfortable to you. You don’t have to do all the things. You don’t have to even do social media, frankly. There are plenty of authors who don’t really do social media but have found a way that works for them to make the book sales that feel good.

Kat

Right. Yeah, you can get off the hamster wheel. And I think David Gochran even says this, but he doesn’t quite go into how to do it. But he talks about how you can get 60,000 people in your author newsletter. Fine, you’re on your list, you’re sending out all these emails. If they are not the people who are going to read your book, it’s worthless. And that was one of the points that I really resonated with, with finding my Enneagram and then finding what types of stories I tend to write. And then, okay, now I’m going to go and find the people who tend to like those types of stories and get off the hamster wheel of going to try to convince all the other types that they’re going to like my book because why spend the money and time doing that?

Claire

Well, and it’s a very human impulse to try to find metrics to show that we are progressing. Those metrics, a lot of the times are like, how many Instagram followers do I have? How many subscribers do I have? Those are easy low hanging metrics that can help us chart progress. And it could be useful if it’s one of the metrics and not the only metric, or that all of our metrics are these sorts of follower count metrics or subscribers because we know that those don’t necessarily convert. And a lot of the people who we look at and we go, oh, my gosh, they have so many followers. They must be so famous. Wow, I’m so impressed. I just want to do whatever they tell me. You can buy followers. We don’t want to judge other people’s success on these because they can be fraudulent. And we also don’t want to judge our own success on this because it can be fickle. And there are a lot of authors who are making what they need to write full-time, and you wouldn’t know it based on how many subscribers they have or how many followers they have. Because that’s just not where they’re finding the people or the people who are following them are so rabbit. They’re like, yes, whatever you have, just tell me where to put my credit card number. I think it’s about really evaluating what metrics are going to make us happy and what metrics are going to keep us writing day after day when this is a difficult and often lonely job. And that could just be a metric of, did I write a scene that made me laugh today? That’s a perfectly good metric, and that’s the thing that’s going to keep you writing.

Kat

Yes. And not going after people who aren’t going to resonate with your books will probably keep you from not writing. I think it will help you in your mental health in the long run to just have this full circle of how you can sit down and write. You understand your characters better because of it, you understand yourself. And then when you go out into market, I cringe at any marketing because most of us just want to write and then pass the book off and have somebody else market it. But we’re all alone. You won’t just drive yourself crazy. And you won’t… I tell people you won’t get those crazy reviews because you marketed it to the wrong person. And if you understand yourself and your books and your marketing, come back full circle, you won’t get this, I don’t understand this book, and now it’s a review on Amazon forever.

Claire

Right. And usually those decisions that lead to that not ideal reader are results of either a need for instant gratification or you’ve been triggered in some way. And so it’s like, I’ve been triggered. My core fear has been triggered. This is something feels like a threat to my identity and my sense of self. And so now I’ve got to go, okay, yeah, sure. I’ll take this promotion for my Jessica Christ series that puts it in the religious and spirituality. Yeah, okay, that’ll get me some reads because I’m just like, I need more book sales. And then I go and it’s somehow under Christian literature and everyone’s mad at me now because it really splits a room. It really splits a room that series.

Kat

It’s a great idea, though. I think it’s a wonderful idea.

Claire

Well, it would get me some sales, but it would get me the wrong sales. And it would get me a lot of one star reviews. With the out of context Bible quotes.

Kat

Yes. you might not want to get there.

Claire

Yes. I mean, if that’s your thing, that’s fine. But that’s just not what that series is for.

Kat

Exactly. And that’s the thing is understanding that and understanding yourself and your books better and then your market better, right so having that full circle so that you always talk about just being happy and content in your author career. We don’t have to be the miserable artists.

Claire

Oh, no, don’t do that. Definitely don’t do that. There are all kinds of ways to be miserable in this world. Don’t make your writing one of them.

Kat

We don’t want to romanticize that. So you have more information about this. You have a YouTube channel all about writing with the Enneagram as well. What is that called?

Claire

That’s the I don’t know what the channel is even called, but if you go to ffs.media/yt, for YouTube, not because I’m white. But if that helps you remember it, go for it. That has all of my basic videos. And these are just introductory videos. So if you’re just trying to figure out what is the Enneagram, this is my free resources because it’s like, I don’t need to… Here it is. You can learn it on your own time, see if it’s something for you. My motivation is not to make a ton of money off of this. My motivation is to just reach as many people as I can. And so that’s how I start, especially because I get these same questions over and over again. And it’s like, hey, here’s a great place to explore in your own time and come back if you think that anything that I’m doing is useful and you want more of it. I have a free course, actually, I just remembered. This is the five-day author alignment, in the author alignment course. If you go to www.ffs.media/5day, and that’s like the number five in day. Basically, it’s laid out the same way as my book. So we talk about creative values, persona, themes, and protagonist, and then bringing it all together. And that’s for free. That’s for anyone who wants to get acquainted with it and have some resources and understand the process that I work on with authors. That is there. That’s available.

Kat

So that’s a great place to start. And then if you want to get the book or if you want to check out the master classes, where would they go for that?

Claire

ffs.media/classes. Those are the summer classes.

Kat

You’re so organized, Claire. And I would highly recommend everyone get onto Claire’s newsletter. You always talk about the things that are coming up and talk a little bit more about the Enneagram. And yeah, I encourage anyone to check it out, all the resources that she has, that Claire has both on YouTube and in the free course, see if it is something that will help you, honestly, just have more fun writing and in your author career, right? We want more happy authors out there.

Claire

And life is short. Life is short, you all. And do it enjoying the thing you want to enjoy. But also, if you are one of those people and you’re listening and you’re like, oh, the Enneagram. I get it. I get it. I can’t tell you how many people have been like, I was rejecting the Enneagram, because all my friends talked about it and they made it sound like a cult, right? Yeah, you know, Kat. Or I had some friends who are really into it, and they maybe used it dismissively, like, you’re such an 8. That thing. That ain’t what it’s about. So give myself a try. It’s not dismissive. It’s not just like, we’re not sorting you into Hogwarts houses. It’s useful. It’s useful information that can help you get to know yourself better and not only get to know yourself better, but get to enjoy yourself more. That is my disclaimer. If someone treated it like a cult, they didn’t understand it because it’s a liberation, not a control mechanism.

Kat

As some good Americans will always do, they will find a way.

Claire

I know. Yeah life finds it.

Kat

If you’re the head Enneagram person, you must do as I say. But I do have to say, yeah, that is one reason that I rejected it for a while. But you’re very good about not calling any one particular type out. It’s just like, this is how we are and it’s okay. Let’s just get to know ourselves and each other and our characters. And honestly, I, as somebody who tried to reject it a long time, I was telling you earlier, like today with my daughter, I’m like, listen, you are a type. I haven’t had her do that. You’re a certain type and you need to not expect the same things from your friends because they’re different. It really does help you both in your own author career and with writing. So thank you so much, Claire, for coming on and telling us. I know there’s a lot to talk about in just 40 minutes so that we didn’t even cover everything. But I will have the links in the show notes below for people to get to know you even better.

Claire

Awesome. Thanks for having me on, Kat. This was fun.

The post Ep 186 The Writer’s Enneagram with Claire Taylor first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.

In publishing you have traditional publishing, indie publishing and hybrid publishing. Mountain Ash Press combines the expertise of two female writers, Caroline Topperman and Andi Cumbo, to create a boutique hybrid press that helps writers from the beginning concept of a book all the way to the end. Today I have them on the show to talk about everything their press does for authors, how they came up with the idea and a fun retreat they’ll be hosting in the fall of 2023.Visit Mountain Ash Press on their website here: https://mountainash.press/

Do you want to attend a retreat in Spain? Come join us for a week of writing and creative inspiration in Toledo, Spain at the Write With Us! Writing Retreat. Click here for more information. https://katcaldwell.com/write-all-week

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TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:

Kat

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Pencils in Lipstick. I’m excited to have you have two guests with me today, Caroline Topperman and Andi Combo. Andi has been with me before, but this time they are together because they have endeavored on Mountain Ash Press, and we are going to talk about how they can help authors like you become published. So welcome. How are you doing?

Andi

Good. Thank you.

Caroline

Good. Happy to be here.

Kat

Well, thanks for coming on. I think we’ll go first with Andi. You’ve been on the podcast before, but just as a writer. So introduce yourself a little bit, Andi, and then we’ll go to Caroline on just who you are as people.

Andi

Sure. So I’m Andi Combo. I live in Virginia and I write cozy mysteries and soon hopefully romantic comedies. And I have been an indie published author, but I just recently got an agent, so now we’re shopping my books out to traditional publishers.

Kat

Oh, very cool. And Caroline is your partner in crime here for the press. Hi, Caroline.

Caroline

Hi. I’m Caroline, and I’m right now in Toronto, Canada, so across the border from everyone. I actually come from a screen writing background, but I’ve recently written a memoir that I am currently shopping around to agents, and I’ve also been indie published.

Kat

Wow, very cool. So you guys have quite the background on both writing and different ways of publishing between the two of you.

Caroline

Yes. And that’s why we joined forces. That’s the exact reason why we decided to work together.

Kat

So there’s quite a few, and you live near me. There’s a lot of distance between the two of you. So how first did you guys meet?

Caroline

I think I found Andi and I followed one of her newsletters. I signed up to one of her newsletters. And then Andi was… Oh, I know. Andi was actually hosting, she was doing coaching for creatives who were trying to bring their writing life and whatever other creative endeavors they do. And she was trying to help them bring that together. And that’s exactly where I was at the point in my life where I had all these things and I didn’t know how to bring them into one cohesive poll. So I worked with Andi for a few months. Clearly, it went well. And then we just decided this idea of a press came to mind. I asked Andi if she’d like to join forces. And the rest is history.

Kat

And here you are. That’s so awesome. So tell me a little bit about Mountain Ash Press. Is it a go now? Are you guys taking manuscripts?

Andi

We are. Yeah, we have a few clients already and a few in the works, so it’s pretty exciting. And yeah, so what we do is we work with writers who have anything from an idea to a finished book, and we help them get that book into print whatever way they want to. We really don’t prioritize indie over traditional publishing. We think they’re both great avenues for different reasons. And so we do everything from book coaching to loading it to Amazon.

Kat

Wow. Okay. That sounds like a lot of work. I’m already glad you two are doing it. So why did you want to keep, I guess we call it somewhat a hybrid, although I think you guys are a bit unique in offering book coaching from idea to final product. I personally haven’t heard of that. I don’t know if other people are doing that. So how did you come to this decision of bringing an author along on the full journey?

Caroline

I think there’s just a demand for it. What happened is that I was doing some book coaching, and I actually worked with a client for close to two years, and she needed help with that final last bit. So I sent her to Andi. Somehow I was still involved in the project. And so it evolved from that, really. And there really is that need. I see that quite often that people work with an editor, then they have this manuscript, and then they’re like, now what? What do I do with this? And we decided if we could be a full service house, that would be great. And what we’d like to do, I just want to add later on too, is to have a contest where people can submit, and then we will traditionally publish their book as well. So that’s where we fit into that hybrid mode right now for now. But there’s just this, you said it, it’s really hard to finally get your book out there. And there are so many components. There’s the marketing. Sometimes it’s even just figuring out a good cover page for a book. And because we have experience with that and we have our strengths in different spots, they don’t have to look to a 1,000 different people to help them. We have somebody that we will potentially be working with, and she was very open. She’s like, look, I’m going to write one book. This is it. And I don’t want to worry about all the other stuff. And then the other bonus, because you do get this with some of the hybrid presses, is that then they’ll take a cut of your income from your book, and we don’t do that. So you pay for our services upfront, you get the work, we help you put it out in the world, the book is yours.

Kat

That’s nice. I can imagine this working together is very comforting to people just because that’s how it used to be. And the whole creative process, I can write a book and I’m in the middle of finding a book cover and I’m going insane because what I like personally might not be actually for the genre and being able to talk with somebody who has a more critical eye and isn’t so personally involved in the book just sounds like a very nice process.

Andi

Yeah. And because we’ve done it all ourselves, as writers, we know how to talk about that, which is to remember that books are precious to their creators, but also they’re pieces of their product that has to be sold. And so hopefully we’re compassionate towards everybody who wants, I don’t know, flowers on their cover and market it to men so we can say, well, men don’t usually buy books with flowers. All their flowers are really pretty. We can hold that middle ground for people. Which is I think one of the things that’s sometimes harder with traditional publishers is that they don’t have to be don’t usually have the experience with the writing part. And so this way we carry that compassion in, but also the expertise to help people get things to print.

Kat

Yeah, absolutely. When did you guys open house?

Andi

The beginning of May 2023. We’re open a few weeks now, and we did it on a spur of a moment and then discovered that because we’re in two different countries, we have to figure out a whole lot of the back end business stuff, but we’re getting it all together. And we got some good clients. We’ve got a poetry collection coming out later this year and then a memoir and a recipe art book. It’s beautiful. And that’s another thing that we do is we can work with people whose books don’t really fit the niches of genre. So we can help people put books out that would not find a traditional publisher, maybe because they’re too unique. But there are people that can market them. This client has a very big platform. She has people that follow her that are interested in what she’s doing. So she can sell the book, but she was not going to find a traditional publisher for it.

Kat

Yeah, that is one of the problems, right. As much as they claim there are no more gatekeepers, there are definitely. They are definitely gatekeeping some. I mean, they have to make a profit. And if you guys watched at all that debacle that they had over here in DC of testimonies and all that, it was like, you guys literally have no idea what you’re doing. That’s what I came away with. So I would feel more comfortable going with you two, where you have actually done it yourself. Like you said, you’re writers. You’ve been part of that opposite end, right?

Caroline

Exactly. And that’s part of it is that even though, yes, the press is technically new, our experience is not.

Caroline

There’s years and years of accumulated experience in the industry, in different facets of the industry. Each of us has a network of people that we know that we can draw upon. So none of that is new. It’s just the actual partnership and the name is new.

Kat

Right. So when you guys talk about book coaching and bringing people through, if they come with you, do they find editors and everything? Is that all included or are there some things that people might have to find outside of Mountain Ash Press?

Caroline

No, it’s all inclusive if they want it that way. So they have the choice. One of our clients, she had an artist friend who actually did all the illustrations for, it’s like a beauty recipe book that the art book Andi was mentioning. And so she had an artist friend who did all the illustrations for her, and she had somebody also do the cover. And it’s beautiful. Absolutely, she brought that in herself. And that’s reflected with how we’ve worked with her. And so, yeah, they can if they want to. But if they don’t, if they just want to hand us words on a page, we can help with the rest of it. Yeah. So we don’t require them to do anything if they don’t want to.

Kat

That’s amazing. Very cool. So you guys have your… I take it you’re not going to niche to a specific genre because both of you write in different genres anyway. So is there any genre is open to submitting to Mountain Ash Press?

Andi

Yeah, we’re happy to consider anything. I think we’re not as likely to publish business books because that’s just not our market. But particularly anything on the creative nonfiction, fiction side of things. But then also we’ve done a lot of books ourselves and with other people that are heritage books. I want to keep this for my family. So that’s the poetry collection we’re doing is a man’s mother wrote a bunch of poetry and did some drawings, and so we’re producing that. Those kinds of things we’re happy to do. And then for the traditional, if somebody wants to publish traditionally, then our considerations for taking it on will just simply be like, do we think we can help you find an agent and a publisher? And if not, we can coach you on how to maybe make your book fit that. And if not, then we’ll just tell you, we’re not a good fit for you because we don’t know how to pitch your book. Although I haven’t met a book that we haven’t figured out how to pitch.

Kat

You have to have that caveat in case something really strange comes up. Out of the box, we will say. When you say heritage, somebody, like you had mentioned before, I think it’s a one book they don’t really want to… It’s not so much, I guess, for sale. And I guess for you, because you’re not taking royalties, that doesn’t matter as much to you then.

Caroline

No. Because we respect it. So one of the books is a memoir, and I believe this person will want to put it up on all the platforms and we’ll help them with that, and that will be fine. But it’s a family memoir that will be for sale. And we also will sell it on our website because more places for it to be seen. So we will publicize it as well. And then the book of poetry, for example, that book will be… I’m not sure we’ve just started discussing it with this individual. If they want to put it on the website or not, we can as well, if anybody else wants it. It does have, in my opinion, the book does have some value, heritage value, which I think it would be great if they agreed to it. But that will be more for their family. Okay. So the first run will be for their family.

Kat

I think that’s really interesting that you’re going to sell it from your website because I’ve heard, I think it’s Joanna Penn has always said, she doesn’t understand why traditional publishers don’t have a bookstore, at least their own online. If you love Simon & Schuster, go there and you can find the books. So you guys have decided to do that yourselves.

Andi

Yeah. I run for my books. I sell them through my website. And so we just use those mechanism. If it’s traditionally published book, then we just get permission from the publisher to link to where they are selling it. But if it’s something that we publish for someone, it can be on our site if they want it there. And then it’ll just work just like if you buy it from any other retailer. You’ll pay and it’ll get shipped to you and it’ll be… It’s actually a very simple process. So I don’t really understand, again, Joanna Penn and I are on the same page, why the publishers are doing that. But yeah, we will make that happen if people want it on our site.

Kat

Yeah. I think that it’s just like you said, Caroline, it’s another place to buy your book, to have it out there. It helps your Google and everything. You have to find it there. That’s interesting, I know. Sometimes I really don’t understand the traditional press sometimes. But with the traditional press, I read a story just the other day of how you have to come with an audience. These days you can’t just have a spectacular book. You have to come with an Instagram audience or something like that. So what is Mountain Ash Press’s stance on that? What do people need when they come? Do they need 5,000 followers?

Caroline

4,999, at least. No, kidding. Big bird people get heart palpitations. No, I mean, again, because… So it depends. That’s true for nonfiction and genres like memoir. It’s not so much the truth for fiction books in the bigger, wider world of publishing. We will coach people. We have a package, part of our package, too, includes coaching people on how to increase their platforms, but it’s also to help teach people how to use them. So, for example, I’ve been working with this woman who is a singer, on Instagram, we’ll use that one, she has a couple of hundred followers. It’s nothing. And honestly, until you get into the tens of thousands, it’s nothing. We will not help you. I hope we can, but chances are we will not make a post go viral. You will not suddenly wake up the next day and be like, Oh, I have 100 million followers. This lady, for example, she does have just a good number, several thousand on Facebook, but she’s a singer and she has other connections and she has connections to some big names. And it’s more about helping people flip the switch of, oh, wait, it doesn’t have to be social media. That’s not just platform. There’s so much more to it because her audience is huge, actually. She does singing retreats and meditation retreats, and she does all these things. And I’m like, those are your people. It’s about teaching them that part of it as well. It’s more of in a mentoring, coaching capacity that we do that because those are their people. But that’s how we will focus on helping them sell their books.

Kat

Okay. You have experience with this, right? The last time we spoke, you were doing exactly that, like mentoring creatives on business.

Andi

On business stuff, yes. So we’re trying to help people understand that they don’t have to be overwhelmed by building a platform. You don’t have to be on every platform posting 25 times a day. You can link things, you can post the same things you can be where you’re comfortable being. I tried TikTok because Caroline made me, and I just couldn’t do it anymore. It’s just too much for me. That where I am personally in my life. I have a little kid. I just don’t have the mental space to create a video all the time. But I can do Instagram photos and I can be on Facebook pretty regularly. So we just help people understand who they are and what they want to do. I have a friend who’s writing a memoir about Vietnam, and he knows every veteran’s group here in the US and could sell 100,000 copies probably just by telling those people about it. So just give them a sense of platform that’s broader than what your Snapchat numbers are but there we are.

Kat

No, I think that’s an important point to make to authors, whether they’re memoir writers or fiction writers, is the people who follow you on Facebook, because we’ve all been around for a couple of decades, since I’ve been alive and adult before Facebook was around. So the people who follow me might not necessarily want my book. The writer who’s writing about Vietnam, that might not be the audience that he has following him on Facebook, but he has another way to find this specific audience for that book, right?

Caroline

Absolutely. I honestly think none of my family has ever bought my book.

Kat

Oh, no. Everyone should get rid of that idea right away. Sometimes you don’t want them to. I have an author friend that wrote it in the book. If you are a family member, put this book down now, or don’t talk to me about it after.

Andi

That’s a really good epigraph. I like that. Well, and also just this idea of helping people understand that because your friends and family don’t buy your books doesn’t mean they don’t support you. Their job isn’t to be your customer. Their job is to be your friends and your family. That’s also part of what we try to tell writers, because it can be really discouraging if you think, I love my brother. He’s amazing. I’m pretty sure he’s never read anything I’ve written, but he’s a composer. And honestly, I haven’t listened to his music either, although I’m all the way behind him, but his music is just weird to me. It’s not my thing. So don’t tell him I said that. But we got to help people understand how marketing works. And it’s about finding the right audience for your books. It’s not about no book is for everybody, despite what some of our clients may think sometimes. Every book has an audience. So we want to help them think about who that is. And then how do you reach those people? And that could be social media. It could be speaking at the VFW. It could be a church, it could be anything.

Kat

Yeah. And it might change per book that you write, depending on what genre you’re writing.

Caroline

Yeah. And it’s also about… So one of the things that we’ve coached people on to is to start your publicity early, before your book comes out. Start talking to outlets, start writing if you can, depending on the book, of course, but you can write articles for different places, and then they will post your book when it comes out, they’ll post it to their people. And it’s just about understanding that your job isn’t done after that last word comes on the page. Unfortunately, we’re sorry, there’s still a lot more work to do. It doesn’t end.

Kat

But it would be nice to have you two next to the writer being like, okay, what do I do now? Because it’s true, you might want to write a book, but gosh, what do you do afterwards? I think every indie author, at least, and possibly traditionally published, the first time they wrote was probably like, oh, I’m not done yet. I can’t just go and write the next one.

Caroline

But here’s the thing. So let’s think just traditional for a second. The world has changed. It’s not like I find my agent and my agent sells my book and it gets published by one of the top five and I get to sit back and watch the money roll in through my door. That’s not going to happen. You are actually expected to use your advance to market your book. So unless you will have pre-sold three million copies and then you’re in a different league and you don’t meet us anyway. Although we’d be happy to help you if you’re out there. More than happy to help you. But the idea is that, let’s say we get a client who comes in and says, I need help, for instance, cleaning up my book, we’ll do the developmental edit, we’ll go through the line editing, we’ll do all the proofreading. Then they’re like, well, but maybe I’d like to do traditional. That’s fantastic. But now is actually the time where you need to start getting your name out there and you need to start talking about it. Because guess what happens when an agent or even one of the mid range presses that you have to submit to, even one of those presses, they’re going to Google you. They’re going to look you up. We will at that point, also help them with their pre-marketing marketing and getting their name out there. And if there’s a place that you can write an article for, if there’s a podcast you can get on, if there is any interview you can do, you should be doing it because you’re already building buzz around your book. And that’s what the super traditional, that’s what they’re looking for.

Kat

Right. They are looking for you to be more involved than what we maybe idealize in our heads as writers, like what they used to do in Stephen King in the 80s and 70s, like everyone. But it’s a hard mindset shift because we just grew up with that. And wouldn’t it be nice if you could just pass it off and not have to do anything else?

Caroline

I would love that. I would love it. But there’s reality.

Andi

That’s right. And we do everything too. If we get somebody that’s just at the beginning of their career and they want to have a big presence, then we’ll help them. We have people we can hire out to help them work the website, build a basic website. These things all cost a lot of money and they take a lot of time and energy. So it’s nice if you can have us manage that communication and the back and forth on things so that you don’t have to do that. But yeah, I mean, the average time span that a publisher will spend on your books is two weeks once they’re out, you get two weeks of marketing time from them. And then because they have other clients and they have to continue to make money, they move on to the next book. So yeah, they might do you a national press tour, but it’ll be done and their attention to you will be done in two weeks. We can teach you how to keep the attention on you for a longer period of time without killing yourself.

Kat

That’s a good point to make, without killing yourself, without starting to hate everything about your book. No, I do think it’s a big mindset shift. I’ve been spending more time in learning marketing for all the things I want to do. And I’m sure you guys have learned it both for your books and for getting Mountain Ash Press out to the world. And it’s just another beast. And it’s something that you have to learn and learn how to not kill yourself while doing it.

Andi

Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of people think that marketing piece isn’t creative. It is. This is differently creative. I love marketing. I actually find it really fun. I love having conversations like this and talking with people. I love figuring out how to get my kid’s favorite YouTubers to comment on him, which I did last night. He was so excited this morning. That creativity, it’s just different than the creativity that goes into writing. And they can feed each other. They don’t have to drain one another. They can actually be empowering in both senses.

Kat

Yeah. And I can see how if you have already seen the fun in that, you can help mentor someone who might be dreading it to find that fun. That’s probably your mystery writer figuring out the puzzle. But we do better together. Having some community around you and showing you like, no, but let’s make this fun and how you can do that. That sounds way more exciting than sitting in my office trying to figure out another reel for the next week.

Caroline

That’s the magic. You need the community. There’s no way, maybe there’s like one person out of every million people who will actually like doing this by themselves. But there’s so many new things happening, so many new places, so many resources that it’s hard to navigate through all of them. What we want to be is we want to be your partner in all of that. That’s how we approach it in that way, that we’re there. If you have questions, we’ll help answer those questions. I agree, marketing, it’s a lot of fun. And it’s not all that different than writing. The writing is more solitary, and then it has to stop being solitary at some point. I mean, if you want someone to read your book.

Kat

Yes. No, it’s true, though. Editors used to be that book coach, really, that person that would walk alongside them. And like Fitzgerald, I was reading the Artful Edit, right? And it goes with his editor, and it’s like, this is a book coach. He’s reading as he’s writing. He’s giving feedback, he’s helping him along. He’s pointing things out, inconsistencies, adding, what if you do this? What if you do that? And it’s like, oh, my gosh. It’s like a light bulb. And I was like, yes. I don’t think writing has ever been this really actually solitary endeavor in the sense of they never let anyone see the book until it came to the bookstore. And then all of a sudden it was a sensation. Writers have always had mentors, just like every other artist. I don’t know where we came up with this idea that we have to do it by ourselves.

Andi

And this idea, too, I think that illusion creates this preciousness. About the books we write, which means then we get really defensive and protective over our work when really, often people are just trying to help. And if you’re going to put your book in the world, you got to be ready for people to not love every single phrase you put on the page. I mean, it’s painful to me every time I get a note or somebody doesn’t like something. But if you can do that with people beside you who can say, okay, just put that email away for 24 hours, just set it aside for a minute, take a deep breath, do something you love, remind yourself people love you, and then come back, we can help you put that in perspective. But if you try to do this in a solitary manner, you don’t have anybody to give you perspective on. And then you’re just going to always be defensive about your work because you poured yourself into it. Of course you did.

Kat

Yes. I do also think you’re mentoring on marketing. If you’re marketing to the right person, the right group, you’ll still get the emails, but maybe fewer than if you’re trying to market a clean romance to all romance readers. Just understanding the differences. You’ve been in that indie industry, so cozy mystery is different than a gritty mystery, right?

Andi

Oh, yes. I can’t put, I said a swear word, a very mild swear word in one of my books. Oh, my word. The women were upset. I got a lot of emails about it because I crossed the line in the genre and I did it intentionally. I knew what I was doing. But if I didn’t know what I was doing, that would be really devastating to get all these people scandalized by the fact that I wore in the book. But I knew I was pushing it on purpose. You have to know that stuff. And it’s not stuff that you can just know intuitively. You have to learn it. Carolina and I have been in this business a long time. So we’ve just done things we know, and we can tell you like, oh, yeah, somebody’s going to be upset about something and you just can’t take it personally. It’s going to hurt, but you can’t take it personally.

Kat

Yeah, absolutely. I can just see how this would be nice. And of course, there is a payment to have your services, right? But I will just tell everyone listening, the amount of money you might spend on all the little courses and all the little formatting things and setting up your website and all the time you spend not understanding WordPress and then finally dishing out, I might be talking about somebody I know myself. And it’s great that there’s a lot of services out there that people want to help with, like make 30 reels in 30 minutes or whatever. You could do that, or you could just come to people like you in Mountain Ash Press and just get it all together. Maybe not feel so chaotic.

Caroline

Well, that’s the other thing, too. And then the cost that we’re forgetting about, if you’re going in little pieces, and it’s fair, some people prefer to do that. They have their own system. That’s fantastic. But the time that you forget about, too, is how much your time costs to have to follow up with people and organize it. I’ve seen this recently on one of our clients, and it’s pretty funny is that the client sends one bit of information, and then there’s about 30 emails in the background happening between us and the person that we’re working with to make it happen that the client never sees. And there’s all these back end emails to make sure that it gets… So for example, a cover page or layout, just to make sure that everything is exactly the way the client wants it, we’re managing all of that. So instead of the client having to figure it out and be like, I don’t understand the terminology, I don’t get it. I don’t know. The client lives their life. We do all the back end work and then we come to the client with the finished product.

Kat

Nice. That sounds very nice. Instead of being like, no, it’s still a millimeter wrong. Whenever your spine is like, I will never do a different color spine again, ever. Please remind me next time. But knowing that stuff, it’s my first book. So it’s like knowing that little thing and how much time I spent on that issue. And you’re waiting for them to answer. And you’re no one. You’re like that, peon author that’s having a problem. It’s just nice to have somebody else advocate. And again, the emotions might be a little lower, right?

Andi

We won’t tell the story of how much time I tried to do proper headers in my first book. Lord in heaven, I lived alone and had chickens, but those chickens heard some choice language for me as I tried to get those headers, right?

Kat

Well, especially before all the formatting software. I remember trying to get Adobe, whatever that was design or something. It’s like it keeps moving. And I’ve worked with clients that will send me a Word doc and then change it to PDF. And I’m like, no, I’ve tried that before. This is not going to work. It’s all the little things that you guys can save people from these frustrations.

Andi

That’s right. Yeah, one of our clients just said he went on to try to figure out how to load things to the retailers and got into there and went, no, I’m not doing this. I’m just going to call Andi. We’re going to get it done.

Kat

Yeah, it’s gotten more and more complicated as I’m trying to learn Facebook ads and I just can’t. What is this word? What are you guys talking about? So how do people… This sounds nice to have two people, two women coming alongside them and helping them from concept to book and beyond. How do they approach Mountain Ash Press? What do they need before they contact you guys?

Andi

A sense of where they are. That’s really all that they need. Do they have an idea of a book and they just want to figure out if this is feasible? What’s the process from there? That’s one place they can come in. They have a finished draft and they want to find an agent. We can help them with that. If they have a finished draft and they just want to have us load it to retailers for them, we have a client we’re doing that for right now, we’re happy to do that. Like anything, wherever they are, they just need to have enough sense of where they are to be able to tell us where they are, and then we can tell them where to go from there.

Kat

Okay. So they just go to MountainAsh.Press, and is there a form that they fill out?

Caroline

Yeah. So they can email us directly, but there is a form as well that we will probably send them. If it’s just an idea, then of course not, because we need to jump on a call with them. But yeah, if they already have a manuscript, then we do have a form for them to fill out just so we can get as much information as possible so that we can then… It gives us a better idea of how to steer them. We’ll usually jump on a call with them, about 15, 20 minute call, but this might give us a better idea. So, for example, we have a potential client and they sent us some of the artwork for their book. They sent us some bits and pieces, which was great because then what we could do is send them back about 20 things we need to know before we could give them a proper quote. And it made sense for this client. I know that might sound overwhelming for someone, but that’s that idea is just what they need. Then we get together, we figure it out in the background, and then we send them a step-by-step list, item list of what we can do, what we can provide with costs so that they can make a decision.

Kat

Okay. So basically your packages are personalized?

Andi

Yeah. We also set packages that they can get a sense of if you’re coming at this point, this is the price you’re looking at. If you’re coming at this point. But we do them bespoke, I feel fancy saying that, for each client based on what we’re going to have to contribute. So if a client has a cover done, and then but they want their book pre-read. We have a stable, it’s also a fancy word, of people we hired out and we just do our cost based on our prices based on what those costs are going to be. It’s not about just spitballing a number. We do math, which is very hard for us, but we work at it very hard. We do figure it out eventually. We’re word people, but we do numbers. And we also have an assistant who is better at numbers than we are. So check it.

Caroline

We try to be very transparent, too. We’re not hiding anything. This is my time to do X, Y, Z for you, and this is what it’s going to cost, and this is it. We really don’t want the hidden fees. One client we quoted for recently, for example, she was just hollering and humming about something, so we said, Okay, well, this will be the base. And if you want this, it’s going to be this. This is this. This is this. That’s it.

Kat

Right. Just have it out in the open. I haven’t looked at it for a while, but once you’re known as the writer, sometimes they’ll come to you for advice. So I’ve looked at different contracts for other hybrid presses, and it’s been about six years since I’ve looked at them. And usually they are like one size fits all. This is what you’re going to get. You’re going to get a poster, you’re going to get this. And I have made phone calls of like, what if they don’t want it? And they’re like, well, too bad, take it or leave it, put it in the trash. This is what we give you. So this sounds much nicer of like, okay, if somebody can bring their own artwork, why would they pay a package that includes artwork? So that just to give people who are listening an idea of the difference that you guys are bringing to the market, really, in this industry.

Andi

Neither of us wants to own a conglomerate, where we aren’t actually hands on in touch with what’s happening. We’re very personally involved. We’re not graphic designers, so we’re going to hire a graphic designer, but we’re going to be the people talking to that graphic designer. We have proofreaders that work with us, and we’re going to be the people talking to them. We want to be involved in that. We’re not doing this to try to fleece writers, which some presses are, honestly. We’re just trying to help. We really want to help. We have done all of this ourselves. I mean, I’ve been in this business for more than 10 years, and I would have killed to have somebody walk me through this when I was starting. It was so hard to learn how to do it. I was already trying to figure out how to write a book, much less learn all this other stuff. That’s what we want is the relationships with people.

Kat

And there’s more stuff now. There’s more stuff to decide. Do you want to go why? Do you not want to go why? What does that even mean? Should I get an audiobook? I don’t know. Just to be able to ask those questions instead of going to every free webinar available in 2014, that was my life.

Andi

Yes. And those are great. I mean, I love Mark Dawson’s ads course. It’s great for somebody who just wants to piecemeal a process together for doing ads or something. But if you don’t want to have to learn it piecemeal, we can do it, but we can also teach you how to do it. I think that’s the balance is you can hand it to us and we’ll just take care of it. Or you can be back and forth with us and we’ll help you learn how to do it.

Caroline

And I want to just add to that, we don’t disappear because I found sometimes too, when I’ve worked with editors or people, they go, okay, thanks. And then I don’t hear from them for two months. And I know how I am. That would make me really nervous because I’d be like, while they’re not talking to me, they must hate it. This must be the worst thing I’ve ever done. And you get emotional about it, even if you don’t want to. So we don’t disappear. We’re still there. We will check in. You can check in. We might tell you that, look, we’re going to disappear for two weeks because we need to work on this. But sometime in that two weeks, we will let you know we’re still working on it. Everything is good. This is what’s happening. So you’re never left hanging because I think that’s the worst feeling.

Kat

It really is, especially if you’re new at it. Well, I’m not sure it will ever get better when you’re at it. Are you done yet? Is it terrible? I don’t know.

Kat

And the other problem on the other end that listeners might not know is when the editor is actually done, they’re actually done. So if you are editing your book again and a new idea comes to you, you have to approach the editor again and resubmit it. Unless you have a really great relationship with them. But we’re talking about just those of us who have a couple of books or maybe our first book. That’s a real eye opening experience as well that you guys wouldn’t have that problem if a writer came to you.

Andi

Right. Because we make ourselves available. If you rewrite your whole book, yes, we’re going to have to re-edit it for you, and that’s fine. But we’re still going to be willing to do that. We’re here and we have a calendar, we’re people, so we have limits to our time and energy. But our whole goal is to be in relationship with our clients long-term. So we hope that they keep coming back to us every time they need something. Right, Caroline? Is that what you hope?

Caroline

Yes.

Kat

So the other thing that you guys are doing is hosting a retreat as if you guys weren’t busy enough. So tell me about this retreat.

Caroline

Yeah, I don’t know what we were thinking.

Kat

You can’t back out now.

Caroline

Now we’ve said it. I’m actually super excited about it. I know Andi’s hosted retreats before. I’ve never hosted one, so I’m really excited to do this. And it will be in Canada, but that’s actually a bonus for all the American listeners because we have funny money up here.

Kat

The dollars are going to be further a little bit.

Caroline

A lot. Right now, a lot. It might be a great time to get away. It’s going to be from November 9th to the 13th. It will be in Niagara on the Lake, which is just near Niagara Falls, actually. It’s just north of Buffalo. It’s not that hard. It’s easy to get to. We are one of our guests will be Susan Scott. She was an editor for the New Quarterly, which is a big magazine here. Then both Andi and I will be hosting workshops as well. There will be free time to write. There will be time to go into town, which is its wine country. That’s just always a fun place to be.

Kat

It’ll help your writing.

Caroline

It will help with the creativity, or you could drown your sorrows. But the other bonus is that we’re finalizing detail still. However, the inn has already said that it’ll be three nights, four days, but the inn will be throwing in an extra night before or after so people can just come and stay and enjoy the region.

Caroline

They’ve been very generous with that.

Kat

Wow. There are going to be workshops and writing time.

Andi

Workshops, writing time, potentially a writing workshop as a group so you can get some feedback on your work. We’re talking about doing a group dinner one night so we can all connect because that’s another thing we would like is everybody to really get to know one another and us. And the place we’re looking at is gorgeous. So it’ll be like, hopefully a respite as well as a place to build your craft and build your network.

Kat

Okay. And you don’t have to be don’t have to be a client of Mountain Ash Press to go?

Andi

No.

Kat

Okay. All right. That sounds amazing.

Andi

All the information will be on our website so you can pull it up and make your deposit and reserve your space.

Kat

Awesome. Okay. So MountainAsh.Press, we will have the website in the show notes, of course. And I encourage you guys to just check it out. And if this is something that you want to do, if you are feeling like you need a little bit of help, no matter what it is, from idea to formatting, to getting your book out and marketing, I encourage you guys to just click on the website and check it out. I have talked to Andi a couple of times. She is lovely to talk to. And Caroline and I have talked now a few times, and she is fun as well. So definitely go to MountainAsh.Press and see all the expertise that you guys can get in one place. But thank you so much, Caroline and Andi. Thank you for coming on the show.

Andi

Thanks for having us.

Caroline

Thank you.

The post Ep 185 Mountain Ash Press with Andi Combo and Caroline Topperman first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.

Have you ever considered becoming a ghost writer? Are you trying to write your story, but find yourself stuck and are wondering if hiring a ghost writer might be the best idea for you? Today I talk with JB Favour about the ins and outs of ghostwriting. This is an episode if you want to find out how to be a ghostwriter, what it requires of you and how to get started. And this episode is also for anyone with a story who doesn’t want to write it themselves.

Are you looking for information about the Write With Us! Writing Retreat in Toledo, Spain? Go here: katcaldwell.com/write-with-us-writing-retreat-2023/

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TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:

Kat

All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Pencils & Lipstick. Today I have with me JB Favour. Hi, JB. How are you doing?

JB

Hi, Kat. I’m doing great. Thank you. How are you doing?

Kat

Good, good. I’m so excited to talk to you. So we have a friend in common, Stacey Juba, an internet friend. But before we get into it, could you just introduce yourself to the listeners? Tell us where you’re from and a little bit about who you are.

JB

Okay. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Pencils & Lipstick podcast. My name is JB Favour and I am a ghostwriter and a poet as well. So I have the technical skills that help me write the stories.

Kat

Oh, that’s amazing. I’m really excited to talk to you about ghostwriting. I think that it’s an incredible skill. So what exactly got you into ghostwriting in the first place? What about writing in general, I guess?

JB

Okay. About writing in general, I’ve always liked. That’s the best thing. I’ve always loved to write, actually. When I was little, I used to have this journal, I still have my journal, I used to call it my sad journal. I just like to put my sad thoughts. If I was having a bad day, I had this little note, I just put in there, oh, someone made me upset today. This is interesting. I just scripple it in there. It often bonded very well with poetry. The next thing automatically would be to write a poem about the feeling or emotion that I was feeling at the time. I just knew that I like to write. And if people saw the stuff that I wrote, not the Journal of Gospel, my poems, they would tell me, This is really good. This is good. And having a very imaginative mind, I’m always scribbling stuff that looked like scripts back in the day. And I just write a little short story and pass it out for my science. And my teacher would be like, this is a really good story. Where did you copy it from? I’m like, no, it’s from my head. So that was how I knew that I could do a good job with writing. And it was just something that I could do effortlessly. But it was not too long time that I eventually learned that people could pay you to write. I had no idea.

Kat

I think this happened. This is like cross cultural. I can write, but I better go get a different job. So many of us think that we can’t be paid. So then did you go on to do something else before you got into ghostwriting?

JB

Yeah, exactly. So I’m African, Nigerian especially, and you cannot be a Nigerian child, telling your parents that you want to be a writer. What is that? Well, go write out your spare time. You can’t be a writer in my house. So that doesn’t happen here. So what I did was I did like every kid going to school. I studied medical laboratory sciences, and that’s the field that I actually was in because… just go be a doctor. One of the prestigious things you could ever become as an African child and the culture back home. That’s what I studied. But it was during the COVID actually, then I decided that I wasn’t going to practice my field anymore. I was already writing before that time, but I was trying to combine it. Still get the job, but COVID I’m like, no, hands down, stop everything. I’ve been wasting my time. This is not something I’m passionate about. I want to do stuff that I’m passionate about. Let’s chase it.

Kat

Yeah. And I think the world has changed so much, right? So our parents… I mean, you’re younger than me, but probably they didn’t grow up with the Internet. My parents didn’t grow up with the Internet. I barely grew up with the Internet. So jobs have changed. The possibility of running a business online, like you and I, we were just talking, we’re talking across the ocean. That’s amazing. So it’s almost like a possibility that our parents didn’t think was possible. Why would they think that?

JB

Sure. And I don’t blame them.

Kat

Right. No, dad, at some point I will get clients in Australia and it’ll be fine. I’d be like, you’re crazy. That’s not going to happen. So you went through all the medical training. So you are trained. You’re like, no, we’re done, during COVID, you want to just go full on writing.

JB

Actually, I just got the basic educational degree. I didn’t practice because I was supposed to go for a year internship, all that practice. But I quit. So I didn’t go for that. It’s more like I just get the degree, put it in my bag and I’m done. That’s what I did.

Kat

If you ever have to fall back on it. I mean, COVID changed a lot. It’s a big deal. We’re three years out and maybe we can keep moving forward, but it was a big deal. We need to not forget. Shutting down was big. So you were writing before that, though. Were you writing your own poetry? Were you doing your things or were you already ghostwriting while studying and working?

JB

I was already writing. But it was after the COVID time that I actually took it more like a career. I was already ghostwriting, but I was writing the work and all the things because I wasn’t really sure that I could balance because there’s a thing, there’s an inside joke that we artists have that authors are not really rich people. I was there in the writing world and I was seeing that there’s not so much money and we have bills to pay. So it’s like, do it, be broke, don’t do it, and have something to fall back on. But it was COVID that taught me because when COVID came, the job was real dull. I couldn’t really work. And I realized that I had been holding myself back because since I was trying to juggle so many things at once, it was also during the time till I had a show, I was host of people… And because I was juggling different things at the same time, I couldn’t focus on one because it’s a career. People think you can’t really make that in a career, but I disagree. You can make it a full-time career. In fact, it’s a whole big career. It’s a whole lot of work. Because I was divided, I couldn’t give her the attention that I needed. It wasn’t growing the way it was supposed to grow. I was getting clients, I was doing some pre-lessons, but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t even know that there was a lot more to just being a ghostwriter. You have to actually make people know that you are a ghostwriter. That involves some serious marketing. I wasn’t doing that because my time was divided. But when COVID came, I realized that the whole thing that I was worrying about was gone. COVID took it all. And you’re not able to come back on this writing. So I realized that I could actually live without those jobs. I could live without all these things that provided attention and just do my thing. I just did that.

Kat

Right. That’s an amazing, like, epiphany, though, to be like, oh, what I thought I was falling back on, actually, I’m falling back on my writing. Like, what a reversal there to be like, oh, when you take that away because no one would have ever before COVID thought, right, that they would actually take away the medical. The world would take that one away. So I think that’s true, though, like with any writing or any business, if you’re divided, like in your focus, it’s hard to really have it grow, right? Yeah. So you were already ghostwriting. How did you start out ghostwriting? How did you decide that that was something you wanted to pursue?

JB

Okay. So because I’ve been writing in life and doing poetry for a while, I already had the skills, which is very number one thing you need to have if you didn’t want to consider becoming a ghost writer. But it wasn’t until later when somebody tagged me to a post to get my work done, I used to put out this poetry. I graduated from just writing it in my journals to actually put it out on social media. I just create this little key template and then write some of my forms on it and put it on Instagram, put it on Facebook, and people were like, oh, I love this form. It touches me in this aspect or the other aspect. And people were just like sharing it. Sometimes it was getting some attention. I’d say, well, I read this. I could write this for you. Just sub-advertising what I was doing. But I didn’t know I could get paid though. So someone, a friend, she saw… She had been seeing my forms and all of the stuff that I’ve been putting out. And she saw somewhere that somebody, a coach, mentioned that she was taking in students. She wanted to take in students. But these people have to already be writing. So she’s going to do a paid test. And if you pass that paid test, if you pass the test, then you get to be a part of a team. Now, the good thing is because you’re already writing, she’s not going to be teaching you how to do it. She’s just going to be teaching you how to monetize the skill, how to scout and get peaks. This person that saw it, she tagged me to the post. I went there, I saw it. She’s just looking for a team. Okay, maybe I just applied. I applied, I sent my application in. She said, here’s a prompt, write the story off this prompt and send it over. You’ve got two days. I’m like, I don’t need two days. This is the stuff I do for free. I just put straight up. I didn’t really take it seriously. It’s just something you don’t even know that it could be a career career. So I just wanted it. And I got an email a few days after that. She said, I really love to prompt. It was so good. I’d love to have you on my team, fill in the details below and all of that. I became a part of a team, and it was she who actually showed me how to monetize, ghostwrite, to actually take it as a career. It wasn’t that she was teaching me how to write, but she was now showing me how to pitch, how to lead, and get the clients that I wanted and how to present myself as a ghost writer in a practical sense because she was giving us jobs. She had a job. She was a middle man in the industry. She was getting jobs and she just did a whole job, like 10 projects. She’s going to delegate and say, oh, you write this one. This other person is just going to guide us to do it. I was learning on the job. That was the most practical class I ever had. And that was when I learned that it’s better to learn practically than have somebody just tell you a bunch of courses to read or watch. It’s better for them to give you the job and have you learn from the job. That’s what I thought. She was amazing. She’s there. She’s my angel.

Kat

Wow. That’s really cool because I can imagine, even if you know how to write and it sounds like you write really well, was ghostwriting a skill that you needed to learn? Were there still things about ghost writing in particular? Well, tell us, first of all, for anyone who doesn’t know, what is ghostwriting? What is your job as a ghost writer?

JB

I guess it’s so simply put, a ghostwriter is a person who gets paid to write anonymously for another person. So like the word ghost, you’re not getting the credits. The person who you’re writing for is going to be known as the author. So this person is buying off your expertise, your skill, in crafting or producing that manuscript. You’re not going to do the owner of it.

Kat

Okay. And is it usually nonfiction? It’s usually their story, like a memoir or nonfiction? Or could it be fiction as well?

JB

You can ghostwrite literally anything. People ghostwrite speeches. I’m talking big time speeches. We have celebrity age ghostwriters that ghostwrite even speeches. Don’t want to be too loud. Some of the speeches that you see on the news, a ghostwriter wrote that.

Kat

Wow. Oh, my gosh. You’re blowing the tops off the industry here. I assume most celebrity books are probably ghostwritten, right? I can’t believe that a celebrity would have that. I mean, writing is a skill, right? You can’t be everything. You can’t be a singer and a writer. I mean, I guess you could, but it’s a low chance.

JB

Especially if you’re really big in your field, there’s no time. Your schedule is really packed. You need time to write a book.

Kat

Yeah. And you need it written well. You don’t have time to have a published book that’s no good. You need to you need someone to do it. So because you’re the person behind the scenes, like writing, what is it that you had to learn? Or was there anything different about writing what you had already been writing, poetry and different other things for people and actually ghostwriting a book? Was there anything different that you had to learn?

JB

Yes. Especially when I decided that I was going to make memoir, write a nonfiction, writing my thoughts. So I ghostwrite, I do some top of the romance tree list stuff and all of that. But when you’re writing a nonfiction book, like a memoir or an autobiography, that’s when you know if you really are a writer. Because fiction book with a romance novel or thriller novel, whatever, those numbers, all you have to do is just spin them ideas. You can spin like 10 different ideas and have the client look at it and be like, Which one do you like? I can spin it some more. That’s not your story, man. That’s nobody’s story. You just thinking it up. And if you have a strong, imaginative mind, that’s easy. That’s not even a piece of work for you. But the real work is writing another person’s story for them. So, for example, if I’m to write your story, I’m a black woman, I’m African with my experiences somewhat limited to my person, my environment, and my culture. And we have not experienced similar things. So if I have to write your book, I have to become you so that when you look at the book, it doesn’t feel like a black girl somewhere in Africa or anywhere else. It has to feel like you wrote it. You, white woman in DC, her name is Kat. She’s a podcaster, maybe has pets. It has to feel like you. And to do that, you need more than just writing skill. You need to support yourself into another person’s body. It’s a crazy process, but that’s what I like to call transporting yourself to another person’s body. And if you want, I could talk a little bit about what that was.

Kat

Yeah. How much do you get to know the client? How do you do that? How do you know them enough? Because I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. We might have something, I don’t know. You have different ages, you have different cultures, you have different… I mean, you’ve helped write for men as well. You have different sexes. How did you learn that?

JB

Okay. I have my own process. I don’t know what works for other girls writers, but for me, the first thing is becoming friends with these people. So first of all, either I’m pitching to the clients that I’m proposing to write for them, or they’re actually talking to me and proposing that I write for them. In a way, I have to hear your story first of all. Just like a brief overview, I need to know what story that you’re writing, and I have to be interested in your story. I have had to turn down some stories because I didn’t feel that I could do it. Not that I could have write it. I could write it for you, but I needed the story to speak to me and it wasn’t speaking to me. That’s one thing I want. It has to have a connection with me. When I hear you, do I feel like I want to tell that story that you’re telling me? If I feel like, man, I want to write this book. This is an interesting story, then that’s the first step. So the next step is getting to know this individual. Before we even talk about exchanging materials, I need to even know how you think as a person. I always talk to my clients in video. First of all, we talk. I can see your mannerisms. I’m talking to you now. I can see your face. I know the way you’re not. When you like something, I see how you smile. If something is getting to you, I can see the way your eyes light up if you’re intrigued. Now, my job is to observe these mannerisms, these emotions. And then also when you’re writing for someone, you have to capture the voice, a certain way that they talk. And that is it. You can reflect that. So if I talk with you a bit more after now, I’ll be able to tell if you are the person to use contractions in your sentences. For example, there are some people who don’t say want to. They want to say, I want it. They would say, I want to eat. You don’t want to write a book for someone, for example, I’m saying want to. So if you want to write for me, you know, want to, going to, sugar is my thing.

JB

If you write for someone who says, I want to, I don’t want to, I’d like to, and doesn’t use these mannerisms. If I write and say, I want to, it’s going to look alien to them because they don’t sound that way.

Kat

Right. Yes. So was that something that you learned with your mentor, just becoming part of that person? But you must be very good at languages and cadence as well to just be able to pick up on that.

JB

I think so. I think so. No, this was something I had to learn on my own. My mentor, she didn’t teach me how to make this money or anything. She just taught me how to monetize, how to figure out where to find good paying clients and position yourself properly. So it’s more like she gave me the net and all the equipment that I could use to fish. It was my job to go out there and do the digging all the searching properly.

Kat

Well, I can tell that you’re very passionate about it because if you really want to write the book well, you have to, like you said, you have to write it in their voice as though you are inside their body. So you have to be passionate about that. Like you said, you might have to turn some books down if it doesn’t inspire something in you. But you must also just have a ability to observe. Maybe that’s the poetry in you where you can just observe people. I know poets. I’ve interviewed a couple. You guys just have a certain way of looking at the world as a poet. Yes. I think it must like pull people’s stories as well, because I know… I’ve worked with clients and with memoir clients. I don’t write it, but I mentor them through it. And I don’t know if you’ve come up against this, but sometimes when it’s their story, they think they want to tell the story, but actually as they get into it, it’s very difficult. They have to get deeper, and I would assume so you can get deeper. What is that like when you’re working with someone? How do you get long might it take to actually get to the heart of the story? Because sometimes a person might think a memoir is just like, this happened, this happened, this happened. But really a memoir is like, how was it for you? We want that human experience, right? And that means getting deep.

JB

Okay. So because I have been doing a lot of memoirs and autobiography work, it has often meant that I have been dealing with a lot of traumatizing experiences.

Kat

Oh, right.

JB

To be honest, 98% of the people I’ve worked with all have a brutal story to talk about. Something has left them damaged and completely, utterly damaged. This is them trying to get closure. So, for example, if you’re writing a book for someone who has had to deal with abuse, that’s a sensitive topic for them. They need to even be comfortable. They need to trust you to come out. It’s like they be back and you asking them, Oh, come out. Come out naked. Just come out. And that’s a lot of asking. That’s a lot. They need to feel they should feel your trust. So before you ask them to come out, you best lay the ground for them. So when they come out, they don’t feel cold outside. There’s something waiting to envelop them. So that is the trust. I like to tell them, Think of me as your friend. This is the process. You and me were healing together. Sometimes when they tell me their stories, before we even start writing, it’s always a moment of just two people opening up. This is a story that I can relate to, I tell them, I feel you. I let them know that I am utterly sympathetic to them. Sometimes this story is going to make me cry. It’s often the case of, oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You want me to tell you something like that. And they’re like, Oh, no, right? And we’re just putting out ourselves there. This story is utterly painful story to make a stranger like me cry. And I’m listening to it all. I don’t even know if I could tell my story if I was you. You are so brave. And listen, I will help you. I will help you. We’re going to do this together. And someone listening to this is enough to tell them, Maybe I can trust this person. Maybe we could do this. And so they’re willing to take the step little by little. And I try my best to include that emotion in the book because it’s a big deal for them to tell you this. It’s something you should handle like a fragile object. Be careful with these emotions and tell it that way. Don’t really try to put your own emotion. Just tell it the way they gave it to you. They gave you something, put it back to them that same way. So I just express it there. And when I show them the first sample or the first draft, they’re often motivated to come out, because now they’re like…

Kat

Right. Okay.

JB

This feels like a welcome invitation to step out and tell you more. And that’s how it comes out.

Kat

Wow. That’s very cool. I think that’s very cool that you are able to do that. It takes a certain personality to be able to listen to that many different stories. There’s so many stories of trauma in the world and to be able to pull it together and put it into a book for them. And that’s very cool. That’s very amazing. I’m very impressed.

JB

I think the key is listen, not like an author. I tell my friends that, listen, not like an author or ghostwriter. Just listen like a human being. Because if you have someone talk to you and you’re interested in how you’re going to ghostwrite this, you’re going to miss out on the emotions that they’re sharing with you. But if you just drop all that post writing thing in your head, just talk back. They’re talking to a human being. You’re not some robot. Sit down and listen to this person talk, just like a friend to you, then only then will you be able to get the right emotion that you translate in your voice. So after you’ve listened, you can now think about what to do with these emotions that they’ve given to you. It works all the time.

Kat

Yeah, I think that’s amazing. So you started ghostwriting before COVID, but then you really got into it. Ghostwriting is your business now, but you also do a couple of other things. Is ghostwriting the main part of your business, or is it just the part and the other things that share together?

JB

Okay. So I’ve been ghostwriting for five years now, four or five years now, give or take. So ghostwriting is something that I am super passionate about. It’s me. It’s stuff that I like to do. I like stories. You give me a story and you’ve given me… It’s like you’ve given me food and I just like to tell it. Maybe it’s because I’ve been telling stories of people being traumatized in situations. So for me, it feels like I’m putting my part in a better place because these people, when we’re gone, they’re like, They have no idea what this means to me. And I can tell because they are. It’s like the closure for them. And it’s like I’m healing myself, too, because I’m broken as well. And these stories, they have no idea, but they inspire me to want to be a better person. So ghost writing is something that I’m passionate about. But currently, after COVID, I decided to create an agency. So that’s like the business side of me. But it’s separate from ghostwriting. I am a ghostwriter, but I have a company that I run when I’m not ghostwriting. It’s a content and branding agency.

Kat

Called Favespen.

JB

Okay. Yeah. So I have a tool there, but I like supervise and that’s stuff that I also like to do. Branding involves telling stories as well. I get to use that skill in there to help.

Kat

Yeah, it’s true. There are so many ways to tell a story in this world, right? Visually and written as well. And do you teach people to become ghostwriters, or will that be part of you at some point, or do you just want to keep the ghostwriting separate, just you?

JB

Oh, I coach people. I coach people to become ghost writers as well.

Kat

So what does that look like for somebody who thinks that they’re good at writing or they know the basics, I guess, about writing? If they come to you and they think, This sounds cool to be able to help somebody bring a story into the world and be the writer behind it. What does that look like to be trained as a ghostwriter?

JB

Basically, like you said, you must have some skill. You must be a writer. I’m not teaching somebody how to write. That’s a whole lot. I don’t think I can do that. Teaching someone how to write. That’s basically like teaching someone English. I don’t know if I did that. You have to have to be a writer, have some written work, maybe even some published stuff, not compulsory. But at least I have to see that you love to write because eventually you might even get good money, get paid and all. But as you go on, you will discover that there’s a lot more to it, those writing than just having the money. Because after the excitement of the first cash, sexy, and it expires, then there’s the work to do. You need to actually love it to want to finish it. If not, it’s going to be a struggle to finish the book after you’ve got the money. I tell you this from experience. That’s why I don’t make a story that I don’t like because after the money comes in, why do I even have to do this? I’m invested in it. It’s not a big deal.

Kat

Yeah, I can imagine. It’s like anything in business, right? We hone up where we want to have the niche. You said you could probably write many, many things, but what makes you so passionate is the memoir. So what does a day look like for you when you found a story that you want to write for a ghostwriter? Do you guys have timelines, like a deadline? How does that work out just like the business wise, just so that people understand that it’s not like, oh, I get money and I write a story. Take the romance down a little bit on this.

JB

Okay. So basically it depends on what I’m writing on. So if I’m talking about something that involves me to do research, which most of my jobs involve this.

Kat

Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. So it’s talking to the person but also researching.

JB

Let me use an example. One of my last projects, I had to write about someone who was in a coma for almost a year, I think. I don’t know anybody who’s been in a coma. I had to research the situations that could lead to a coma. And eventually, how long… Because we had to get it right because you have no idea if a doctor is going to be reading that book and they’re going to say, this is wrong. This is incorrect. So I had to make my research to know how long someone who was in this condition can stay in coma. What are the do’s and don’ts for patients in a coma? Because the character has family members around. We don’t want the family members doing stuff that they shouldn’t be doing. Exactly. Then I had to also research what the effects of surviving a coma can have on a patient. So I’m not over exaggerating. While I’m working with the storyline, I want to keep the fact in line as well. So I had to read up on that. I even had to make a call to a doctor that he specializes in neurosurgery and a couple of other things. But he was in the spine and neurosurgery department because the character that we was writing for lost the ability to control his legs and all. I wanted to control of the stuff that was going to be writing. So I reached out to this doctor and even just ask her a couple of questions about our potential character. What’s it looking like for someone who had a coma, who had seizures, like heavy seizures for a long time? What’s it like for this person? Just ask these questions. I use that to impute in the story that I’m writing. I’ve never experienced it. And then I also ask people who have had to deal with people who they have relatives or friends who are in a coma. What was it like caring for these people? How did you feel? What are the challenges? So I could have my characters experience them because I cannot relate to it. And it was a memoir, but it was like a fiction style memory. So I wasn’t even having the potential client’s emotions to count on me because the client does not have that emotion.

Kat

Was in a coma. Wow.

JB

Good. So I had to get these emotions from elsewhere and I even had to watch a movie. I watched the movie on Netflix. It’s Me Before You. Really sad story.

Kat

Yes, it is.

JB

You know it?

Kat

Yes.

JB

Great. Great. Great. Great.

Kat

The tissue, get your tissue back.

JB

I had already watched the movie a while ago, but this project made me go back to rewatch it because the guy was in the wheelchair as well… We wanted it to be sad because the character would have to leave his family untimely, write a sad note and all. Don’t try to make me better. Don’t give me an oxygen, just like the guy in the movie did. So I needed to have that emotion again so I could put it into both.

Kat

Yeah. So it’s not just write. You can’t just be good at writing. You have to be willing and good at research and getting the emotions of the other people and getting the things that are happening around them, whatever that might be. So you have to be good at research then. We didn’t hear your answer to that. So that’s part of the job, really.

JB

It is, absolutely.S

Kat

o where would you tell somebody to start if they wanted to pursue ghost writing?

JB

I’m going to say if you haven’t done it before, if you haven’t ever gone through the field of ghostwriting before. One of the things that you have to do, first of all, is to hone your communication skill because you need to have a great deal of communication to be able to get an emotion from a client and translate it into your own but without losing the person’s voice. You might need to have a coach because there are people who can tell you absolutely have to talk. And two, people often forget that there are courses available. You could take classes, you could take courses. If you don’t want to have a coach, this is important because there’s a lot that you cannot learn on your own. You might be good at writing, but you need assistance. And talk to other ghostwriters. Feel free to ask somebody questions. I survived this far because I ask questions. I don’t know stuff, I asked somebody. I don’t know this, I asked Stacy, our friend before we came here. I’m like, do you know any podcast I could come on? She told me about you. And if I didn’t ask, I wouldn’t know, I wouldn’t meet you.

JB

So ask questions if you’re starting out. And that’s the easiest way you can ask Google to… I ask literally everything. You have to read up and read books, too. There are some guide books and books that help you with your writing. I can’t remember their names now, but there are a lot of books that there is to guide you and these different experience writers. Read these books, they could also help you as well.

Kat

Okay, very cool. So if somebody is looking to possibly… Maybe somebody’s thought they were going to write their book, but now they’re thinking, oh, maybe I could just get it ghostwritten because it’s still their story out in the world. Where can people find you both online, social media and your website?

JB

Okay. So I’m very active on LinkedIn. Okay. It’s a space to get me, just JB Favour. I think I’m the only JB Favour on LinkedIn. Sorry, I was just talking about you.

Kat

Wow. Good for you, man.

JB

If that even possible? I think that’s like a million of us. But I’m JB Favour with a capital letter, all three of all caps, Jb Favour. And I’m very active on LinkedIn and on Twitter. I’m also active there as JB Favour. Basically all my handles are @JBFavour. If you do Google search, I have an optimized profile on Google, so you could just do a big JB Favour search of Google and you’d find literally everywhere you could contact me with. And my website is on Journal Portfolio. It is jbfavour@journalportfolio.com. It’s like a website portfolio you can reach out to me there.

Kat

Awesome. We will also have the links in the show notes. But if somebody’s driving or whatever, they can get your links there. But yeah, JB Favour is very easy across the board. You can find her if you are looking to possibly be a ghostwriter. You can ask questions as JB encourages you to do. And if you’re thinking about maybe writing your book is too much and you just need somebody to help you with it and maybe ghostwrite it for you, I encourage you to reach out to JB. Thank you so much, JB, for coming on the show and across the waters. I hope to have you on again soon sometime.

JB

All right. Thank you. I think this was a really fun episode. I love talking to you. It was really cool.

Kat

Thank you.

JB

Thank you.

The post Ep 184 Ghostwriting with JB Favour first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.

All stories need conflict! Let’s talk about why and what you can do to actively add more to your story.

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TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:

Kat

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Pencils and Lipstick. I’m Kat Caldwell. Today is the 183rd episode, and it is still May as I record this, May 24th. I’m ahead of the times. It’s May 24th as I record this. I want to talk to you guys about conflict today. It is not an interview show, but we are going to talk about conflict and how to add it and why to add it into your story. But as you guys know, I hosted the Write With Us online writing retreat with Marci Renée just about 10 days ago, and I wanted to fill you guys in on how that went. Now, if you don’t know already, as a writer, marketing and selling is like half of your job, right? If you don’t know, the answer is yes, right, correct. That is half of your job. I didn’t really realize this consciously, in the beginning. I did realize it pretty quickly, but I still grappled with the idea of what is marketing and what is it for a book? So if you don’t know my story for it, I published my first book in the fall of 2017. I finally hit go. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but it was as perfect as I could get it at the time, and I was sick of working on it. So I hit publish. And I knew in my head that it wasn’t just going to become viral. There was no TikTok back then, by the way. I don’t think. There was Snapchat or whatever, but whatever. But I knew that people weren’t just going to find it and buy it. There were already a lot of books on Amazon. There were lots of books coming out traditionally. Anyway, what I did realize soon enough was I hadn’t any clue how to market the book. And so 2018, I spent all year reading two business books a month and realizing very quickly that business online and business specifically for the arts is very different. So business books, a lot of times were geared towards working with people and teaching people how to sell. It’s not that I didn’t get anything out of that. I did, for sure. But it wasn’t geared towards art. How do you sell art? It’s a different product. Everyone needs shirts and shoes. And of course, you have to compete with the other people selling shoes. But not everyone needs books and your audience is not as broad. And not everyone who likes books will like your book. So I realized that I was not really getting to where I needed to go. I promise you this has a point. So speed up, I’ve been putting out books and starting the podcast and speaking with other people. And quite frankly, I started the podcast to have a reason to talk to other creatives on how they were doing things, how do you get your book in front of people? How are you marketing this book and selling this book? And besides doing that and writing another book, all the things, I wanted a reason to talk to other people and not just be a pest, but to be able to give them something else in exchange, like, I’ll put you on the podcast if you answer my questions. So that’s honestly why I started the podcast. And I had no idea that I would like it this much, and so we continue. And I still have more to learn, so there you go. So when I started these workshops, last year I got certified as a fiction book coach, and this year I’m almost done with my nonfiction certification. I went through the process of book coaching, what I wanted that business to look like, what I wanted to use that certificate for, and came to the conclusion that I just really wanted to go gung ho for the workshops and the online writing retreats and the in person writing retreats because I really, really enjoy the person-to-person. I love traveling, I love culture, I love showing people cultures. I really want to bring people to Spain and show them my beloved second country and write at the same time. I want to facilitate this place that you can just write and you don’t have to worry about anything else. I am worrying about the food for you, you get to just write. So I went all for that. Now comes the connection, learning to market still. So I am learning from some really great people how to sell things online. And it’s really not, I would say, it doesn’t come naturally to me, but I am thankful for the people. Russell Nohelty has been amazing. His courses are amazing and teaching that to me, like just landing pages in how to make things clearer and more concise and visually better and how the psychology works with people. And honestly, even David Gochran, he’s a Scottish writer who it’s davidgochran.com, I’ll put the link in the show notes. But he talks about selling your book and finding the right market. And I’m just applying those same ideas to finding the right writers who might come to the retreat. So the retreat was a blast. The online retreat was May 16th and 17th. I had such a great time. Really good time. All the feedback that we got was good. Somebody said that they wanted even more workshops, but that’s about the only criticism we got. There were seven workshops, so I felt like there were a lot of workshops. But hey, we are going to take that suggestion and see where we can take it. Maybe we can get one or two more workshops there. There is that problem with the time zone. No one in Australia, they were sleeping the whole time that we had the workshop, and I’m not sure how to fix that. Anyway, we had a great time. All of the guests had a good time. We had a lot of live participation, which surprised me. That’s what I was most nervous about is, is anyone going to show up live? I don’t know because you just never know. You can’t promise anything, right? But people got to workshop their ideas with Beth Barany or Lewis Jorstad, which I thought was amazing. What a great opportunity to be able to workshop an idea or your book or your plot or whatever it was that they were talking about. We didn’t have any technical issues. Thank goodness, knock on wood for next time. So what are the mistakes that I made? Let’s go with that. What are the mistakes that I made? Now, I was told not to market it until three days before the event, and that made me really nervous. And so I marketed it for two weeks before the event. And I can now see why people say don’t market it until three days before the event. The idea still makes me nervous, but I’m going to try to be a little bit better about waiting until the last minute because weirdly enough, psychology is like a science and it works and people know what they’re talking about. And we humans just, I don’t think that we value online, looking towards the future, as much as we value in person. That’s just my idea. So the next time that I have one, you will probably hear me talking about it, but there will probably be no sale until like, let’s go with five days. I’ll try five days. Oh, my gosh. See, I’m already like making mistakes. But talking about the next one, that’s another mistake that I made. I didn’t have the next one set up. Honestly, it was like trying to get the in-person retreat in the background, getting that together and doing the online. It occurred to me to set up the next online writing retreat, but it didn’t get done. It was like a fleeting idea. And so it wasn’t set up. And so I was talking to a marketing coach afterwards, and they said, well, you didn’t have any next step for people to grab onto.Give them 20 % off if they buy the ticket now, for the next one. And all these great ideas. So I didn’t have that. And I still don’t. I still don’t have that set up. Although we are looking at something fun, Stacey Juba, Emma Dhesi, and I. So anyway, be prepared for the fall. There might be something coming. And Troy from Plotter and I are working on a pretty long workshop for October. So all these little things, but you know what? I could have had that ready for people. Just looking backwards. This is the problem with creative businesses. It’s usually who know, like one person doing all of this stuff. And that’s me. Marci is doing a lot of the editing once I put it up there, and she works full-time. So anyway, fail on my part. But we still had a good time. It was a lot of fun. If you don’t know, we had five guest authors come in and teach new workshops. And I learned a lot. I always learned a lot. And I just had, they were lovely to work with. I would love to work with them again. And hopefully they would want to work with me again. But the next one, just so that you know, will probably be in the fall. And then between now and then, I will be trying to figure out a time to have really static times that we will be having these retreats. And these retreats are called retreats because they are groups of workshops. And I will be having workshops throughout the year other than just the retreats. But as I said, I will be trying to create specific times throughout the year so that we can be prepared for it. I can be prepared for it. Anyway, marketing is just one of those things. Just finding the right people, the people who are interested in that. And now we are moving on to the writing retreat in person. And that’s a whole new group of people that I have to find. And it’s fun, if anyone’s a marketing genius, let me know and let me know all your ideas. Although, then I’ll just change them and make mistakes anyway, but it’s fine. So the online one was great. I had a lot of fun. Definitely want to do it again. And the in person one we are still working on. Again, if you guys are interested, you don’t have to buy it right away. But if you’re interested, head on over to katcaldwell.com. The links are in the show notes and you can find out more information about Toledo, about Spain, about what’s included, FYI, everything’s included in ours, except for plane fare and train fare. But everything else is included. But you can find out all of that. Just click the link below.

Kat

Before we go, we don’t have interview today. I am going to be talking to you about conflict because conflict is one of those things that lots of the manuscripts I look at lack, honestly. So we’re going to talk about why you need it, because sometimes when I talk to writers, they don’t really understand what I mean. And I think a lot of times readers will tell the writers, your beta readers will tell you, I feel like something’s missing, like a scene’s missing. And one of my clients told me that she had added in this scene this date scene. So the couple are on a date, and it had been suggested to her by a reader, a beta reader. And while the scene was fine, I think really what the beta reader meant to say was that it’s not necessarily a dating scene that’s missing, it’s conflict. And so sometimes that is one of the problems with using beta readers, if they haven’t been trained in storytelling or story arcs or what stories need and the psychology behind them. So your editors, your book coaches, all of them who have been trained and gone through certification or read a ton of books, will be able to tell you that it’s not just a date scene that’s missing, it’s conflict. So we’re going to go through conflict.

Kat

If you guys are enjoying the podcast, please share it out with everyone that you know who is a writer who might be interested. If you don’t know, we’re on YouTube now, so you can see me waving my hands at you, trying not to knock the mic off. So subscribe there if you prefer to use YouTube as your platform of listening, if you want to see things, if you want to see me, if you want to see my guests, you can listen and watch over there. Otherwise, if you are on a podcast app, please subscribe on that app as well and give us a review, even if it’s just a star review. It’s like this constant thing that we have to keep moving the podcast forward and telling the algorithm, yes, people are listening. So whenever you review and there’s a new review, it just helps that algorithm say, oh, look, people are paying attention. So yeah, if you listen every week, you can also let me know. I would love to know if you’re listening on Facebook. I’m there, Kat Caldwell, Pencils&Lipstick, on Twitter @PencilsLipstick, and Instagram, @PencilsandLipstick, all spelled out, or @katcaldwell.author on Instagram. Am I missing anything? I don’t know. Anyway, we’re also going to be putting up clips on TikTok. Oh, man, so many places. Speaking of conflict and how I resist getting on TikTok all the time.

Kat

All right, so conflict. The thing about conflict is, in real life, we avoid it like the plague. We don’t want conflict. I don’t know about you, but I am anti-conflict. I have lots of opinions that I will tell my husband. That’s all that I will do. I am conflict averse. I will do everything. I will ignore a situation in my face. Not a dangerous one, but I will just avoid conflict. I have lots of stuff in the family, have always done that divorce, all the things as a kid. And I will avoid the conflict like the plague. I will not bring up topics. I can go a long time not speaking on politics or anything else or world events because I don’t want any conflict with anyone. So yeah, we avoid conflict. I mean, some people crave it, but for the most part, we avoid conflict. And even if you like debating with people, conflict in the sense of issues happening in your life. So when we’re talking about our story, weather can bring up conflict, plot can bring up conflict, people from the past bringing up conflict, secrets getting out, bringing up conflict. So we’re talking about conflict that just permeates our life. We’re always, especially in the Western world, we’re trying to make our life comfy, not complicated. We want hot water in the morning. We want a place to make our breakfast. We want enough clothes to wear and some shoes or whatever. We want our car to start in the morning. We want the air conditioning to work because otherwise it’s conflict and it’s stress and we don’t like that. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But the interesting thing is that while we avoid conflict in person, we actually look for it in the stories that we read and in the movies that we watch. So conflict needs to be in your story. You need to create conflict with your characters, whether it’s people coming at them, plot coming at them, whatever it is. They need to have something happening. So one manuscript that I read, there was this little girl in it, and I kept thinking as a reader, there must be something that’s going to happen with this little girl because she played a really big role. She was on the page a lot. And it was a romance book, but this little girl was on the page a lot. And granted, you can’t ignore a child if they are part of the story. But she was in there so much that I really thought something was going to happen. And in the end, almost nothing happened with her. She was there, but not really. There was almost an incident, but then it got resolved really quickly. And that is actually a problem because as a reader, if the reader is thinking that something’s about to happen with this person, they’re holding space for that person in their brain. You need to make sure that something happens with that. It can’t just be that they spend the whole book thinking something’s going to happen with this character and then nothing happened. The other problem that I see often with conflict is that the problem is that your characters are too good. They’re too good. So when a stressful situation comes up, let’s say somebody purposely crashes the car and there’s a couple inside, all of their past issues, if they’re having issues in their relationship should probably come up, all of a sudden. Let’s say, let’s get an even more stressful situation. Let’s say that their plane gets hijacked and now they’re in the wrong country. And for this story, they need to have conflict. They need to be upset with each other. They need to want to blame each other. And they need to have past conflict come up and impede their movement smoothly forward. Does that make sense? They cannot just get along all the time because that’s so just regular. That’s not why we come to story. And the truth is, in stressful situations, humans bring out their worst side with their most beloved person because they feel safe enough to let their stress go. Especially if it’s a new relationship, stress should probably challenge that relationship. I’m thinking as I say this, in any relationship, whether it’s new or not. But usually, romance books are about new relationships, so we’re just going to go with that. It should challenge their relationship in the sense that bad things should happen. And someone should make a decision that creates even more conflict within their relationship. So let’s say they lose a child on the playground. Maybe it’s a nanny love story and single dad. The nanny is out at the park with the kids, and he comes to see the kids, surprise, surprise. And it’s exactly in the moment when she’s not sure where the kids are and she’s about to panic. Whether or not you need them to be kidnapped, or maybe it’s just, oh, we find the kid and everything’s fine, the dad should actually make a decision. Those are his children. He should have a very visceral reaction to this incident. It doesn’t mean that he needs to be violent. He needs to stay within his personality, but he should make decisions, make comments that will really put pressure on their relationship. Let’s say they’re like age gap, right? And so maybe he’ll say things like, you’re too immature to take care of my kids. I should have known. Or something like that’s hurtful, right? He could say that calmly, and that would still be hurtful. And that’s going to put pressure on their booming relationship. I hope that makes sense to everyone. So really, the point is that only flawed characters will create conflict in the story. And so your characters need to have those flaws. And I know that we talk about flaws a lot, but I hope that you’re starting to see that it really impacts the story, whatever their flaw is. And so in the moment that conflict comes up in the beginning, the first half of the story, your main character is going to be making decisions based on that stress happening within their world view and making the wrong decisions, slowly making maybe a few more better decisions. But stress is going to bring out their old worldview much more than their new worldview until the end. And that’s how we see the change.

Kat

So let’s talk about how can we find this conflict that we need? You might have the characters in your head and the plot happening, and now you’re thinking, where am I going to come up with this conflict? And I would say that it’s pretty easy. I’m going to give you three ideas on where you can find conflict to add to your story, how you can take something and let your imagination go wild with it. So we are heading into Memorial Day weekend, right? Yes. I’m trying to think. No, I think we just ended Memorial Day weekend. So you are probably with some families, some barbecues. You probably overheard some fun stories. I want you to challenge yourself this summer to listen a lot. A lot. Whether it’s with friends or family, whether you’re by yourself watching the kids on the playground and you’re listening to other people. People tell stories about their life all the time. And if you ask them questions, they want people to listen. And I’m not saying to ruin confidences, but listen to what happens in real life, what brings up actual conflict. This is especially true if you’re writing romance or writing family drama or sibling drama. Look at what is causing conflict and then try to figure out what might have started that. So what started the mistrust between the sisters? What started this issue between the mother and the daughter that you’re observing? And people might not tell you the truth, but this is where your imagination comes in. So trying to piece together, why does the mom always say something about the outfit of her daughter? And then her daughter get angry, and then it brings up this same story all the time at the barbecue. Most of the families try not to listen, but this time you’re listening and you’re realizing that it stems from way back in high school or whatever, I guarantee you, you will start understanding human psychology more and where we find these conflicts, where these fires in our lives start and how they smolder and why they smolder. If you just take time to listen, just listen to people talk, how they talk, how they respond to each other, and where it might have started. And then you know you have to go to your story and think, Okay, how can I add this to my story? So you also need to look at your characters. Once you have been listening, look at your characters and really decide where they are being a little bit too good, where they are being a little bit too clinical psychologist. A lot of times our characters are very much clinical psychologists. I don’t know about you guys, but I love observing people, just like the first challenge. And I always have since I was a kid. And I love analyzing why people might do stuff. I love psychology. I love listening to lectures on it. But the truth is, when we’re in a moment of conflict or in our own story or in our own head, we are not responding after having psychoanalyzed the person in front of us. So let’s say you and your partner are having a fight. You are just in it to win it. You just want to win the fight. You want to prove that you are right, that they were wrong. You are not psychoanalyzing them. That’s for the therapist to figure out. In the moment, you are just bringing up all the old stuff. Maybe it’s obvious that you’re not right anymore, so you bring up the old things. This is human. To air is human. This is how we fight. But we’re not psychoanalyzing in the moment. We will later with the therapist when they’re like, Hey, sit down and think about maybe where your spouse was coming from or where your teenager was coming from. And they’re like, okay, I guess so. But in the moment they’re not. And so a lot of times with our characters, we make them like psycho analysts. And so then they choose the right reaction. They’re a little too understanding. They’re a little bit too calm. They’re a little bit too nice. And that’s where this idea comes if you Google the biggest mistakes of writing a character, a lot of times it’s going to say, Your characters are too nice. That’s where that comes from. It’s how their reactions are just the Polly Anna, goody goody two shoes, they never make a mistake, ever. So really look back at your characters and how you’ve written them. I mean, anytime that they’re apologizing or not responding and not yelling or choosing not to yell or telling the reader why it’s okay that so and so is like that. Try to take out that psychoanalyzing as they learn to behave properly or overcome their flaw, they will probably might have a few moments of psychoanalyzing themselves and others and making better choices. But especially in the beginning and even by the end, they’re not always perfect. We don’t need them to be perfect, and we don’t need them to always have the perfect response. Think about Pride and Prejudice. When Darcy is telling Elizabeth, I love you and I want you to marry me despite your family, which turns a very romantic scene into, I’m sorry, what did you just say? And he says something like, well, you can’t expect me to be happy about your circumstances. That is such a flawed thing to say. He is a very prideful man. He has prejudices. That’s the whole point of the title. And they’re coming out even in a moment when he is trying to declare his love for Elizabeth about how her mother talks too much and is embarrassing, and her sisters are flirts, and even her father can’t reign in the family, and how that stigma and that gossip is going to follow them. So really think about how your characters are reacting even in moments when they’re being pretty romantic or pretty awesome. Which brings me to the third idea, pull out the books that you love and the characters that you love and try to read them with an editor’s eye. Now, if you are going to get lost in the story, I suggest you read it backwards. I know that’s weird, but going backwards, take a high lighter, read it out loud, do anything that you can to help yourself not get lost in there and analyze what is going on. Maybe pull out the Pride and Prejudice scene where he is trying to propose. And then, of course, Elizabeth gets offended and goes off on him. And see what made him do this? And why would he do that? And as a human, why is he making that? And then what scenes in my book are like that where he’s declaring his love? But how can I make it really tense and awkward? How can I bring conflict to this situation so that my characters really have to choose more wisely, really have to choose each other, really have to choose if they’re going to save the world or to cross the time gap or whatever it is. Don’t just have them be a hero all the time. We actually crave Pride and Prejudice because he overcomes his prejudice for her family. He chooses that she is more than the gossip, that she’s worth fighting for. He wasn’t at that moment yet. And even as he’s proposing marriage to her.

Kat

So take your favorite stories and try to find what is creating the conflict. A lot of times side characters are pushing the main character into conflict or are poking their finger at them. In the car when you’re on the road trip and the kids are like, I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you. That’s the side characters a lot of times are trying to force the characters into decisions, or they’re creating conflict. They’re challenging the main character’s decisions and reasons for that. So take a good hard look at that. Maybe pull out some highlighters. I know not all of you like to mark on your book, so maybe copy the pages and then pull out the highlighter or take notes. But also if you’re going to get lost, read it backwards or out of order and see if that will help you see the conflict, just pull scenes and see the conflict on it. You can also do this with movies. Why is this character acting the way that they are? And this is really nice to do with other writers, where you watch something together and maybe take notes, and you can stay more accountable on not getting lost in the story, but really analyzing the characters and how they made decisions and how it impacted it, how it created more conflict at first, and then what decisions they made to smooth out the conflict. Maybe where you see that conflict could have been more, what conflict they could have added to it. Not every story is perfect, right? How could you add that story to your book or maybe pull out a scene with conflict and rewrite it? You don’t have to publish it. That’s just you working on writing even more conflict. What would they have said that would have made this even more tense in the story? Or maybe if they had made this decision, then this, this, and this would happen. Writing a fan fiction short story about it. But those are simple ideas that you can use this summer to make sure that the book and the story that you are working on has conflict. Because I have to say, if a story has no conflict in it, many readers won’t understand what the point is of spending time reading it. We come to stories to learn. We come to stories to be in a position of emotional charge, without actually having to leave our house. That’s what we like. We like finding the monster, pursuing the murder, finding love without having to leave our potato chips in our couch and our lawn chair or whatever. Our heart will actually react to things that are happening in the story if we’re invested in it. And we’re only going to get invested if there’s actually something to learn, somebody to chase, something to figure out. So that’s why we come to the story. We want the conflict. And the other thing to avoid is ordinary conflict. So we come to stories because there’s something extraordinary about them. There’s something a little bit different. There’s something a little bit more. We want to learn from them in a just more exaggerated, right? We could all write a story about our day-to-day, but nobody would read it because it’s just pretty ordinary, right? If our story is just I keep going to pick up the kids, people get it. But we come to story because something else is happening and we want to figure out. So make sure that your conflict is not ordinary either. To really up that ante by listening to other people, figuring out what conflict is happening in actual human lives, watch some movies, take some notes, see if you can start a little analyze the conflict club, and then take a look at your story and see how you can up it.

Kat

Let me know what you think about conflict, how you add conflict to your story. Let me know which one of these challenges you like better. Maybe if you try one and it works, I would love to hear about it. Or maybe you have tried it without me suggesting it and you want to tell me which one worked and which one didn’t, how you got more conflict in there. Or what is your favorite movie in which that conflict really pushed the envelope of this story? I’d love to hear from you on Twitter @pencilslipstick, on Instagram, @pencilsandlipstick, or @katcaldwell.author. Or you can find all the links in the show notes below. Let me know what you feel about conflict, and I will see you next week.

The post Ep 183 3 Tips To Add Conflict To Your Story first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.

Today I talk with Evan Gow, creator and developer of the amazing Story Origin App. This website is the one-stop shop for marketing for authors. If you want to join promotions, manage a swap with other authors, have a landing page for beta readers and more, you NEED to check out Story Origin App.

Want to support the show?

Go here: https://pencilsandlipstick.com/support-the-show/

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Want more information on my books, author swaps, short stories and what I’m reading? Sign up for my readers’ newsletter.

TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:

Kat

Welcome back, everyone, to pencils and lipstick. I am happy to have Evan Gow with me again. It’s been about two years, but Evan Gow is the guy behind Story Origin. App creator, founder, worker. Hey, Evan, how are you doing?

Evan

I’m good. Thank you for having me on.

Kat

It’s been about two years. We sort of did basics in 2021, but I feel like nobody goes back two years ago in podcast. So could you just introduce yourself a little bit to everyone who’s listening?

Evan

Yeah, sure thing. So I’m the indie developer behind Story Origin, as you mentioned. That means I’m the engineering department, the customer support, the marketing department. Everything you either love or hate about Story Origin is my fault.

Kat

So you get all the emails?

Evan

Yeah, I get all of the emails and I respond to all of them. My inbox is always open. Anyone is always welcome to send me an email straight there on the home page of Story Origin. You can pester me. It’s totally fine.

Kat

I had no idea that you were the only guy behind it. That’s insane. My mind is a little bit blown out. Do you ever get a day off? Do you ever take a day off?

Evan

I try to always clear my inbox every single day, but, you know, other other than that, my time is pretty flexible, so I’m very lucky in that regard. But I’m always sort of working on building new features and things as well.

Kat

Yeah, which we’re definitely going to get into.

Evan

Which is why I think a lot of people think that Story Origin is more than just me.

Kat

Yes. Because since 2021, I feel like the left side of the homepage has doubled almost. At least it was two thirds what it was. At least you were very busy during the pandemic. So let’s talk a bit about what Story Origin is. It’s especially for indie authors, I would guess. But could you talk about where the idea came from and what we use it for?

Evan

Yeah, back when I was I used to write short stories in high school, and then I got interested in entrepreneurship and technology in college, and then I eventually wanted to build tools for writers and get back into writing. Quickly the building tools for writers took over 100% of my time, so I never really got into writing stories or anything. But, yeah, I was talking to authors, just asking them, what tools are you using and what do you have troubles with? And they’re like, okay, I use this for delivering my reader magnets. I use this for creating universal book links. I use a different platform for finding reviewers and putting out review copies. I use some combination of Google Forms and Facebook Groups to arrange newsletter swaps. I use maybe a different service or email and Word Docs or Google Docs for doing beta copies. I got a different platform for my website. I was like, okay. Wow. Oh my god, just stop right there.

Kat

Can you tell that indie authors aren’t tech people?

Evan

It actually requires quite a bit of sophistication to keep your mind wrapped around every different tool that you need to use. And all the different spreadsheets they have, right? Those were just the services I was talking about, right? Like, they also had spreadsheets for tracking their word count, spreadsheets for distributing audiobook promo codes, spreadsheets for whatever else, right? So I’m like, okay, let’s simplify this. I want to make your life simpler. So I’m going to build one thing that does it all. And I think if I had actually told anyone at that point in time, I’m going to build one thing that does all of that, they would have said, Evan, I don’t believe you. And that’s the nicest way they would have said it. If they did not say, Evan, you’re delusional. I just started building stuff and released new features sort of as I built them. It does it all.

Kat

It does do it all. But I would think that most people start with the newsletter feature. Do you think that’s true?

Evan

I think most authors hear about Story Origin for the first time. When someone says, hey, you need to start building a newsletter, get on Story Origin, that’s the place to start. Yeah, that’s how most authors learn about Story Origin. So that’s usually the first thing that they start with is building their newsletter. And I think that that is a good place for many authors to start is with building your newsletter, building an audience.

Kat

Right? So I harp on people all the time about building a newsletter so they can go back and listen to those, specifically my lectures. But the main thing is you can have your reader magnet on Story Origin so you don’t have to use up your website. Okay, this is how low tech I am. I’m an 80s girl, right? So I had a computer growing up, but still I remember the blue screens, like the blue screen of death and everything. So you used to keep it on your website or maybe PayHip, but that will make your website really heavy, which I didn’t understand until somebody had to explain it to me. So being able to keep a lot of just documents and things somewhere else if you have a very simple website, was eye opening to me. It’s like, oh, I can just have it here and I don’t have to go looking for that one media page or whatever. It doesn’t always turn out right either, and it becomes that like bloated out image when it’s just on my media. Maybe I just don’t know what I’m doing. But I would assume other authors also don’t. It’s a nice little landing page. Your reader magnet. What is your reader magnet? You all it’s like your short story or your free book or your couple look at these first five chapters. But then for newsletters, what do people set up a newsletter and what does Story Origin offer for building that newsletter? Because that’s everyone’s question. How do I get more people on my newsletter?

Evan

Right, exactly. Yeah, you can host your reader magnet landing page on Story Origin and like you said, which is where people would come to request that free book for you. And then Story Origin handles the delivery, right?

Kat

Yeah, we don’t have to deliver. That’s awesome.

Evan

You don’t have to handle the tech support when someone emails you and says, how do I get this on my Kindle or whatever that comes to Story Origin. And there’s tons of instructions and stuff and email support for them if they run into issues. So that’s another reason not to do it on your own website as well then also Story Origin and integrates with a bunch of different email service providers. So when you design and send your email through MailChimp or MailerLite or whatever, wherever you host your mailing list, Story Origin can directly send those contact info to many different email service providers. Or you can always just download a CSV of the sign ups you get through Story Origin. But how do you get those sign ups in the first place? Right? So there are two ways that you can do that on Story Origin. There are two different types of cross promotion. There are group promos and newsletter swaps. So a group promo is where you, me, and let’s say 20 other authors all list our reader magnets on a single landing page and we all drive traffic to that single landing page. And so all the readers that come to that landing page, they can select which books that they want from that group promo and they’ll sign up to each of those individual authors mailing list.

Evan

And so you can grow your own mailing list by being a part of those groups. And yeah, those are extremely helpful. I would recommend if you’re just starting a mailing list, you have zero subscribers, joining group promos is the way to get started. That’s really easy.

Kat

A little bit by genre. So you’re finding the correct reader, right? You’re not getting a mystery reader for your cozy romance, right?

Evan

Yeah. So on Story Origin and you can see a list of upcoming group promos and you can find the ones that are in your genre and then just apply to the ones that you want to be a part of. And of course the readers, they are selecting individual books out of that group promo that they want to get and sign up to those authors mailing lists, right? So you also don’t need to worry about getting people who aren’t interested on your list or something somehow, right. They’re coming specifically for you when they sign up to get your book. That is a great way to get started. Of course, you can always also just put up the link to your reader magnet on social media or wherever you want at the back of your book. You can run ads to that landing page as well. Group promos are really easy way to get started though with all that because you don’t have to figure out some complicated ads dashboard or worry about like, oh, now I have to grow my Twitter following to get any views on my links that I’m promoting on Twitter so I can get people on my mailing list. That just seems like more steps, right? Yeah. So group promos are a really easy way to get started. And even if you have zero subscribers, many of those group promo organizers are still more than happy to accept you into those group promos because many of them had zero subscribers when they were starting out, maybe just a couple of months ago. Now they’ve got a few hundred subscribers and they’re like, I know exactly how I felt a couple of months ago when I had zero people on my mailing list.

Kat

Yes. No, a friend of mine was very cautious about. And I said, Story Origin is just one of those places. Like you just go, you apply to the promotion. And he was surprised that pleasantly that they all accepted him. And I was like, I know, because we’re nice people.

Evan

Yeah. It’s very weird to be on a place on the internet where people help each other. Most of the internet is people just trashing each other. But Story Origin has a very nice, very helpful community of authors that are generally all trying to help each other out.

Kat

Exactly. And then once you get a couple, what is the difference with the newsletter swaps then?

Evan

Yeah, so a newsletter swap is a different type of cross promotion. Again, group promos and newsletter swaps are both types of cross promotion. A cross promotion is just basically let’s help each other out, let’s promote each other. So that group promo is a group setting where you’re all promoting a landing page that has all your books on it. A newsletter swap is a one to one type of cross promotion where I’m promoting your book in my newsletter and you’re promoting my book in one of your upcoming newsletters. And so we’re not promoting a landing page that has a whole bunch of books on it. We’re directly promoting each other’s books.

Kat

Right.

Evan

And so that can be I’m promoting your reader magnet, you’re promoting my reader magnet, or I’m promoting your universal book link and you’re promoting my universal book link. So we can increase our sales or we can promote each other’s, review copies, et cetera, right? Again, a newsletter swap is just we’re promoting each other’s books in our own newsletters.

Kat

Yeah, people might be more selective, I guess, with that. But still, I know I always choose at least one person, whenever I go back into swaps. Somebody who has much lower numbers than I because I’ve been there. And I’ve never spoken to an author who doesn’t specifically seek out lower number authors to swap with just because we’ve been there before and because it’s still an audience. They still have people who are not on your list who might be interested in your book or your reader magnet. I’ve just never been denied, I guess, and I’ve never heard that on Story Origin. So again, it’s a nice place. Also with your promos, there’s like a ranking, right? So the other question would be how am I sure that if I’m doing all this work to put it in my newsletter and put it on social media? Are all the other 20 people doing their work too? I never really care about that, but some people do. But I do think that ranking that you have, what do you call it? I’m calling it ranking.

Evan

So when you go and you request a newsletter swap with someone or they’re going to request a newsletter swap with you, you can go into their past campaigns that they’ve arranged on Story Origin and you can see their click stats for how many clicks that they’ve sent to group promos or to past newsletter swaps that they’ve arranged through Story Origin. So you know, hey, is this person actually sending a decent number of clicks to the group promos or newsletter swaps that they’re participating in? Like are they upholding their end of the bargain? Because there is that trust issue that if all this were invisible, you wouldn’t know whether or not you can sort of trust people necessarily, right? And that’s how it was before Story Origin was around for the most part, right. Like all these people who are arranging newsletter swaps through Facebook groups and Google forms and all that stuff, there was no community transparency. You didn’t know whether or not someone was chronically not sharing the books that they said they were going to share, et cetera, right? With Story Origin and all that. Super transparent. So you can always just go to their past campaign history and look at how many clicks they sent to each one of those promos.

Kat

Yeah. And I think it helps keep us accountable, right? I am conscious not to sign up for too many. I don’t want my click rate to be below. And it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take people with lower click rates. They might have a smaller list or whatever, but it’s like, oh, have they participated in 25 and gotten two clicks? That means that they keep forgetting to share, I would assume. Okay, so we’ve gone over just like the transparency and the newsletters and the reader magnet. So you have so many things here. So Kickstarter has become a big thing and I’ve noticed that you guys have like direct downloads, you guys have beta copies, you have review copies, you have all these things. Okay, let me see what question I’m going to ask you. So direct downloads, do people usually use that for things like Kickstarter or like mass here, now that you’ve got this, go download it here.

Evan

So, yeah, I mean direct downloads are super versatile, right? It’s simply a landing page where a reader can download your free book. They don’t have to sign up to your mailing list or anything to get that download, right?

Kat

Perfect. Okay.

Evan

And if you want, you can integrate that direct download page with a mailing list so that someone does have to enter their email address. But all that entering that email address on that page does is checks to see if that email address already exists on your list. Which can be helpful for things like if you have a review team and you want to provide a direct download to them, but you want to make sure that they are on your review team mailing list. You can say here’s the download link, and they’d have to enter their email address and Story Origin and doesn’t record their email address. In that case, it just checks if the email address they entered is on your review team mailing list. Nice. But you could also do this for something like a Kickstarter where you could create a mailing list for people who have signed up to a certain pledge level for you on Kickstarter or something like that, in Story Origin. You could then check to make sure that their email address is on that pledge level mailing list or something like that.

Kat

Yeah, that’d be very helpful.

Evan

They can get that download.

Kat

Otherwise it’s a lot of follow up all the time. Yeah, and there’s always that like, wait, there’s 21, but I only have 19 on my list. Like where are they two? So that would be nice. And just like the deliverability of that.

Evan

You don’t have to handle the tech support Story Origin and does that for you. And the other common place that people use that direct downloads feature as well is just in their welcome sequence for their mailing list, right. A lot of times people are building their mailing lists through Story Origin and so Story Origin already handles the automatic file delivery for them. But if you’re building a mailing list like through your website or something, or you have just like a form on MailerLite or MailChimp that someone somehow signs up to because you promote that link somewhere and you just want to be able to make sure that they get that download. You can put that direct download link in your welcome sequence so you can make sure that they’ve gotten that book.

Kat

Right, so they don’t have to refill out a form like, I already do this, it’s already filled out, they go and they get it. Nice.

Evan

Exactly.

Kat

That’s awesome.

Evan

Yeah. And even if they’ve already signed up to your mailing list through Story Origin getting a reader magnet, it’s still nice to provide them that direct download link in your welcome sequence. Not even so much because they need the download because they already probably have it at that point, but more just as a nudge like, hey, get started reading that book, right? Because people, their to be read list can sometimes be extremely long, right?

Kat

Yes.

Evan

And providing those little nudges like, oh, here’s the summary of that book that you got and here’s the download link again, just provides them a reminder, oh yeah, I really wanted to read that book. Let me go get started on that today.

Kat

That’s a good idea because also if you get the email and you’re on your phone and you’re waiting for your kids soccer game, you could get it on another format, right? And you could say, well why don’t I start reading it now? That’s a good idea that sometimes we just don’t think of like, oh, they already have it. Just providing it in several places is always helpful for people. Yeah, that’s awesome. So then we have the beta copies if somebody’s newer to the indie world, what is a beta copy?

Evan

So a beta copy is usually an early version of your manuscript that is not ready to be published. It’s something where you want people to look for, read through this manuscript and tell me, were there any boring scenes in here? What did you think of the characters? All those sorts of things that you might want maybe out of a developmental editor or something like that, but you can’t pay for a developmental editor necessarily. Or you really just want to understand someone who reads in a genre. You want to understand, hey, does this actually fit to your tastes? Right? Because you might think you’ve written a I read a lot of lit RPG. You might have think you’ve written a fantastic lit RPG, and someone else is like, no. I mean, you slapped some game mechanics on a fantasy novel, but this is not lit RPG. You’re missing all these different separate tropes or something. Those beta readers give you feedback about your book.

Kat

And are those beta readers in Story Origin, or do I bring the beta readers.

Evan

You bring the beta readers to Story Origin. They would just be able to apply for access for your book, and then you can approve or decline those requests for access to that beta copy. And a lot of authors are like, they’re like, Why would I do this? I can just send them, like, a Word Doc or a Google Doc, right? But the complaint that I’ve heard from many authors and this is why I built the features a lot of times you just send a Word Doc or Google Doc to someone, and then their feedback is, it was great. I loved it. And you’re like, I need more.

Kat

Unless it becomes a New York Times bestseller, I need some more.

Evan

Anything, please give me a little bit more feedback. With Story Origin, the beta copies feature, they only unlock each chapter after providing feedback on the previous chapter. So they have to provide you feedback on each chapter individually before they can read the next one.

Kat

Wow, that’s a great idea, because, in fact, life is busy, right? And you might have a thought for chapter seven that you lose by chapter 37. And then you’re like, I liked it.

Evan

Yeah, right? Exactly. Yeah.

Kat

Very nice. Okay, so you upload it there, they get it there. You give permission as well, which is a nice way to control who has opened it. I assume that you can see has anyone not opened it yet? Are they actually reading it or not?

Evan

Yeah, you can see how far they’ve gotten into the book. Origin lists all of your readers that are readers for your beta copy and then shows you what the last chapter is that they’ve left feedback on. So you know whether or not they’ve read through chapter five or six or seven or eight or whatever, because you can see, okay, they’re down to chapter eight on their feedback or what?

Kat

Oh, that’s so much better than Google Forms.

Evan

Yeah.

Kat

Oh my gosh, it’s funny, I’ve seen that beta copy for a while. I’m not ready yet for beta copies, but this year I will be. So I’m glad we’ve talked. I got to create a Google Form with questions that they’ll actually answer. Yeah, okay, awesome.

Evan

And with the beta copies feature on Story Origin, you can provide questions to them at three different levels, so you can provide questions that they will answer on a specific chapter, like chapter two, what did you think of the scene between these two characters? You can provide questions at the overall book level, so those questions will be at the end of every single chapter. Like, did you find any scenes in this chapter boring? Right? And so that question would appear on every single chapter. And then you can also insert questionnaires between chapters for more overarching feedback. So you can say, okay, I’m going to put questionnaire after chapter four, and I’m going to ask them, what did you think about the first four chapters? What did you think about the arc and the development of this relationship over the past four chapters? Or something like that? Right?

Kat

Right. Yeah.

Evan

So you can make those questions and you can solicit feedback in Story Origin, calls it critique guidance in sort of whatever level you want. You don’t have to put any of those questions if you don’t want to at all. You can leave the critique guidance off and they can just free form it, right, the readers can. But the other thing that is valuable to note there, because you mentioned Google Docs, have you done beta copies through Google Docs previously?

Kat

Yeah, I would have them fill out a questionnaire and then I would make it a direct download and then I would send them the questionnaire.

Evan

Send them the questionnaire.

Kat

But it’s been since 2021 that I published, so then it was before that that I did beta, so I haven’t done it yet.

Evan

So you were providing like the full EPUB or Moby or PDF or whatever, right? Yeah. So with this feature, they only access a chapter at a time, so they’re not getting the full file download. So that’s another thing for people who are afraid of giving out a full manuscript, you don’t have to worry that someone’s just going to take that file and then share it around, right? They can only access it when they’re logged into their Story Origin account.

Kat

Nice.

Evan

And then for authors that have done it, done their beta copies through just like, people leaving comments on a Google Doc or something like that, I’ve had authors say, oh, I had my readers fighting, arguing in my manuscript on Google Docs about some point.

Kat

Because they can see each other’s comments.

Evan

They can see each other’s comments in Google Docs, right? So they’re like biasing each other’s feedback, number one. And then number two, they might not. Bias each other’s feedback, but they might actually disagree. Oh, yeah, that’s like, guys, please, this is my workspace and I’m getting all these comment notifications.

Kat

Well, that’s very confusing for especially a new writer as well, of like, who do I listen to? And then it probably spins off into something completely different.

Evan

Yeah. So, Story Origin, you as the author can see all the comments. They all live in one document for you as the author. But each reader only sees their comments. They don’t see the other reader’s comments.

Kat

That’s much better. Yeah. I especially think just the biasing of it like, oh, I guess well, if they thought it was good, then I guess it’s good. No, I want your opinion as your own entity and your own reader. Yeah, that’s nice. Because I don’t want my readers biased. I want the brutal truth.

Evan

Yeah, right. And it’s the other thing is, like, if two people who have not seen each other’s comments say the same particular thing they didn’t like, or they thought this was weird, then that is a much greater signal to you that, oh, this is a part that I need to fix, versus someone commenting, this is weird. And then someone else seeing that comment and being like, you know what? Yeah, I see that person’s point. I think it’s weird too, right? Versus they might not have ever noticed it had they not seen that other person’s comment. Right.

Kat

Yes. Who knows what psychology is happening, right?

Evan

Exactly.

Kat

I want you sound smarter. I want to argue or whatever. Awesome. Okay, so you bring in your beta. So I would assume I send out a newsletter to my list and I say, anybody want to sign up for beta? This is where you go. And then I have it all in one spot. I don’t have to do any Google Docs or forms.

Evan

Right, exactly.

Kat

And then also forget about the forms. Like, oh, yeah, that’s right.

Evan

All this feedback that I have not used.

Kat

But like you said, it’s so many different things. So having it right in one Story Origin. I’m going to check my group promos. Oh, yeah, I should check my beta copy. Right, as well. And then you guys got into audio…

Evan

Promo code distribution.

Kat

I feel like that was during the pandemic as well. Is that newer?

Evan

That’s not too new. I think Story Origins has had that as a feature maybe for maybe three or four years now.

Kat

I don’t have audiobooks.

Evan

I also have a hard time remembering when I released each individual feature.

Kat

What year is this?

Evan

Shouldn’t we have jetpacks by now or something? Right. I feel like it should be in the future.

Kat

I feel like there shouldn’t be viruses. I mean, what are they doing?

Evan

Yeah, I know, right?

Kat

They should just be eradicated.

Evan

What weirds me out. A thing about being in the future that I can build software that makes getting feedback on a piece of text easier, substantially. For authors. I’m like, shouldn’t someone else have done this so long ago? How am I?

Kat

How am I the guy that nobody cared about it until you came around? Well, the indie author world wasn’t supposed to be a thing, remember?

Evan

Right, exactly.

Kat

Hard not to make it a thing. So if people are getting into audiobooks, and especially with AI these days, and that argument will get figured out, but AI audio is probably going to make it a little bit easier, possibly cheaper. Although I have my doubts on making an audiobook. So what do you guys offer for those who have audiobooks?

Evan

So if you produce your audiobook or distribute it, like through ACX or find a way or through a different audiobook distributor that maybe goes through Audiobooks.com or through Kobo, you get these codes. You might get like 25 or 30 or 100, depends on the different distributors. You get these promo codes so that readers can download that audiobook for free and listen to it on Audible or well, AuthorsDirect/Findaway got acquired by Spotify, so now they would redeem that promo codes for them through Spotify. Or you might have Kobo or audiobooks.com promo codes. So you get these promo codes where someone can download that book and listen to it for free through those various platforms. And those promo codes are really meant to be given to people who might potentially leave a review on the audiobook, right? And so you only have a handful of them. You want to make sure you get them into the hands of people who are actually going to listen and leave reviews on those books. So Story Origin has a way where you can collect interest in that review, copy in those audiobook promo codes, people will essentially request a code, they’ll say where they are planning on leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads or BookBub or whatever other retailers. And then if you want to approve someone, you just enter the code that you want to give out to them. And then Story Origin, the reader will be asked to leave their review on Story Origin and then leave their review on whatever other retailers as well. And so that review on Story Origin just makes it easy for them to copy and paste their review across the various places that they said that they would leave a review.

Kat

Yes, that makes it easier.

Evan

And it makes it easy for you, the author, to also, just at a glance, see all the reviews, see the text for all the reviews that people wrote for those audiobook codes. And the great thing there is that when someone applies or requests a promo code from you, you can see their reviewer stats. So if someone’s requested and been approved for ten audiobook promo codes through Story Origin, and before you can see, oh, they’ve been approved and said they were going to leave reviews for these books on Audible and Goodreads and they completed zero of those processes. I’m not going to give this person a promo code because they haven’t completed that review process for these other ten books. So I’m not going to give the promo code to that person nice. Or someone else applies and they’ve got their stats are like ten out of ten for Goodreads or Amazon or whatever else and say, okay, I can be relatively confident if I give this person a promo code that they’re actually going to go and leave a review. And again, that’s especially important with the case of audiobook promo codes because you’re only limited to a certain number of them. You have a handful of them. So you really want to get them in the hands of people who are actually going to leave reviews. And if you’re doing this by yourself, you’re just using like a spreadsheet or something to distribute those promo codes. You don’t know from the community who is actually going to leave reviews and who’s not.

Kat

Yeah, you would not be able to see that. Tell me how many you’ve completed. And getting reviews, as most indie authors know, is very difficult. So being able to choose the people wisely is nice. Do I have to bring the reviewers or do they sign up through Story Origin?

Evan

Either, or. They would request the audio promo code from you through Story Origin. But you can either send them to Story Origin like you might send out a newsletter to your own mailing list saying, hey guys, I have promo codes for my new audiobook, come and request them here. And then people from your newsletter could go and request it on Story Origin or you can set up cross promotions for those audiobook promo codes through Story Origin. So you could join a group promo for those audiobook promo codes or you could do newsletter swaps to promote that audiobook promo code request page. And then Story Origin also has a public directory of audiobook promo request page that you can optionally choose to opt into. So you can have your audiobook promo code request page listed there. Regardless of how you end up promoting it, whether it’s to your own mailing list, through group promos, through newsletter swaps, through putting it into the public directory, you still always remain in the driver’s seat about who to approve to give those promo codes to.

Kat

Okay, so they have to sign up for like a Story Origin reviewer sign up.

Evan

Many readers already have Story Origin accounts. Setting up an account on Story Origin is literally a matter of they enter their name and their email address and then hit submit. And then Story Origin just emails them a login link. So they don’t even need to set up a password if they don’t okay, cool. So they’ll just get a login link sent to their email address and then they would go through that process to say where they’re going to leave a review for that book, right, and hit the request button. But yeah, it’s totally free for all. The features on Story Origin are free for readers. And the account creation process is incredibly simple for getting those promo codes. It does require an extra couple of steps for them because they are going to say where they plan to leave a review. And if they say that they’re planning on leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads or BookBub, they’d also be prompted to add the link to their reviewer profile from those platforms as well. Okay, so if they say they’re going to leave a review on Amazon, they would give you the link to their Amazon reviewer profile.

Evan

And so you can not only see how many of the review processes have they completed on Story Origin before, let’s say they had never requested an audiobook promo code on Story Origin before. If they say they’re going to leave a review on Amazon, you can still always just go and check their Amazon reviewer profile and see do they leave reviews in general. If this person has never left a review for anything on Amazon, if I give them a promo code, it’s maybe more unlikely that they’re actually going to leave a review because they’ve never reviewed anything on Amazon before. Or you can also just check to see what books have they reviewed in the past, right? So if I see, hey, all these books that you’ve reviewed in the past on Amazon before, they’re all cozy romance and I write steamy romance and you’re requesting a steamy romance book from me, I might not accept your application for review copy because you might think you’re going to be getting something that you’re not, right? And I don’t want you to feel like you should leave a review if it’s going to be something that you’re not going to like.

Kat

Yeah, there’s too much sex in this, right?

Evan

Yeah, exactly.

Kat

There do tend to be people who sign up for reviews and then you’re like, I’ve read reviews. I was going to do a newsletter of funny reviews because there are some hilarious ones out there where it’s very clear that the person just doesn’t like the genre. So I’m just not sure why they bothered.

Evan

And then they’ve also reviewed book two and book three and book four in the series, and you’re like, why did you keep reading this series?

Kat

Just going to torturing yourself.

Evan

You’ve given every single book in this series a one star. Why are you still reading it?

Kat

Like it’s vengeance at this point. You’re just like, really mad at yourself.

Evan

Yeah.

Kat

Or like people who just I really love the people who this happens on Goodreads who will preface with, by the way, my rating goes like this. You’re like, but that’s not how ratings work. Three means good. You’re like, okay, I might not choose you because I don’t know what’s going on.

Evan

Right? Yeah. The other thing. When they request that review copy from you and you’re looking at their Amazon reviewer profile or Goodreads or BookBub reviewer profile, you can see how many books are they usually, what are the ratings. They’re usually giving the books. If you see that they’re giving every book that they read like one star and they’ve given out maybe a couple of three stars or something like that, you’re like, okay, this person’s highly, highly critical. Like, I don’t want me to give this person a review copy. And you as an author should not in any way feel obligated to give someone a review copy if you think that they’re not going to like the.

Kat

Book, they’re just grumpy.

Evan

Yeah, right, exactly.

Kat

I do talk about this. Your book is a piece of work that you’ve spent a lot of time on writing, formatting, doing all this and then the marketing, like just using all these little things that you can use on Story Origin. That’s your time. So like you said, you do not ever have to feel obligated to give anyone, especially a coveted review promo for your audiobook. You can choose. You don’t have to feel bad about that.

Evan

Yeah, by the way, all the stuff that we’ve been talking about with the audiobook promo code distribution is basically how the ebook review copies works on Story Origin as well. So when someone requests a review copy of your ebook from you on Story Origin, and you can see their reviewer stats and links to their reviewer profiles, you get to individually approve or decline them. You can cross promote those through newsletter swaps or group promos. There’s a public directory for ebook review copies that you can optionally list it in. You can also just promote it to your own newsletter. Everything we’ve just been talking about also applies to ebook distribution of review copies. All the tracking that you can see, like when they’ve left a review on Story Origin, what retailers they’re going to leave their reviews at. The other thing to mention with the ebook review copies though, is that there are two distribution methods there. You can choose to distribute it as just a file download through Story Origin, so you just be getting the file through Story Origin, or you can distribute it as an Amazon prepaid book link. So if your book is in Kindle Unlimited, you have this exclusivity clause with Amazon that you won’t distribute that file through any other means essentially, right? What you can do is you can purchase a gift copy of that book on Amazon and you can get that redemption link from Amazon and then you would put it in on Story Origin. So when someone requests a review copy from you, you would just enter in that redemption link for where they can redeem that gift copy.

Kat

Okay? That’s like the only way to get around that.

Evan

Yeah. So even if you’re on Kindle Unlimited, you can still use that review copies feature. And some authors might be thinking like, why would I use the review copies feature on Story Origin if I’m just giving out the Kindle Unlimited? Like, if I’m giving out a prepaid book link again because you want to be able to see have they actually completed reviews for other authors, what are the links to their reviewer profiles? You want the tracking and automatic follow up that Story Origin does for those reviewers, et cetera. So those are reasons to still like, even if you’ve got your book in KU and you’re going to be giving out Amazon prepaid book links, that’s another good reason to still use that review copies feature.

Kat

Yeah, I mean, just for anyone who knows how difficult it is to get follow up on reviews, I just checked one of my books and there’s two out of five, and I feel like that’s a good average for two people to have completed it. I guess it’s possible that they didn’t come back and tell Story Origin that they did it, but pretty sure that the other three didn’t. So that is why just handing out reviews or like copies and hoping that they will follow through with what they promised to do, humans, you have no control over that. So it’s nice to be able to see it. It’s nice to not have higher expectations than necessary or to stress out about it or all these things. It’s just nice to have that sort of everything in one place.

Evan

Yeah. For that reason, some authors ask me like, okay, what percentage of people should I expect to actually complete my reviews for review copies? And I truly cannot answer that because it’s entirely up to how strict you are about who you’re going to approve for review copy. If you’re only going to approve people who have previously reviewed like, 30 books on Story Origin and they have all their links for all those provided and et cetera, if that’s your criteria for who you’re going to approve, you’ll probably have 100% review rate, but you’re going to decline a whole lot of apps, right?

Kat

Yeah. It’ll get hard. You just have a smaller pool to choose from. Yeah. It does depend on what your goals are if you’re going to cast a wide net or a narrow net. But it’s just difficult for every book launch, for everything like that. This will help you just keep everything in one place and to know, even for your book launch, to know who you don’t want on the next one because they didn’t finish, they didn’t do it, because this is like, you’re going to do all this work to get your book out there. If that person isn’t going to pull the weight for the free book that you gave them, then you might not want them. Just kindly say no.

Evan

Yeah. And Story Origin also acts if you have multiple review copies on Story Origin. Let’s say you put up book 1, 2, 3, 4, whatever in a series on Story Origin, and they’ve requested book one and two. And you can see when they request book two, you can see whether or not when you’re viewing their reviewer profile, whether or not they’ve already completed book one. So Story Origin and shows you what other review copies they’ve requested from you and have they completed those when you’re checking their reviewer profile to see whether or not you want to approve them. So it also just sort of acts as like a customer relationship management CRM, sort of a tool where it’s like, okay, I know that they’ve reviewed my other books in this series as well, so I’m going to approve them for this one. Or, hey, they still haven’t actually left a review on book one or book two or something like that. I’m going to email them or something.

Kat

Yeah, can you email them and just say nicely, hey, I can release book two. Could you just finish up and right, can I email them or do I click something for Story Origin?

Evan

So it depends. Right, so if they’re coming through your own mailing list, like if they’ve come through your own mailing list, then you could always just email them because you already have their email address. If they’ve come to you on Story Origin through a group promo or newsletter swap or through the public directory, you only gain access to their email when they’ve completed the review copy process because Story Origin already automatically sends reviewers reminders. And so we don’t want to reviewers to feel like they’re being spammed. Right, exactly, right?

Kat

Are you done yet? Like the five year old in the back of the car?

Evan

Yeah, Story Origin already does that to readers, saying like, hey, it’s been a couple of weeks since you were approved for this review copy. Please don’t forget to go complete the review process. This is important to your reviewer stats. If you want to get more review copies on Story Origin, like, here’s the impetus for completing the review. Reviewers are not technically required to complete reviews that would be breaking terms of service on multiple services. So reviewers are encouraged to complete their reviews, and they understand that’s important if they want to get more review copies through Story Origin and because authors can see their reviewer stats. Right, and so Story Origin and sends those reminders to them. But yeah, so you would only gain access to those email addresses after they’ve completed the review copy process. If they’ve come to you through your own mailing list, you could always just reach out to them individually because you already know their email address.

Kat

Hey, man, finish up. So the big news that you’ve had in 2023, or at least in the last two months maybe you’ve had more, is the custom links, which is what I wanted to bring you in especially to talk about. So custom links, I think especially with authors. A lot of indie authors are moving to their own storefront or trying to figure that out. I know bigger name authors are doing shopify and then as I talk to sort of us mid list and lower lists or just starting out authors it’s like shopify is a lot but how can I brand? And I think that what I tell people especially just starting out is how can you train your readers to come to you, right? And so this custom link I think especially is like a step forward in getting those readers to come to me. Like I am the brand, I have this bookstore and I would really appreciate it if you would buy it from me from Amazon. I appreciate all sales. So that’s what I really like, the custom links first. So could you talk about the custom links and then we’ll sort of get into how authors would use it.

Evan

Yeah, the custom links feature is basically several features. In one, because it’s a custom links, you can create custom links and then you can also build a website with that feature as well. So a very simple website with probably the use case that you’re talking about more closely lines with the ability to create custom redirect links like you would on Bitly, right? So many people are familiar with Bitly. You create like a little short link so that people can, you can put that link at the back of your book or you put it on social media wherever. And when someone clicks that link you can see account of how many times that link has been clicked and then it will just redirect them to whatever page that you want to, whether that’s to your Amazon author profile or redirect them to your landing page on your own website for where they might buy the book or something like that, right?

Kat

Yeah. But if you’re just using free Bitly, I’ve had Bitly break on me so I’m sure at least at some point they’re not obligated to keep your Bitly working like five years later. No your Bitly is probably not working right.

Evan

And the other thing with those Bitly links as well is they’re just Bitly links. They’re ugly, they’re not your links, right? And so with the custom link feature on Story Origin you can create essentially short links that are customized for your domain. So I could create one at www.evangow.com/bookone, right? And then that would direct them to let’s say the Amazon purchase page for book one in my series or something like that.

Kat

For anyone listening, I’m going to show as you talk, I’m going to show people what this looks like.

Evan

Awesome.

Kat

So this is my page. So yeah, this is your custom place. So I guess you made mine as books.KatCaldwell.com.

Evan

Well you did that.

Kat

I did that. I did this.

Evan

Story Origin recommends if you already have a website built. Kat Caldwell.com then you would set up a new subdomain. And Story Orgin generally recommends using books. whatever your domain is.com.

Kat

Okay. So if you write in several genres, you could do like, Mystery.KatCaldwell.com or I could have in my memory is very short. Okay. We talked like a month ago. I guess I just chose books. But I think it’s very nice. Like books.KatCaldwell.com. And so then my first link here would be books.KatCaldwell.com/SteppingAcrosstheDesert, correct?

Evan

That’s right. Yeah.

Kat

I think it’s amazing. Like a I can remember it. It’s not bit.ly/whatever. And it’s very nice to see, especially on social media, when they see the actual link, like on your newsletter, you can put it behind a button. But I know Facebook hates Bitly. They really don’t like pushing your post if it has a Bitly link. And people have tried to get around that by putting in the comments or whatever. I mean, this is just nice. I can put a link. It’s nice looking. This is my brand, right? And this is where you can go to find my stuff.

Evan

Yeah. Or if you’re like posting it on Twitter or something, like books.KatCaldwell.com/SteppingAcrosstheDesert. It’s also just easy to remember to type in. You don’t have to go somewhere to remember what was that link, or if you’re putting the link in the back of your book, right? Because if someone’s reading a book on a Kindle or something like that, like the Kindle web browser not good. So a lot of times people might be reading their book on the Kindle, but then they want to open the link on their desktop or on their phone or something like that. It’s much easier for them to type that than just like some random string of letters or something like that. The other thing is, like, retailers like Apple do not like it when you include just like an Amazon link in your book, right?

Kat

That’s true. Yes.

Evan

So if you have books.KatCaldwell.com/bookone or something in your book and you’re selling that on Apple, and that link might go to Amazon or Apple. So the universal Booklinks feature on Story Origin.

Kat

Yeah, this is my universal book link.

Evan

Shows all the retailers where your book is listed. And so, yeah, you can put that at the back of book one.

Kat

That’s so obvious that I didn’t think because if people don’t know when you upload your ebook to Kobo, and they find out that you have a link that only goes to Amazon, they will spit it back to you. And so you used to have to have two different copies of your ebook.

Evan

So that now you don’t.

Kat

I think it’s especially Apple is like, no, you can’t have a link that only goes to Amazon. So if I put in my universal link so it would be books.KatCaldwell.com/SteppingAcrosstheDesert, that goes to my UVL. And people can easily buy whatever they want. Buy from whatever store they want.

Evan

Okay, exactly. And it’s not going to get kicked off. Yeah. So you don’t need to worry about okay, this is the manuscript version. This is like the ebook version. I’m uploading to Kobo. This is the ebook version. I’m uploading apple. This is the ebook version. I’m uploading Amazon, et cetera. Like that. You don’t need to worry about it.

Kat

Right. And then I could add this, I guess. This probably wouldn’t get kicked off either though, would it? Like books.KatCaldwell.com/Amazon. So I have it I don’t know, I haven’t checked it yet.

Evan

Yeah, I don’t know whether or not because it has the word Amazon. Even though it’s not the domain of the URL, it’s in the path in the URL. They might be more finicky about allowing something like that. What you could do is instead just link to books.KatCaldwell.com at the end of all of your books, and then that would just take the readers to your profile page, your website that you built on Story Origin, where you can have all of your books listed. If you click books.KatCaldwell.com on your Storyorgin dashboard, you can see that shows all of the books where they could request like your reader magnets, or they could request your review copies, or they could click on the universal book links to go to the retailer for whichever book you want. You might just want to send them to that more generalized sort of spot where they see all the books that you have and then they can click on whichever one that they want, depending on whether or not you’ve got books in a series or what have you.

Kat

Okay. And so when you’re talking about the website builder from Story Origin, is that what you’re talking about?

Evan

Yeah, that’s the website builder part, is that page that we were just looking at that showed all of your books in that one place that’s just on books.KatCaldwell.com without anything at the end of that link.

Kat

So I had already had a domain purchase. But if somebody’s just starting out, what would they need to start with this page here?

Evan

They would just need to buy a domain.

Kat

Okay.

Evan

I recommend NameCheap. They’ve got good docs that help authors for people that aren’t super technically savvy and maybe don’t recognize some of the words, they have pretty good docs that help you understand, oh, go here, do this, do that, and then your thing is set up. Yeah. Essentially you would just need to buy a domain. Usually it’s about like $10 a year. I had one author who had emailed me back after I released this feature. Like, buying my own domain is extremely expensive. I can’t do that. I’m like, oh, it’s like $10 a year. And they’re like, oh, I thought I had to pay Wix like $250 a year for a custom domain, which, if you want. To build a website on domain. It’s something like that. I don’t know what their pricing is, but it’s very expensive, right? Yeah. But buying a domain is actually just quite cheap. It’s like $10 a year. So you don’t need to sign up for whatever extra premium packages or whatever they have, right. You can just build that website on Story Origin and just buy your domain through, like, namecheap, right?

Kat

Yeah. And for people starting out, unless you’re really if you want the blog and you want all that, you might have to do the Wix or the WordPress. But there are a lot of traditionally published authors that have very simple websites. Like, they have a presence online and that’s about it. It’s like, here are their books, here’s their author bio, and you can’t find much else. And so you don’t have to have this huge website as an author. What you want is for people to buy your books, right, and to know who you are.

Evan

Yeah. I had a lot of authors test this feature out. 95% of them already had an author website, right? And they looked at the website that they generated with Story Origin that’s just basically got all their books listed, has their free reader magnets to entice people to sign up to their mailing list, and they’re looking at this going, I pay $X00 for this website, which took me hours to build, and I’m honestly afraid of till the amateur. Yeah, right? It took me hours to build. It doesn’t look good. I’m afraid to touch it because I’m afraid I’m going to break something, so I never am going to update it.

Kat

Which will break it.

Evan

Yeah. Or I’m like paying someone else to touch it because, like, I and so, like, there’s the extra cost of doing that, and they’re like, this is just yeah. And then they look at what they build with Story Origin and they go, this takes me 15 seconds to add a new book to this landing page, right? I’m going to drop my website. I don’t need this complicated pain in my neck to manage deal with whatever thing Story Origin does it all for me right here. And the Universal Book Links feature automatically localizes the Amazon links to the reader’s country. So if they click on the Amazon link from the Universal Book link on Story Origin and they’re in the UK, it’ll take them to Amazon co UK. If they’re in Australia, it’ll take them to Au, et cetera. Amazon has all these different storefronts, most authors websites, they just have, like, here’s the Amazon.com link. And if you live in the rest of the world, sorry, figure it out.

Kat

Because you’re asking authors to be more tech savvy and it’s just things you don’t think of. You don’t think of, oh, it’s a .co.uk, for better or worse. We don’t think of other countries.

Evan

Right? Yeah. Also, even if you could, it’s like, okay, now I have to list like here’s the Amazon.com link, here’s the Amazon.co.uk link, here’s the Amazon.com.au link. It’s like, okay, number one, it just makes the landing page look more complicated to readers, right, and you want things to look as simple as possible. So with Story Origin, there’s just like an Amazon button and then Story Origin automatically localizes it to their geography for them they don’t need to think about it. So it can keep the landing pages for your UBLs really simple. And then being able to create redirect links so that books.KatCaldwell.com/Amazon takes them to we’ll just redirect them from your website to your Amazon Author profile or something like that. Being able to set those kinds of things up on WordPress or Wix or whatever, it’s not straightforward or easy. Story Origin makes that process take like 30 seconds.

Kat

Yeah. And it really helps with certain things. I know now that Amazon is allowing you to see your number of followers. There are promotions now specifically for your author page on Amazon. So just having that link is nice where it’s not that giant Amazon link because if you’ve ever copied and pasted a giant Amazon link it’s like, is that even real? Does it take anyone, anywhere?

Evan

/store/author/e01x8, yeah.

Kat

And it just keeps going. Right, but I was telling authors this is a great thing, this is what I’m using it for so I can’t get I don’t have a store set up yet. It’s like that is down the line, right, like on my list maybe I got to get my books out first. But what I want is to continue the branding. So I was trying before you sent out the email to think of what could I do to get people to me and to have that branding there of .books.KatCaldwell.com it’s easy to say on podcasts, right, if you’re going out and talking to people or on YouTube or just on social media so you can say it very easily, but you’re also just branding it. And so if one day I were to put up an actual storefront where I want people to buy from me, I feel like my fans would already be ready for that. It might still be a step of like, here, buy from me or buy from Amazon maybe like easing people in. But the getting them to that link rather than sending them to Amazon, that has erased this logistical step that I couldn’t come up with except for making another page on my website.

Evan

Right? And the nice thing about those two is that with like a redirect link with those links on Story Origin in general, you can change them anytime down the line, right? So let’s say at the end of book one of your series, you put a link in there that says books.KatCaldwell.com/bookone, you can leave that link as the link at the end of your book one forever and then you can just change. If you ever want to change where that link goes, you can do that anytime without republishing that book. So you could change. Okay, /bookone goes to my UBL. Oh, you know what? I changed my own mind. I’ve now written a reader magnet, like an extended epilogue, reader magnet, to get people in my mailing list. Now instead of sending them to the buy link for book two at the end of book one. Now I want to send them to this extended epilogue to get them into my newsletter. So now book one goes to my reader magnet without changing the link at the back of your book. The link at the back of your book stays the same forever.

Evan

You can just change where that link goes to over time, depending on what you think might be best. Right, or, like, maybe you say, oh, you know what? I used to direct them to buy book two, but now I actually want to send them to my own storefront. So instead of it taking them directly to the Amazon store for book two, now it takes them to my storefront for book two. Right, or it takes them to just like the books.KatCaldwell.com homepage, right? So now they’ll see all of my books listed there or something like that. The point being, again, you can leave that link as books.KatCaldwell.com/bookone. And you can always just change where it goes to because you might decide you want to be doing something different with that link. And you don’t have to worry about generating a new EPUB file and then uploading that to Kobo and Amazon.

Kat

Making sure to delete the old one. Especially for people who are wide. You have to remember, I forgot that I saw Google Docs. I was like, oh my gosh, I have to remember how to upload it to Google Docs. So, yeah, especially for people who are wide. There’s a lot. So maybe a KU person doesn’t understand. But making sure that you change that link, if you can just leave your pristine, hopefully formatted book alone, that would be great. Okay, so if we just change the back end of where it goes to, but every time they’re clicking it, they’re still getting sent somewhere that we’ve decided they want to go. That’s very nice. Very nice. I like this. This is why I like talking to you, Evan. So I have even more ideas on how to use these things. And what’s amazing is I can just keep creating a new one. If you have a series, you can do, like, a certain promo for a series. Again, I think it’s great for branding. I think we are all small businesses, and that’s what we should be doing, right? It kind of helps that marketing piece just be easier. The last thing we got to talk about is what does it cost to get onto Story Origin and how do people get there to sign up and start using it?

Evan

Yeah, so storyorginapp.com the standard plan, which includes all the features on Story Origin is $10 per month or $100 per year.

Kat

Yeah. Nice.

Evan

So I think most authors who have probably been listening to this conversation is like, this is like the equivalent of five different services and ten spreadsheets I’ve been managing. Is this going to be $100 a month for me? Yeah. No, it’s $10 a month or $100 per year. So extremely affordable. And I’ll always keep it affordable for authors because I want to make sure that authors, at every stage, it’s accessible to them, right? If you have any questions or run into any issues, like I said, my email address is like on the home page of Story Origin or you click the contact link on Story Origin, you’ll see my face, you’ll see my name, you’ll get a welcome email from me. When you sign up to Story Origin, that comes from my email address. You can always shoot me a question. My inbox is always open. Yes.

Kat

I can’t believe you don’t have a VA. You should get a VA. Yeah. But you also have lots of video tutorials. It’s very easy to do. I know. Every time I send people to a new thing, I sort of preface like, this one’s harder to learn to use. But Story Origin is really, I think, one of the easier ones to figure out. It’s very well organized. There’s a video tutorial if you need it, but it’s just one of those places that it’s pretty straightforward.

Evan

I do my best to avoid getting emails. So creating video tutorials and having those accessible right next to the features, the video tutorials are inlaid with the feature, right. Like, oh, I need to use the reader magnets feature. How do I do that? The link to the video tutorial is right there. It’s not like on some separate support docs website or something like that that you have to then search through a knowledge base. And how do I navigate this other different website? That’s how a lot of people do it. I don’t think that’s great.

Kat

Yes. People need to follow you. Exactly. It’s very well organized.

Evan

Yes. Because I tried to avoid getting emails, I don’t want people emailing me with questions. But you are more than welcome to because that is also how I get feedback about, oh, five people sent me an email about how do I do this? Obviously there’s something here that I need to change so that people don’t keep running into the same issue. I’m both the customer support and the engineering department. So if I’m getting a bunch of emails about, hey, how does this work? Then I can put my engineering hat on and say, oh, let me go make this easier, simpler, faster, more intuitive, so that authors don’t run into this set of questions, right?

Kat

Nice. Yes. And the good thing is that there are always forward thinking authors out there, so they’ll ask the questions and then I’ll just benefit from them having asked. Look at that, we can do business. Well, that’s awesome. So I will send people in the show notes below, otherwise it’s storyorginapp.com. Otherwise we’ll have the links in the show notes below and in the transcript. But thank you so much Evan, for coming and guiding us back through Story Origin.

Evan

Yeah, thanks again for having me on.

The post Ep 182 One-Stop Author Marketing at Story Origin App first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.