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.

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

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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

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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

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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.

Join me today as I talk with Lis Shaughnessy, found of the Writing Retreat Sampler. Lisa has taken it upon herself to not only find the writing retreats offered around the world, but to interview the hosts and bring all the links to one place, WritingRetreatSampler.com so that writers can have a better way of discovering the writing retreat for them! You can find interviews from the past and sign up to hear interviews from future writing retreat hosts (including me in July!) at her website https://writingretreatsampler.com/

You have one more day to sign up for the Write With Us! online retreat live. If it has passed, you can purchase the full seven workshops as a course here.

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TRANSCRIPTION STARTS HERE:

Kat

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Pencils & Lipstick. I am talking today with Lisa Shaughnessy. Hi, Lisa, how are you doing?

Lisa

Good, Kat. Thanks so much for having me here. I’m really excited to be talking to you today.

Kat

Me too. I’m glad that we’re not just on email. We’re talking, with voices. Semi see each other. So I will go into how I found you and how we set this up and what we’re going to talk about. But could you introduce yourself a little bit to everyone?

Lisa

Sure. So I am doing my current business. It’s been an interesting journey. So I was in the Air Force. I was military for 20 years. And then I joined the government after that, because that’s what people do in the DC area. So I’m in the DC area and you just naturally slide into that. Well, even when I was in the military and the government, I did my own thing. I didn’t realize at the time that I was entrepreneurial in this construct of ultra rigidness. So I try to do my own thing. And people let me for the most part, which was interesting. And then they stopped letting me do it. I got a new boss and she was like, no, no. So I said, well, maybe the government isn’t for me anymore. And I said, I’m going to start my own business. So in 2012, I started helping fitness professionals do their social media. It was all new. Everybody’s trying to figure out what to do social media stuff. And I did that. And then it segueed into where I’ve actually always been professionally, which is processes, process improvement, and customer relationships. So I started helping small businesses put their processes together, help them get their business in shape, and also help them with those important follow up messages that nobody does because that’s where the business is. It’s great to make connections, but if you don’t follow up with anybody, they’re not going to go anywhere. You’re not going to grow your business. So I did that for a couple of years until I really got burnt out on that. And in 2018, I decided to stop everything completely and write full-time. So I have been researching my family history for years, and I found some interesting stories along the way. So I started writing those. And yeah, that’s what led me into my current thing. But I really enjoyed writing and saw that there was… I had more ideas in my head. I had more stories, not just family stories, but it kind of sparked this creative juice I didn’t know I had.

Kat

That’s so cool.

Lisa

Yeah. And so I just started writing stories. And then I know we’ll get into it. But I did that for a couple of years until I realized I needed some help. And that’s what led me to where I am now.

Kat

Okay, that’s so cool. So I found you through a friend who found your Facebook ad. So I know I said this off recording, but I really want to put together writing retreats because I think that, I’m going to say especially women, because we’re always were working. A lot of women have the home life, the kids, whatever, and writing is very difficult to do. We all know that we can get our half an hour here, half an hour there, but wouldn’t it just be lovely to have a whole week? Isn’t that everyone’s dream where you don’t have to cook, you don’t have to do anything. And so that is my dream. And so a friend of mine found your Facebook ad for this writing retreat sampler. And so that was in March or February of this year, I think.

Lisa

February. Yeah, probably February.

Kat

So you put together all these speakers who run writing retreats. And I was like, There are so many. It’s amazing. So how did you fall into this writing retreat sampler? That’s the name of the blog, correct? WritingRetreatSampler.com, which the link will be in the show notes below. But how did you get into bringing people together to let writers know that this is a possibility we can have this time?

Lisa

Well, it came from my writing. So as I segued from creative nonfiction for the family stories, which the stories were written already, I just had to make them more like, readable. And I took courses. I don’t know if it exists anymore, but the creative nonfiction something had classes. So I was learning how to write true stories, but in a fiction way. And then when my other creative ideas came and I was writing actual books, stories, actually they ended up being novellas because I realized I can’t write a lot. I’m good at a novella, I said what I had to say.

Kat

That’s good. Lots of people only want to read a novella.

Lisa

But then I realized I didn’t understand the story structure. I didn’t understand how… My first writings, of course, everybody’s are crap, right? You just get everything down. They didn’t read very well. They weren’t very compelling. So I started looking around to find ways to help me with that. And there were some courses. I actually hired a book coach, which was great. She was wonderful. Actually, it was an author accelerator book coach. Yes. Years ago, this must have been… This was like 2018, 2019, and she was amazing. She helped me so much really understand the inside outline and all those things, how everything relates. But I needed a little bit more. I wanted, like you said, that concentrated time to really dig into this and learn from other people. And so I started looking for writing retreats, and this was fall of 2019.

Kat

Oh, no.

Lisa

I know, right? So the first problem was; I found all these blog posts that had lists and lists of the 80 best writing retreats. So I was a process person and I get out my spreadsheet and I’m plugging in the name, the website information, and then I’m trying to compare the ones that I liked, and it was still frustrating. I’m still looking at a spreadsheet and it’s not easy to compare or see which ones might be best for me. So I let that go a minute because then we’re coming into the holidays and everything. So I thought, okay, well, after we get back from vacation, I’ll start in the new year. I will find a writing retreat in the new year.

Kat

Well, we all had plans in 2020, to do so much.

Lisa

We did have plans. So I did find some and then March hit, everything shut down. So no writing retreat. But I still wanted to eventually go on one. And there was still the problem that it was really difficult to find one. There were a couple sites that had writing retreats, but they weren’t… I don’t know. To me, it wasn’t easy to use them, and there weren’t that many on there.

Kat

No, I agree, because when I was doing research to set one up, it was really difficult to just see, like, to find it, to Google it. And Google is like the number one search engine, right? So you’re just trying to find, I don’t know if we don’t care about SEO in the writing world or what, but I wanted to know, like, the veterans who have been doing it for years, what works, what doesn’t. I couldn’t find it. I found maybe five.

Lisa

So my first part of this was I decided to create a writing retreat directory, which is not up yet. It’s very close. It should be up, maybe even by the time this airs, it should be up. So I started working with a developer, website developer, and started going through that road. And it got delayed a couple of times for various things. But this past August, I was making connections with a few writing retreat hosts, but I was really ready to get ready. I wanted to connect people. I wanted writers to find these writing retreats. I wanted writing retreat hosts to be successful. So I was really frustrated that I had no way to do that. And I was talking to Kent Sanders, who was actually one of my retreat host speakers at the February Sampler. And back in September, I was talking to him and he suggested an online summit. And I was like, a summit? I’ve never heard of that. So I Googled it, like I said, I Googled it and found this online summit model. And I thought, well, maybe I could make it work for retreat hosts. Maybe I could do stuff that would help them with their business or something like that just to get started. And I was talking to one of my brothers who’s much more visually creative than I am. And he said, well, why don’t you not do that, but connect writers with the writing retreat hosts. Don’t connect the writing retreat hosts with people who can help in their business. Connect the writers. That’s what you want, right? And I was like, oh, yeah.

Kat

It’s always good to talk things through with another person.

Lisa

Yeah, the brainstorming. You get ideas that you’ll never think of on your own. I would never have thought of that in a million years. So after we got off the phone call, I immediately bought the website domain, WritingRetreatSampler.com, because that’s the only thing I could think of to name it.

Kat

Naming things is so hard, but I think it’s a good name. But it’s so hard. It’s so permanent.

Lisa

I know. I know. I was like, Well, that’s it. It’s done. And I made the website over the weekend. I just got some hosting and got a WordPress site going, threw up some general things, put a sign up box if you want to get notified. I’m doing the sampler thing. And then I just started cold calling, cold pitching retreat hosts. I didn’t know anybody. Kent Sanders was the only person in the whole writing retreat world I knew. But I was like, no, I’m going to do this. Okay.

Kat

You found 15, though? There were a lot of people in February. And there.

Lisa

Were more that were asking me if they could participate, but I had to keep it low because for one thing, I didn’t know what I was doing, and this was all very new.

Kat

And we all lose interest, unfortunately, life happens. You can’t.

Lisa

I contacted everybody in November. I had them lined up, and then I had the free event in February.

Kat

It was very good. It was really good. It was super informative. I was really excited about it because the lady that I’m putting together our retreat in Spain, we had been trying to find this information. And one of the biggest things that I learned on that one is we had a schedule set up for our writing retreat, and almost everyone that presented and had been doing it for years. It was like, no schedule, more than two things. And we were like, okay, scrap. It was so wonderful to listen and to learn from them. But it was also wonderful to hear how many retreats there are in different places in the world. And that to me, I was just like, oh, my gosh, I really want to go on one now. There are amazing places to go to.

Lisa

Yeah. And it was great because I had people who were present from all over the world and attendees. Well, not too much all over the world, basically North America and Europe. But yeah, I had somebody in France, somebody in the UK, somebody here, but her retreat was in Iceland. Yeah, it was amazing to bring all these people together. So that’s what I do. My whole career, my whole personal and professional life has been connecting and bringing people together. So it just comes natural to me. I find people who need to be together, I’m like, okay, you have to be together. Let’s introduce each other. Let’s build a community because that’s more what I’m doing, is I want to obviously help writers and help writing retreat hosts. But I really want to build this community where writers can get all the help that they need. They can find products and services that help them because I have sponsors. So for this next iteration, I’m having sponsors. And that way when people come to the event, they can visit the sponsor booths and they can interact with them. They can see what they offer, how that might help them, make them think of things they might not even know exist. Because we know there’s a ton of things out there for writers and it can be overwhelming.

Kat

It can be very overwhelming. And like you said, especially if we are learning to write or we’re starting a new genre or we just want that extra help. It’s amazing to me how many writers don’t… I don’t know if they have looked for help and they can’t find it. So then they just like, okay, never mind, I don’t need it. Or they think that they don’t need it. I think I need it. I think I need some help. But I think it would be lovely to be in a place where the atmosphere itself is writing. You know what I mean? The ideas are there already. And like you were brainstorming with your brother, even talking to another writer, What should my character do? I’m stuck here. And the ideas that they might come up with will lead you to what you need to do. That just sounds amazing.

Lisa

Yeah, I love that. And that’s why I like writing retreats. People ask me, Have you been to a writing retreat? Are you a writing retreat host? And I say, no, I haven’t managed to actually get to a writing retreat yet, but I understand the power of them. I know that, like you said, that in-person connection, that one on one time, or that alone time. Because like you said, even if you’re trying to get a 30 minutes in here, there, the way I write, that takes me 30 minutes to get back into the groove. What was my character doing? What was the setting? What was the scene? What happened? What happened up till now again, where you have to get back into that mindset. So by the time you’re back in the mindset, the laundry bell has gone off or you have to go to carpool.

Kat

You got to make dinner again.

Lisa

Again, right? Why do we have to do that every night?

Kat

Yes. And it’s lovely. I know when I started writing and I was with the kids and I finally got all three of them into school, all of them. I was daycare, every… And so I had four hours and I still had all the things but I could think about only my book because that’s all that I… The other thing that I was doing, all, it takes so much mental capacity. But now that I have a business and all the other things and then the book is in the middle, like you said, it’s difficult to spend all your mental energy on that book. So then when you sit down, you have to do it. And so what a retreat does is helps you just stay in that zone, I assume, because I also have not been to one yet.

Lisa

Because morning, noon, and night, you wake up and you’re surrounded by other writers, even at a breakfast table or lunch or just enough. Even if you go on an excursion, a lot of retreats have… Not a lot, but some retreats have local places where you can visit. Even going down some unfamiliar road in a town and talking about something can spark an idea. So you’re immersed in it, and that’s the difference. You’re immersed in this new environment with new people, different people getting just all these new experiences. And I think for a creative mind, that’s just like…

Kat

Yeah, it would be lovely, wouldn’t it? Yeah. So as you spoke to all the people for your first summit in February, was there anything that surprised you or that you learned or just kept you energized to keep going? But I guess that’s two different questions.

Lisa

No, it actually all ties in. Yeah. So having never done this and not knowing anybody in the field or the industry, I was very surprised that people said yes, they would do it, that they would speak, that they would not just put a presentation together and record it with me, but they would be there on the date and time of their presentation being shown and they would show up for the live chat. So just that commitment of time, because obviously they’re busy too, it was really nice. I just felt like such a generous community already. And then when writers, I know I’m going to… But when writers emailed me and said, Oh, this was so great. I’ve been looking for something like this. I had no idea that there were actually retreats out there. I didn’t know where else I could get help. Just putting this together has been really helpful for me. So that actually in some of these moments where I’m like, did I do the right thing? Because when you do something so completely brand new that there’s no frame of reference for and people don’t… Not that they don’t understand what it is, but they don’t have a set of frame of reference for it. They can’t compare it to something. So for them to say those really nice things, that keeps me going when I’m thinking, I don’t know, is this the right thing to do?

Kat

I think it’s lovely that you have a talent for bringing people together because I know in the writing world, lots of people have wonderful ideas. A writing retreat is a wonderful idea. You have to find the people. You have to get the word out there. And we’re writers and to be honest, we’re not awesome at marketing and we’re not awesome at business. That’s a whole new thing that has to be learned. And so to have you being able to like, let’s try to find this circle in this world to bring everyone together is an amazing idea. It’s very helpful for those who organize retreats and the writers, I would assume.

Lisa

Right. And that’s the thing. So what I like about the sampler is it’s not a pitch fest. It’s not retreat hosts giving up and just talking about their retreat. Obviously, that’s part of it because I want writers to see all the different kinds of retreats that are out there. But I have a specific format for the presentations, and their retreat information goes at the back. So the first thing I want them to do after telling a little bit about themselves is just tell the writers what a retreat will do for you. Why should they even attend a retreat? I want them to see the benefits and what they’ll get from it right off the bat. And then I ask them to talk about what to bring to a retreat because sometimes writers, they’re like, It’s new. I’ve never been there. What do I bring? What should I think about?

Kat

I always over pack.

Lisa

Right. And what’s nice about that is they talked about tangible and intangible things. So people are like, obviously bring weather appropriate clothes, but they’re also like, bring your imagination, bring an open mind. And if they have something specific to their retreat, we’re going to go hiking, so bring hiking shoes. It just gives writers more things to think about that they may not have. Then they described their retreat, the date location, all the things. And then I ask them to take the writers through a day. Take them through a sample day because, again, I want writers to get that feel for what it will be like. If they’re going to spend their time and money on something because retreats aren’t cheap.

Kat

They’re not cheap.

Lisa

I want them to know what they’re going to get. I want them to see that workshops are in the morning and hiking is in the afternoon. But if that’s not the retreat they want, then they should look at something else. So it gives them idea of what kinds of retreats are out there so they know what to look for when they’re looking for one for themselves. And then at the end, I ask them to tell writers how they can keep that momentum going. Great, you’ve got so much done at the retreat. You finished your manuscript. You’re all ready to do whatever. But then, of course, we go back to reality. Yes. So I want them to give them ideas and helpful hints and just all the tips they can about how to keep that momentum after they’re going. So whether you attend or are interested in the specific writing retreat at each Sampler event, you will still get something out of it because the retreat hosts are going to give you tips and ideas on before, during, and after a retreat. So it’ll just add to your list of things to think about and get in your mind what a retreat will do for you. So I would say even if you see the list of events and the specific retreat isn’t one you’re interested in, that you will still get a lot out of it and you will still get to visit the sponsor booths, which have a lot of good information as well.

Kat

Right. So you had one in February and now you’re having one again in May. So as this episode goes out, May 24th, so next week after the episode goes out, what prompted you to have one so quickly? Because that’s a lot of work. I know what work goes into all this and getting people and recording and putting it up. I mean, it’s a lot of work. So is there just that many retreats and many things to talk about?

Lisa

Well, what’s interesting is, talk about lessons learned. So when I did the one of February, like I said, it was the summit model. So I had, I think, five on Monday and six on Tuesday. And it was stack to stack and just bombarded. And if anyone’s not familiar with the summit model, you take away the replay pretty much after 48 hours unless people purchase your all access pass and they’ll get ongoing access to the videos and things like that. And that just didn’t sit well with me. I did it because I wanted to get this out the door, and it was a model that had information on how to put it together. So though I’m not overly technical, so I couldn’t have maybe figured it out. It would have taken me longer to do something different. So I went ahead and did the model. But the whole time I’m like, Oh, I hate asking for people to pay to just watch the dang replay. And also, as you said, it’s prerecorded. And then the live chat is underneath on the specific day. The prerecorded, I get it. It saves time and it’s not always easy to do live events. But again, the prerecorded, it just didn’t sit with me well. So these new iterations is it’s going to be one retreat host at a time. I’m going to do two a month and they’re going to be live. So we can do live Q&A.

Kat

Wow. Okay. So you’ve thrown away the summit model, which I think that we’re all moving away from summit model. Maybe not. Maybe I just don’t like it either. Very saturated. I don’t like it either because we all know what it is. And to be fair, you deserve to be paid. All these systems cost money, right? So I get it. People need to pay for things because systems cost money, software, time, all that. So you’ve thrown that away, though, and you’re going to just do every month do two live?

Lisa

Right. And I’m going to change out the timing. So I’m in the Eastern time. So I don’t remember if it’s the first. I have it somewhere. I don’t know where. So one Wednesday, I think the first Wednesday of every month, it’s going to be at 8:30 AM Eastern Time. And then the third Wednesday of every month, it’s going to be at 3 o’clock Eastern Time.

Kat

Okay. To sort of help out the world.

Lisa

Right. So the early morning ones, you can catch all the way up to through Europe. And then the later afternoon ones, we can go West Coast back. But the replays are always going to be available. They’re going to be available in Air Meet, which is the platform I’m using. They’re going to be on my website and they’re going to be on a YouTube channel. Nice. Yeah. So people will be able to go back. And even if the retreat’s over, like I said, you’ll still get a ton of information on how to prepare for a retreat and information. But again, you said things have to be paid for. So I’m getting sponsors.

Kat

Oh, wonderful.

Lisa

Yeah, which actually has been great. I love it so much because I’m now bringing another writing related businesses into the ecosystem. So I have three sponsors for the first one in May, and all of them are people I’ve either worked with or have researched and really love their mission. It aligns with helping authors and writers succeed, which is our mission, too.

Kat

Yeah, we all want to succeed.

Lisa

Right. So I cold pitch them. I obviously don’t have a long track record. I just have the one event. And I reached out to three different companies, three different businesses, and they all said yes.

Kat

Nice.

Lisa

So I have three sponsors for the first one, and I’ll be reaching out some more for the ongoing ones. So hey, if anybody out there has writing related businesses, services, hit me up. And if you want to be a sponsor on one of the events, just let me know because I always love to showcase more people who are helping writers.

Kat

Yeah. And I think that’s a wonderful place for those businesses, one more place for them to show because we can all do ads, but in that concentrated ecosystem, I feel like maybe they would have more success where writers would be like, Oh, this is sponsoring Lisa, and Lisa believes in them, and so I’m going to go and check them out, at least check them out because that’s what we all want.

Lisa

Yeah. And AirMeet has these great sponsor booths, so it’s a fun environment. It’s not just a static logo on a slide or something. So it’s actually, I think, more interesting.

Kat

Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting model. I do feel like it’s more work for you, though. I don’t know.

Lisa

Actually, it’s not because it’s one writing retreat host at a time. Instead of trying to get 13, 15 presentations, headshots, bio, all this stuff. That was a lot. And then I had to record them all before February. So having it spread out, it’s like you start one and then a couple of weeks later you start the next one because it’ll all be basically two weeks apart. So yeah, no, I’m finding it. And then, of course, I have my processes in place. So it’s just a matter of duplicating something I’ve already done. So once I got the first one down, it was just a matter of just repeating the process.

Kat

So you are getting some writing done outside of the business or not yet?

Lisa

I was. I am. So I do a cozy mystery on Kindle Vella, and I get episodes in. I try to get at least one episode in a week. So in the evening, I take my writing time. Our son’s out of the house. He’s gone and done and married and done his thing. So that’s my husband and me and the dog. So I just say, okay, I’m going to go into my office and write for a couple of hours in the evening and try to get that done. Because I still love to write. I still want to write. So it’s just a matter of thinking time for that.

Kat

Yes, it is. It’s like, we have these ideas and then, oh, yeah, I was supposed to be writing that. But I didn’t know you were doing Vella. How is that going? Do you like that model, the Kindle Vella? I do.

Lisa

I actually started it when it first came out. So I had episodes ready to go when it went live in was that 2021, April, June? I don’t remember. I feel.

Kat

It was during COVID.

Lisa

Which is a whole blur. I did like it. So I That’s where I put my family stories on under a pen name. And it was nice because you could write in chunks. You didn’t have to have a whole manuscript done before you had to put something out to the world. So I liked that I found an editor who did specifically Kindle Vella. So she was experienced in serial, that writing. So I’d send her my episode and she’d edit it and I’d get it up. So I did that for all my family stories. And then when I was thinking of something new to write, I always loved mystery. I always loved cozy mystery. I’m not a horror or thriller, blood and guts reader. But some ideas for a cozy mystery hit me. So I thought, Oh, you know what? I’ll just put that on Kindle Bella. And I have three seasons of that one up. So I’ve been writing that one for a couple of years off and on. Yeah, it’s fun.

Kat

So in the end with Kindle Vella, it’s almost like television. It’s a season. So there’s not… Do you have to finish it? Does there have to be an ending? How does that work?

Lisa

Some people do actually. For each episode, you mean? Or for the story?

Kat

For seasons? Is that technically a book? One season is one book?

Lisa

It is. Everybody does it differently, but it wraps up the initial whatever was going on the arc in that season. But you still have television. You wrap up whatever that season’s arc was, but there’s still going to be stuff in the next season that plays off of last season.

Kat

We still got to see if Ross and Rachel will ever get together.

Lisa

Right, exactly. So it flows through, which is why a series… And a lot of people use Kindle Vella for… I’ve seen poetry on there. People don’t necessarily use it for the serial, what it’s supposed to be. But I’m basically, every season is what would be like a book and it wraps up the mystery. But then stuff that’s going on in the protagonist’s life or the town or whatever, carry on throughout that. There’s a backdrop or a thread that goes through that they’re still working through.

Kat

And how are you plotting that? My biggest fear would I get out of first draft and then I completely tear it up, rearrange it and just mess it up. So I couldn’t put it out, like, episodically because it would end up being completely different by the end. So what is your process on how much do you know? How much plotting do you do?

Lisa

Very little.

Kat

This is very scary to me. Very little? Oh, my gosh. That’s so cool.

Lisa

Because it’s a mystery, right? I have to know the basics. So I know what the mystery is going to be, like who’s going to get killed. Well, actually, I don’t always know who’s going to get killed, but I know why.

Kat

Okay, why? That’s important.

Lisa

So what’s the mystery? What’s going on? Why is this going to happen? And what’s the outcome going to be? So I have to know the outcome sometimes. You’re going to laugh because I totally pantsed the whole thing. I have an idea, and then each episode I’ll make notes. And I use a story planner, an app called Story Planner, and you can do out scenes and you can do characters and you can do the plots and everything. And so I’ll plug my scenes into there. And if I had a character do something, I’ll write a note like, oh, make sure that I tie this up, that this comes back. And then sometimes I won’t know. I’ll be like, oh, man. Okay, have I box myself in the corner, what would happen now? So that’s what you lay back, you close your eyes and visualize. You’re like, okay, she’s walking down the street. Why would she do that? How would we get back to this plot point? And so I just make it up. And I’m like, Oh, okay. Well, they got together in the diner and talked it out. And I don’t know, next thing you know, they were in the cornfield.

Kat

Somehow. That’s awesome, though. Do you like that process where you use it? It sounds like you could stress yourself into a corner and then you’d get out of it. You brainstorm yourself out of it. I guess a little bit of pressure for the readers. Yeah, I do like it.

Lisa

I like it better than overly. And it cracks people up because I’m such a process person. I am a linear process person. But when it comes to writing, I think that’s why I like writing because it just allows this creative side that I don’t normally get to exercise. So I do like it because it makes me think. I like it. I’m like, oh, man, what would happen? Oh, why did that happen?

Kat

Yeah, you can’t really leave it. Yeah, you really have to get it done.

Lisa

Yeah. A lot of Google searching.

Kat

Your Google search is something the FBI would do.

Lisa

This latest episode, I ended up with… They were in the cornfield because this company was drilling for natural gas on this. It’s set in rural Pennsylvania, where it’s set and nobody knew. And so I had to Google, would there be equipment? Now that I’ve decided they’re going to be drilling for natural gas, okay, well, how would they do that?

Kat

Oh, my gosh. This lady is going to go out to Pennsylvania and drill for natural gas.

Lisa

Well, now she knows what equipment she needs.

Kat

That’s so like a writer. We think of these things and then we’re like, wait, how would that work? I got to not have it too fantastical. It’s got to have something…

Lisa

Right, a little bit grounded in reality. Yeah. So I have some general ideas, general things I want the plot to do and where I want my character’s arc to be. So I focus on her. Where is she going? What is happening in her life that moves her from more of an introverted shy person who hates her job to somebody maybe a little bit more risk taking, a little bit more outgoing, and she changes jobs and moves on with her life. So a lot of it that I do plan out more is how her life is going to be.

Kat

Her life, yeah. So you’re getting to know her really well if you have how many episodes? How many seasons?

Lisa

I’m in the middle of the third season.

Kat

Okay, yeah. So that’s fun. When Vella came out, it definitely was during COVID because I was moving to DC and I was in this tiny apartment and I was brainstorming and then I was like, no, I can’t do it. So I’m glad to hear it. I haven’t heard of anyone who is actually doing it. So how is marketing and things like that for it? Have you had time to do much? Does Kindle help you find readers or do people know what Vella is? How has that experience been?

Lisa

When I first started, I was more active on the groups and forums and things to promote it. I was all over Twitter and Facebook, and I have a website for my pen name, and it was just more active. And then once I got all the family stories out there and I just started writing, it’s Andy Schulbert cozy mysteries. Just do promos every once in a while through Free Booksy or Fuzzy Librarian. And those actually have a really good return. So Fuzzy Librarian.

Kat

So they have specifically Vella. Oh, that’s nice.

Lisa

Fuzzy Librarian does. And also every once in a while, Amazon will do a Kindle Vella thing. So if I get some spike… So I don’t advertise it at all. But if I get some spike in reads, I’ll be like, oh, okay, Kindle Vella must have been doing free token month or something. So it dribbles in. I just did a Fuzzy Librarian promo a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve had 350 downloads of my episodes this month without doing anything else. I haven’t mentioned it to anybody and people are finding it.

Kat

Maybe it’s like the beginnings of Kindle, basically, where there weren’t that many. So if you can write episodically, you might want to get in on it and see if you can find those readers. And it’s a fun idea. I just haven’t had time.

Lisa

Along with everything else, right? The podcast, the book coaching, the routine.

Kat

Add one more thing on there. No, but I can understand, especially city dwellers, your commute, especially if you’re using metro. Way back when, I would have definitely wouldn’t have to carry a book around if I could read a whole chapter. Anyway, well, that’s very cool. I’ll have the links in the show notes below so you guys can check out out. What is your pen name again?

Lisa

That’s Deena Bauer.

Kat

All right, we’ll have the links in the show notes if people want to check out your Kindle Vella. So let’s just get back to the writing retreat.

Lisa

Right. What were we talking about?

Kat

You could get three seasons on in a writing retreat. So this next May 24th is the kick off to this new set up where you’re going to have just one speaker.

Lisa

Yeah. So it’s going to be mainly memoir retreats. And this time it’s three women. They do, all three of them host the retreat. So it will be all three of them on there. But that will be the only time it’ll be a lot of speakers.

Kat

Very cool. And so how do people find the videos and sign up? And what is that process for you now?

Lisa

So on the WritingRetreatSampler.com, I have the events are on the front page, so they can just click on that and go through Eventbrite to sign up. And then from there they’ll get emails on how to enter the event once it starts and information from there. I’ll have the day before I’m going to open it up so people can visit the sponsor booths and get familiar with the platform because I think a lot of people haven’t used AirMeet. So it allows them to go in and get familiar with the platform before the day of the actual sampler.

Kat

Okay. And so then once they’re on your mailing list, will they get emails for every two weeks, like the new speakers?

Lisa

Yeah. So once they’ve signed up, they will be on my mailing list. And there’s options to opt into different types of email once you’re there. But I send out a weekly newsletter with blog posts, sampler updates. I try not to cram it too full of things, but I like to be able to be aware of sample updates, sponsor updates. I like to let people know about our sponsors and any blog posts that come up.

Kat

Right. And your blog is very nice. There’s quite a few blogs, not to brag, but I got to be on your blog.

Kat

That’s got a lot of hits, too. I was looking at my desk for it. Quite a few people have.

Kat

It’s nice, though. It’s another way that you’re bringing writers and their points of view and different things. So it’s nice to not have to do all the work, I’m sure, and to bring in other people’s expertise.

Lisa

Exactly. And that’s what I want. Like I said, the whole community, I want people to learn from each other. It’s not just me spouting from on high, like, this is it. This is it.

Kat

We run out of things to say if it’s just us, right?

Lisa

Yeah, but I do. I want people to get to know each other. I want they see you and your blog post, your guest post. Maybe they’ll visit your site and find out more about you or just your ideas. That’s my whole point. I want to bring as many writers, people in the writing ecosystem together. That’s my goal.

Kat

I love that goal. I am so on with that goal. So just to reiterate, everyone can find Lisa Shaughnessy at WritingRetreatSampler.com. We will have the links in the show notes. And we hope that you guys will sign up for the May 24th, Mainly Memoir. I assume that’s in May. That’s a very cute name. I like that. I highly encourage you guys to go to her blog. As I said, there’s lots of guest posts and Lisa posts there. Lots of information for writing. But thank you so much, Lisa, for coming on and sharing about the Writing Retreat Sampler with us.

Lisa

Well, thanks, Kat. Really appreciate you having me.

The post Ep 181 Finding a Writing Retreat with Lisa Shaughnessy first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.

Welcome to Pencils&Lipstick! This week we are answering some questions I get as well as talking about subplot characters.

Check out Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story and Story Genius. Also John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. And Save the Cat.

Want to support the show?

Sign up for the Write With Us online retreat!

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

Looking for tips on writing, publishing, and storytelling? Join my writers’ newsletter! 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.

TRANSCRIPTION STARTS HERE:

Kat

Hello, everyone. How are you doing? Welcome to Episode 180 of the Pencils & Lipstick Podcast. I’m Kat Caldwell. And today we have a bit of a shorter episode for you. We are going to talk about subplot characters, something that I hadn’t thought much about, and perhaps you haven’t either. So we’re going to talk about them and talk about their role in your story. Not every single story has a subplot character, but if you like writing subplots, you might want to stick around and listen to what I found out from one of my favorite writing mentors, John Truby. And I had read his book before and I went back and was perusing through it and it stuck out to me. And I thought, wow, if I don’t know about that, perhaps you don’t either. Or maybe I’m the only one. I don’t know. Hope you guys are doing well. Next week we’ll be back with interviews with Lisa Shaunessy, and then Evan Gao is going to come in and talk to us about the new things going on over at StoryOriginApp pretty soon as well. There are some really exciting things over there, and I thought instead of me trying to describe them to you, we’d have the expert himself come on. Plus it’s been almost two years since he’s been on the show, which is insane. I should bring people on more often.

Kat

Now, if you guys have somebody that you want to hear on the show, let me know. You can tweet me @PencilsLipsick on Twitter. You can pretty much find me all the time over on Instagram, @KatCaldwell.Author or @PencilsandLipstick all spelled out. Let me know who you want on the show. I have a couple of different people in the works, we’ll see. They haven’t yet scheduled, so I don’t like saying anything until they schedule, but anyway.

Kat

So it’s Episode 180. We are going into May. We are fully in May and life is trucking along, it’s unbelievable. I have sent out Bended Loyalty to more beta readers. I have listened to some beta readers and I have decided to make a little tweak at the end. So, there you go. Sometimes you accept the critiques and sometimes you’re like, No, I don’t want to do that. So this time I did decide that they were correct, and I needed to tweak something. So I’m actually happier with the ending, now. I’ve had a couple of questions come at me through social media and my newsletter, so I thought that I would answer them here. First, pertaining to author newsletters. So the other day, somebody asked me why they needed an author newsletter. And I feel like I talk about this all the time. Mastering Author Newsletters was Episode 178, I believe, not even that long ago. Do you guys like two weeks ago. So I encourage you to go and check that one out. It was in April 2023. So why do you need an author newsletter? It’s because it’s your platform. It is where you can speak closest to others, to your fan base. And it actually really helps you find your fan base. The more emails I send out, the more things that I offer to both my writers and my readers because I have two different lists, the more I understand them and what they want, and the more they understand me and what I’m able to give them. So we can’t get everything we want from everyone, right? So Coca Cola does try to be everything to everyone, but that’s not us. We are not going to sell water and Coke and whatever else they sell. At the same time, we are going to sell our books and that’s probably it. Possibly some author services, possibly nonfiction or two. I sell journals. I really believe in journaling. I believe everyone has a story to tell, whether they want to publish it or not. I think that journaling is very therapeutic and so I created journals for people. You can find them over at KatCaldwell.com/shop. I also write books and I don’t write the same genre, so just to make it harder for myself. So I have to find people who are willing to read across genres. That is what I’m selling to my writers. I am just selling knowledge, just knowledge and storytelling. And I can do that through my author newsletter much better.

Kat

So as some of you might know, I hope you guys have heard somehow, if you haven’t, you should sign up for my newsletter because I tell it all the time. But the Write With Us online writing retreat is happening next week as of this podcast going out, May 16th and 17th, 2023. It is a 9 AM to 5:30 PM Eastern Standard Time, that is New York City Time. Two-day event. There are seven workshops. There are ready sprint breaks in between. There is time to talk to the guest authors who are teaching, ask questions, hang out and meet people. There are going to be giveaways. All of the guest authors are teaching something new to us. And so that’s going to be exciting. I’m really excited to come in and hear what they’re teaching because we can always get better at it. So I have reached the masses, as I say, through my newsletter. And every single person who has signed up so far has come through either my newsletter or one of my guest author newsletters. So that is none of them have come through social media, and I have pushed it on social media. So sign ups have come through the newsletter. I guess I could say one sign up, technically, she asked me questions on social media, so we’ll give Instagram that. Instagram got us one sign up. So that’s just how it is. If I were to run ads for it, perhaps next year I will. This is just the first year. I might see a difference, right? But we’re talking about organic growth. We’re talking about free, as in free on the money, not on the time. So your newsletter is important. You will find your base sooner and you will understand them quicker.

Kat

The next question that I’m going to answer, and this will be the last question for this week, and maybe we’ll do some more next week, is what book should I read to learn more about writing? This is a really hard question to answer because there are lots of really good books out there. So a lot of people like Save the Cat. I’ve never read Save the Cat. Of all the books I’ve read, I haven’t read Save the Cat. And I think it’s good. I think people who I admire have good recommendations. The Three Act Method by J. Thorne is good as well. Here’s the thing, there isn’t one book that is going to give you all the information. So there are lots of good books out there, and I am not even an affiliate for any of these books. But if you are going to start somewhere, and if you have never studied storytelling, I would start with Lisa Cron, and Wired for Story. Yes, Wired for Story, Lisa Cron, C-R-O-N. I would start there because that way, then you’re going to understand the three act structure. Because if you don’t understand storytelling, then there’s no reason to dive into plotting something that you don’t understand. I also think that… I’m trying to look at it now. The Science of Storytelling is an amazing book, and it’s by Will Storr, S-T-O-R-R. That’s an amazing book to tell you why certain stories in certain books have done better than others. And it really has to do with how our brains are structured, it’s amazing. So you have to understand storytelling to understand how to then structure a story. So Lisa Cron also has Story Genius, and that is a great one. That is the hands-on way to structure story according to Lisa Cron. And then I’m going to say John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. As you can tell, I have lots and lots of tabs in here, and there should probably be more because I went back and I constantly… There’s also several bookmarks. I must have lost my tabs at some point. John Truby, I think, is a genius at story structure and especially commercial story structure. So I think his other one is called The Anatomy of Genre. So that one’s also good to understand your genre even better. He has some courses as well. So I don’t think that there’s a book. I think there’s just a place to start. So that is my recommendation. Start with understanding storytelling. And I hadn’t thought of that until Sasha Black said that she was reading the science of storytelling, and I thought that sounded like a great title. So I listened to it on audiobook, and that was really when I started to understand that I was missing a piece of the understanding the storytelling, not just how do I write a book? That’s a very mechanical answer. It’s I want my story to be that story that sticks with people. And that’s my goal. So if that’s not your goal, then maybe start with Save the Cat, that’s fine. That’s just my answer because somebody asked me.

Kat

So I want to talk to you guys today about subplot. But before I get into that, I want you to know that as this podcast goes out, it is May 8th, we are one week away from the Write With Us online writing retreat. So this is the last week for you to sign up. When the podcast comes out next week, I won’t even tell you because you’d have 24 hours to do it. And a lot of you tend to listen on Saturday. Yes, I have the data on it. So this is the last week for you to sign up. You can sign up at KatCaldwell.com/wwu2023. Now, when I wrote it out, it didn’t sound like such a tongue twister. It doesn’t look like one. It does sound like a tongue twister. So Write With Us 2023, KatCaldwell.com/wwu2023. It’s only $127. There are seven workshops. They’re all brand new. You’re going to have time to write. I think this is going to be an amazing, amazing workshop. It is a great way also for you guys to get to know these amazing authors who also offer guest writing services. A lot of them are coaches. Stacy is a developmental editor. Tracee teaches locally as well. And she has an amazing author life fix book and workbook coming out. We’re going to talk about that as well at the workshop. Lewis, Emma, and Beth are all book coaches. So you are going to find a great way, not only have a great workshop, but it gives you the ability to see if you want more from us, from any of us. And you don’t have to choose all of us. You can choose one of us. Nobody’s feelings are going to be hurt. But I think it’s a great way to see how they teach, see how they interact with people. If you’re looking for a book coach or somebody that can give you a little bit more, almost everyone has a book or courses. You can see them face to face. You can ask some questions about their courses, about what they offer. It’s just going to be a really great place. We are going to all be in Zoom, but we will also stream it live to a private Facebook group. So if you’re more comfortable on Facebook, you can watch it there and ask questions there as well. And I’ll be monitoring and bringing up the questions for every guest author who’s teaching. You’re also going to get access to all the recordings. So I know that sometimes I want to go back and rewatch what they taught me. Maybe I understood it, but a week later I’m like, what were they saying? And I want to go back and watch. And I also know that some people, depending on where you are in the world, depending on your life and work circumstances, won’t be able to show up to every single one of them. So if we are going to record them, they are going to be held in my ThriveCartLearn, which is like Teachable, and you will have access to them for life. You can go back as many times as you want. And this is the only time that they are all going to be bundled together for you guys. Those who come in and teach, they will have their recording and they are going to be… It’s theirs. They can resell it, cut it up, do whatever they want with it. But you’re going to have to then purchase them individually if they decide to do that. So this is the only time that you can get them all together. Seven workshops all together, plus just the interaction with other writers up close and personal, it’s going to be awesome. It’s going to be awesome, guys. I can’t stress it enough how excited I am to learn, honestly, from other people and to see what they’re doing and meet all of you all who are writing books. It’s just great. I’m very excited about it. So down below there is a link, KatCaldwell.com/wwu2023. I will try not to make that difficult next time.

Kat

All right, so today I want to talk to you a little bit about subplot characters because this is something, as I said, I hadn’t really thought of. And I’m getting this more or less from John Truby, because he’s a master at storytelling, especially commercial storytelling. And he’s the one that introduced it to me. So it’s all on John Truby. Hopefully, someday he will come on the podcast. He’s just like, I have him up on a pedestal. So subplot character. Subplot character is not your side character. We all love our side characters. They’re awesome. They all have a little reason for being there. And we can talk about that sometime. But a subplot character is the main character of your subplot, like your parallel plot. Maybe you call it your secondary plot. Again, not every story has a subplot, and then therefore they don’t have a subplot character. But I realized that Bended Love has a subplot. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I did not realize this. It’s weird how you’re going to write a story and not understand things. Bended Love is about Scarlett and about her learning to fight for herself, fight for her right to live in this life and claim her space. And the only one she learns to fight for herself, does she learn to fight for what she thinks is right for her nephew. Then there’s the love story between her and Tristen. But the subplot of the story is, Tristen is still in the story and he’s still dealing with this woman who’s coming after him for child support, for a child that he says is not his. So the subplot, he is fighting for what is right, what is the right thing to do in this case of this child in the world. And Scarlett is also fighting for what is right to do for this child in the world, who happens to be her nephew. They’re also fighting for where their place is in the world. And so this is why I figured out that it’s a subplot. They both have the same goal, the same desire in this world. They want a place in this world. Now, Tristen, at this point is a little more definitive in that. And Scarlett is going to rediscover her true desire in this world. She’s been hovering, just getting by, doing okay. And then she’s really going to claim her place. And so the subplot character is a character that is supposed to want the same thing as your main character, but they go about it in a different way. And what it’s supposed to do is highlight the strengths and the flaws of your main character. Because really, what I’ve learned also from John Truby is that everything is supposed to point to your main character. We are not just writing a story of this person, of these things that happen to them. That’s not actually our goal in storytelling. Our storytelling is supposed to take a person and prove to the world that there are circumstances that will force them to change, even a little. That is the goal of storytelling. If there is no change, there is no real story. And I pause there because there are moments in which there can be purposefully no change. And that’s usually called a dark story because it’s basically the main character chooses to stay in their dark hole, I mean, John Trudy calls it slavery, their poor view of the world. They choose to wallow in this hopelessness that they aren’t going to change, nothing’s going to change. The world will go on. And that’s those movies. A lot of times they’re French, believe it, or Spanish. Man, they can be super dark over in Europe. The camera just pulls away and you’re just left with this, really? You went through all that and you’re not even going to change? You’re just going to stay where you are? Yeah. It’s a dark, heavy ending to a story, which it can happen. It can be very powerful and very effective, and it can really convince the audience to want to not be like that. So there are times where you’re purposely not letting them change. But what I’m saying is don’t have things happen to a character with no idea of what you’re doing. The majority of the stories need to change. If you’re purposely not letting them change, that’s one thing, because you’re making a statement. You need to know what that statement is. So your subplot character is supposed to lift up your main character and show them that there’s a different way to do things. So whatever that is, whether your main character is a super control freak and they are trying to control the pieces to the chess game that is life, and they are trying to make sure everything lands perfectly, and and when finding a partner, a life mate. And then the subplot character is really learning to let go and let the chess pieces fall as they may, as they look for love in life. So you really want to be able to compare and contrast these two characters to highlight things. And it doesn’t have to be that evident that they’re doing it. In Hamlet, what are their names in Hamlet? So in Hamlet, he dies. There’s purposeful murder, and then there’s accidental murder. Hamlet’s trying to kill the guy who killed his father. And then yeah, Laertes, I haven’t noted. I don’t know how to say that. Laertes, he accidentally kills the man who killed his father. They both want revenge, and there was a different way to go about it. Got the same result. And then the consequences of that afterwards. The other one that, let me see, that does this is the Philadelphia Story. That’s right. The Philadelphia Story. See, I love old movies, and so I’ve seen old movies. And so I don’t mind it when John Truby uses an example of an old movie, but I’m not sure everyone else has seen it. If you haven’t seen the Philadelphia Story with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, you should really see it. But Katharine Hepburn plays Tracy. And then there’s this photographer who’s trying to pass herself off as a family friend, but she’s a photographer for a tabloid magazine, comes in. They both want love. They’re 1940s women, so they both want love and they want stability and they want that man. And Tracy is this rich woman who’s trying to keep up appearances and make sure everybody thinks of her well. And Liz is like, well, that’s not me. She’s just herself, and she is comfortable with herself. And then she’s sickly, bubbly, love with her coworker, Jimmy Stewart, who reminds me of my grandpa. And she just lets him go and lets him find his own way. She doesn’t pursue him, even though you can see that she’s pining after him. So they’re very different women. They’re actually going after the same thing. And I had never thought of it before on how that subplot character is really highlighting something in the main character. And that’s done psychologically, right?

Kat

So when I say that if you want to really understand storytelling, to start with the science of storytelling or Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story or John Truby’s books, they’re more in-depth, but they’re really trying to teach you what story is in order for you to be able to have the elements that create a story that really stick with people. So your subplot character. Go back and see if your subplot character is lifting up your main character. And I think this is actually very liberating to understand that the subplot character and the main character need to have the same desire because you don’t have to make up an entirely other story that’s paralleling and smushing into this book. This is something that I wish I had known for Coffee Stains, where I could more purposefully parallel the two stories. Instead, I just have two stories in the same book, which is lots of things happen in life. And so that was my reasoning for that. But when you’re writing a story, you really want to bring the audience’s attention to the main character and their change or lack thereof. And so when you use that subplot, you don’t have to go looking for something else in order for them to really push into the forefront the main character in the audience’s eyes. So I thought that that was a really cool thing to learn and to understand better. I think it’s very liberating that your subplot doesn’t have to be a completely different storyline. It needs to be along the same storyline, not as big. It doesn’t need to be big. If you watch the Philadelphia Story, Liz play role in the story as well, it’s just that her goal, her desire, and the relationship she has with Jimmy Stewart is this paralleling the relationship that the woman, Katharine Hepburn’s character is having with her ex husband and husband. So you see, it doesn’t have to be huge. It can be subtle, but it’s purposeful, and it works really well.

Kat

So that is Subplot Characters, and that is our show for today. Be sure to share this episode with people that you know and anyone who you know is a writer, tell them about the Write With Us online writing retreat. I hope to see you there. We will probably have another one in the fall, but it will be geared probably more towards nonfiction or towards the marketing of your book. There’s so many things to learn with writing, but we’ll have another one in 2024 as well, but it will be different. So I think you should get in. Go to KatCaldwell.com/wwu2023. Let everyone know about the podcast as well. We’ll come back with an interview next week. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app or at YouTube.com. We are over there as Pencils Lipstick Podcast. Yes, and give us a review. It’s been a while since anybody’s given us a review. We got to keep those reviews up all the time. Oh, my gosh. So I will see you guys next week with Lisa Shaunessy.

The post Ep 180 Subplots and Questions Answered first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.

Chris K Jones decided to give it all up for his dream to write a story. What he found was that it wasn’t as easy as we all think it is. But after researching, courses and much perserverance Chris finished his first book. And now? He’s caught the bug and is writing another! Come hear about his journey to writing, marketing and learning this new business pursuit called being an author.

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TRANSCRIPTION BEGINS HERE:

Kat

Hello, everyone. Today I have with me Chris K. Jones. Hi, Chris, how are you doing?

Chris

Hi, Kat. How are you? Thanks for having me on.

Kat

Of course. Thanks for coming. There are so many things to talk about today with your book Headcase. But before we get into it, would you just introduce a little bit about yourself to the listeners?

Chris

Sure. I am a recovering serial entrepreneur who always wanted to write and it was a sign of what I wanted to do, but I didn’t want to be a starving artist, so I went out and had a life as building companies and I was the chief financial officer of my company. So I was CFO by day and write at night and then finally got to a point, sold my company and I was able to focus on my writing and I wrote my first book. It came out a year ago, this month

Kat

Awesome. How does it feel to have the book? Like two different dreams, right? So you have your company that’s really cool to have built a company and then to be able to quit that and write a book and have it out, like, finish the book and have it out. Does it feel like a different kind of success?

Chris

Yeah, absolutely. Very different type of success, as well as just a very different experience of being. I kind of joked that I’m an extrovert in the world’s loneliest profession. I never realized that until we went into the pandemic, and my last day at the company I co-founded as chief financial officer, that was January 31, 2020. We went right into the pandemic. I kind of had a month to figure out how I was going to do with my writing and this and that, and then we went into the pandemic. So then it was really easy because I had nothing to do but write. Then I decided my attorney sent me a notice about Barbados, he’s from Barbados, and I’d been there many times and that they had this welcome stamp program. So in September 2020, I packed everything up and lived down in Barbados for close to two years.

Kat

Oh, that’s nice. They let you in during the pandemic.

Chris

Yeah, so they wanted people to come down because tourism was over. There was no tourists. So yeah, went down. I had a one-year visa, which I still have. I renewed the visa and I was able to write my first book from the beach. Yeah, it wasn’t too hard, but I did realize it was also motivating because I realized growing up with nothing and going out and working real hard and lots of sacrifice, I knew each day like, hey, this is the writer’s dream, so sit your ass down, get to work. So I had my process get up, exercise, meditate, and then sit down, writing. And yeah, I got to take a break and go for a swim and then come back. But that was the motivating factor because I knew other people didn’t have this opportunity that I did, and I had to take advantage of it. And yes, it was very great and motivating, and I had a lot of research I had to do. But with Google and Google Maps, there’s no excuse. If you’re a reader, if your reader is taken out by poor research, that’s on you, because there’s no reason for poor research. Everything is writing. I can use the searches that I did and found tons of articles was really amazing. So we’re very lucky as writers that we don’t have to sit in a library all day, that we just go out to Wikipedia, Google Maps for places where you’re getting pictures and images and things like that. And also fashion is, I do integrate fashion into my book about what he’s wearing. There’s pro athletes and he’s a psychologist, and I like fashion. So it was like finding the type clothes that they would wear. And women, I don’t know what women wear. So I had to research, like, label what the dresses were and make sure it was the right one and then check with my friends. I’m like, is this a good one? I think as writers, we’re really in a great place to be able to get all our research done so quickly. Well, you can write anywhere, in your home, you can be on the train, you can do anything, and you can really write anywhere you need to be.

Kat

Yeah, well, I love your attitude, though. Wherever you are, it is true that if you have the opportunity to write a book, no matter even if you’re writing it after work, if you have found the time to carve out that time to write, it’s awesome. Wherever you’re doing it from. And just having that, I think it’s the mental block more than anything to get over has like, seeing it as an opportunity and a blessing just to be able to get it out right. Write it down on paper.

Chris

That’s what I did. I know CFO by day and came home and wrote at night and yeah, it was hard. Luckily, I have a lot of neuroplasticity between both my right and left hemispheres of my brain, so I can make that switch from very analytical type of work. And then going into the creative, the interesting thing that I had to learn was my whole life as an athlete, coach, entrepreneur, I’ve been very results driven. Writing is process driven.

Kat

That’s true.

Chris

And that is not my best thing. So learning not just to create my spreadsheet with my pages per day and all my analytics and metrics and just say, just sit and write and enjoy the process, that’s very hard for me. So I’ve had to learn to reframe my brain and retrain it. And it’s okay that I only got 1500 words done today, that’s okay. Did I have a good experience? Did I feel that what I wrote was quality work? Do I feel that I’m continuing the arc of the characters and feeling good about what I did? And also working 12-14 hours days was routine. Six, seven days a week when you’re an entrepreneur. That’s the way it was with a startup. But I find that after 5 hours of good, solid, creative work, I was done. Dimishing returns after that point where it was just every once in a while I got in a real zone and I would put seven, eight, nine hours in. But it was pure joy, right? It was good, but I knew, like, after that 5 hours I could start seeing it and like, okay, I’m done.

Kat

Yeah, that’s true. And accepting that is really a battle as well. I’m really results driven, too. I need some way to measure what I’m doing and I can get almost addicted. So I have to put away the Google spreadsheet because in the end, like you said, if you put 5000 words down that you’re going to delete 4000 of them because you just push too hard, what’s the point?

Chris

You hit it on the head. The pushing part. Like, I can muscle a spreadsheet, right? I could just bang on it for however long. But you can’t muscle a manuscript. It has to just come, it has to flow. And you have to be willing to not just put the words down because you have this metric. The one thing I did have to do to feed, because I did have this constant CFO in my brain going, hey, what are you going to do? When are you done? What are the results? When are you going to make some money on this and this and that? And just to tell him to be quiet. I kept a timesheet. So, I logged my time every day. And so it took me when people say, how long did it take you to write? I can tell you exactly. 714 and a half hours.

Kat

Oh, that’s awesome.

Chris

Okay. From December 2020 to almost October, November 2021. So I started it in late 2020 and then finished it in 2021 and then published it in March of 2022. But it was good because I wanted to know, like, okay, how long does it take and what can I base the next one on? And be realistic. Also, versions. I mean, god, the published version was version 8.4, that many rewrites. Yeah, so I’m really big on version control that just comes from tech stuff. And it was really good. And I had two editors, designers, and my editors are great, and I learned a lot from them. But even then, I think the next time when I do this one, not only will I have my developmental editor and my line editor, I’m getting a proofreader too, because we all miss stuff and I think we got book fatigue. We definitely got book fatigue.

Kat

We know the story too well, right?

Chris

Yeah. And that proofreader you really need to find someone who is just… as one author told me, a friend of mine, he said, your proofreader should be annoying. If your proofreader isn’t just completely annoying and questioning you on every little thing, they’re not doing their job.

Kat

That’s a funny way to put it.

Chris

Yeah. They should be absolutely almost like on the spectrum type of just beyond anal. And that’s a good, good thing because they’re going to catch stuff that you’re going to like, oh, crap.

Kat

Well, it’s interesting because you’re an entrepreneur that takes a certain personality, but you seem very humble in like because a lot of writers don’t do well with editors, multiple editors. We just feel like, oh, you’re changing my baby. It feels very personal to people. So having a very anal proofreader, I can imagine quite a few writers would just be very upset about that and almost take it personally.

Chris

Well, I guess that’s part of the advantage because to me, best idea wins. And I don’t care where it comes from. I want Headcase to be in my series. I want it to be the best product. And I don’t have a problem calling my art a product and I want it to be the best product that it can, because I’m writing this to not only entertain and it covers… about the book real quick. So Headcase is about Dr. Andrew Beck, who’s the go to sports psychologist for troubled athletes. And there’s not a head he can’t fix except his own. So when his own childhood traumas and gambling addiction gets the best of him, he makes a bet using his insider knowledge on his athletes. And it leads him down this dark path of blackmail, mysterious murder and life or death bluffing. And while it’s a thriller, it also talks another part of his about mental health and sports as a competitive athlete, spending time around athletes and Olympians and learning just some of the issues that they go on their off field and just how many of them had traumatic and horrific childhoods growing up and being able to really talk about that. You are seeing in many places, like in shows where there is a psychologist, like in Ted Lasso, but you never see it in session, where you’re in session with Andrew and his clients. Where he’s very compartmentalized. He’s great with his clients, but then he can’t even see his own addictions and his own traumas and what they’ve done to him. Yeah. The mental health part is part of it as well. So I want this to be something that people, one, they just enjoy. They pick up 20 minutes before they go to bed and they had a little bit of enjoy. They get a break from their difficult life. And if I can do that, if I can entertain them, then I’ve succeeded. Whether I sell one book or a million, it’s really the people who, the emails I get back and saying how much they enjoyed it and they’re actually pretty surprised because I think no one had very high expectations, including my mom. So I have a quote on my website. So I bring my mom down to Barbados and she’s reading like, a draft and she’s going through it. And every time she finds like a little typo, she gets all excited. And then she’s about three quarters of the way through and she turns to me and goes, Chris, I didn’t think it was going to be this good.

Kat

Thanks, mom.

Chris

You want to restate that? So, yeah, a lot of my friends and people I knew and colleagues, they bought the book just to help me out, but then they wrote back like, wow, this was really good.

Kat

Oh, that’s nice.

Chris

Yeah, it’s nice to know because people never saw that side of me. Writing, it’s something I always want. I always say that was the best form of therapy I ever had and being able to be present with what I was feeling and how my characters can make me feel. And I’ve been in a cafe writing and get choked up. Is anyone seeing me because of what my characters are going through? And sometimes people have said, are these real people? I’m like, no, I’ve made them all up.

Kat

Right. But you drew from your experience of just 20 years in the business of sports and coaching and all that.

Chris

Yeah, I worked as a young man in professional sports teams, but it was a lot of my own competition and just I competed in judo. I was a wrestler in college and then competed in judo and then also coached soccer and just things I saw, things I spoke to research with other athletes, spoke to Olympians and other athletes, and just a lot of research. Michael Phelps’ Weight of Gold was really, you should watch that. That just tells how tough it is for even gold medal winners. I asked that to a lot of people, like, who do you think are the most happiest the gold, silver, or bronze winners? So who would you think are the most happiest gold medalist?

Kat

I feel like it’s a trick question.

Chris

So go with that.

Kat

I guess we would always say gold, but now I feel like you’re going to say silver.

Chris

The bronze medalist medalists, because a lot of times they weren’t even expected to win. So they’re happy they got a medal.

Kat

They got up on the podium.

Chris

Or, if they were expected to win and they just had a bad showing, they’re motivated to go back and go, interesting, next is a silver medalist. Because they made it. And even though they just missed that, it’s the same thing where they expect it or not if they’re expected. Okay, just came up short. I’m going to work harder. But the gold medalist, after all this fanfare, they go home and people have moved on, and there’s like this emptiness about 30 to 60 days after the games, where some of them, really, even someone in my own sport, he committed suicide. And it’s not unusual for a lot of athletes to commit suicide because of just the depression and just the let down. And like, what do I do now? What happens? I’ve hit the pinnacle. I’m 20 something years old. Yeah, it’s really quite interesting, all the research that came through about athletes, and, yeah, they go through a lot, and they’re starting to get sympathy, which is great, but they don’t get a lot because, wow, they’re rich, famous, they’re playing a game, they have everything they want. Why should I feel sorry for them? But everybody deserves compassion. Everybody deserves understanding, and it doesn’t matter where you came from, but what most of athletes had to come through in order to just be a professional. You’re talking about just small.

Kat

Like giving up their childhood, really, to become a professional, right?

Chris

Then even after. So I even cover that in the book about what happens when it’s all over and you’re in your 20s, maybe 30 years old, and your career is over.

Kat

That’s so crazy, isn’t it?

Chris

This is all you’ve done since the time you’re six years old. You don’t know anything else, right? That’s how dealing with that, and I dealt with that in the book as well.

Kat

It spans a lot of information then. So you had to do all this research, but at the same time, that’s a little depressing. How did you deal with that, just yourself as a writer, if it was just a tough day of research?

Chris

Yeah, I think it was my job as the storyteller to really tell what’s going on. And yes, there’s things like if I read them aloud or this or that, I get choked up every single time. And it’s interesting. It’s like I wrote it, right? Just like saying things I laugh at every time. I’m like, is that egotistical of me? Or like, I laugh at my own joke? But it’s funny. And the same thing. There’s things that just get me every single time that will bring a tear to my eye and choke me up. And it’s just hopefully the reader is getting that impact, too. When they talk about the things that happen in their families and how their childhood was. And so much really does go back to that and the generational trauma. So, yeah, I take it. No, it’s kind of hard to be depressed when I look up and 85 and sunny every single day. I will tell you this. There were times when after days of doing this, I would get up. I’m like, I need to see a real human being. Funny people in my head. Like, I need to see what a real human and go out and talk to people, because you do get caught up. And the same thing, while I was going through all the bookmarking stuff and readings and doing things, there was a time in the fall I was like, I miss my characters. I haven’t hung out with them in a long time. I actually remember feeling like, oh, I miss them.

Kat

Yes, writers are weird when it comes down to that point of like, I haven’t been alone all day, but I have been alone all day and I need yeah, we get a bit weird, don’t we? So I do want to ask you because you’re, you know, a CFO by day. Like, I’m married to a CFO, so that’s a lot of work. You guys are always working. I mean, now you get to write for a living, but how did you find the time to learn how to write a psychological thriller? I feel like that’s a big step right there. That’s not just like, oh, I’m going to write a short story, or I’m just going to write a memoir. I feel like psychological thriller that takes some plotting and some planning, and things have to come together, right? And research and all that. So did you wait until after you quit to really learn the structure of that, or did you do it before?

Chris

No, it was like 2016. I really started to take my writing seriously. I started doing playwriting. I got accepted to our local theater and I wrote a play called Twisted Metal about two Marines and their PTSD. I tend to write about mental health more than anything. And then I came up with this idea for Headcase. And I actually started out as a TV pilot, and I hired a screenwriter to teach me the business because I was way too busy running my company and teach me how to write that. And then I wrote it. Of course, you submit it to contest. It got destroyed. They just ripped the shreds and you do it all over.

Kat

They just love that, don’t they?

Chris

Yeah, that’s all right. And then we went into the writing, and I worked on that for a while as a screenplay. It started to do well. I won contests in England and Toronto and LA. So I won a bunch… of New York, a bunch of contests. I thought okay, great. And then the writer strike happened. And then we went into pandemic, and I asked a person in the business, I’m like, what should I do? Should I turn it into a novel? She’s like, yeah, do that. I’m like, okay, great. And so I had to learn now, after spending years of writing dialogue, I’m very comfortable with writing dialogue. I love dialogue. It’s a lot of fun. I had to learn to write narrative, and I was that’s probably why I went to screenplays over doing a novel in the beginning, because I just really enjoy the dialogue. But what I found was surprising was the narrative. I was dreading the narrative. I was absolutely dreading it. But it gave me a lot of freedom because now I can because in screenplays, the writer is not supposed to direct from the page, not supposed to say what the actor should do, what they should think, look. But now I’m the cinematographer. I’m the director, and I can tell how Andrew is feeling. And I take him through. So you really are with him all along. You know what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling in his body, what he hears, what he tastes sounds like. I really made it very experiential, so the person really goes on. And then the narrative was freeing for me because I was able to now really get into his head. I told it from a single point of view. It’s only from Andrew’s point of view. And that was a choice. I thought was also recommended by one of my editors, just do that. So you are really with him all the time. He makes bad decisions. And yet it’s interesting when he’s this flawed hero that people still feel for him, and he’s like, come on, what did you do? He’s always like because his trauma gets involved, and he just makes bad decisions, even though he’s smartest guy in the room or thinks he is.

Kat

That’s interesting. I mean, I talk to on the podcast all the time about this idea of learning the craft. So it really sounds like you were very open from the beginning to just learn, because I think that’s another ego trip. Sometimes that ego block that writers trip over is like, if I have a story in my head, I should be able to get it from my head to the paper with minimal intervention from experts. I just find that is pretty prevalent. But just because we have a talent of storytelling doesn’t mean that it can get from brain to paper easily.

Chris

Right. I am not concise. So having an editor that helped me become more concise, but also that just comes from years and years of martial arts training. There’s always someone bigger, better, faster, stronger. You’re always going to get your butt kicked at some point or not. So you learn humility pretty fast, especially in judo, where it’s a Japanese art and you’re just going in with a big ego, you’re going to get your butt kick. A lot of this just being in team, I think humility is really important. And again, if my goal is to produce the best possible work, if a five-year-old’s got a good idea, I’m going to use it. I don’t care, right? If you came up with like, oh, wow. Now, that being said, right? So if a reader is taken out and they tell me about it, I want to hear what they have to say, no matter what. Even though I think it’s the best bit of prose I’ve ever written in my entire life, if it took them out, I want to understand, why did it take you out? What happened? What was it about that would take you out? Was it the fact? Was it the feeling? Was it the wording? And I want to know that. So then I can go back. And if someone gets taken out now, if they say, Chris, you know what you should do with that character? You should do blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s your story, I’m going to write mine. You can keep that, right? There’s a difference. But any reader who says they were taken out by that, by anything, they were taken out of the story, I need to consider it. And I may say, no, that’s you, right? But more than likely, I bet there’s a way I can make that more clear. I bet there’s a way that I can make it more concise. I bet I can make it more powerful. So I see it as a challenge, right? As like, okay, that didn’t work for you. Let me see, can I go sharpen that tool a little bit more? And that’s just going to make me a better writer. So, yeah, going through it with a good dose of humility, I didn’t really think about it like that. I just want the best story and I’m hiring an editor to help me make it the best story. So, I mean, I spent the first part of my career, my first company was advising people as a consultant and kind of working with startups. And there was nothing more annoying when I could see stuff happening. And they’re paying me to give them advice and then they don’t follow it. So the same thing now. It’s the other way around. I’m paying people for their advice. I’m going to follow it. I’m going to do what they say because they’re the expert and I’m the newbie. I’m talented, I believe I can tell a story, but I’m still maybe a yellow belt. I still have a long way to go. And that’s the exciting part for me because I know I’m going to improve. I know book two is going to be better than book one.

Kat

Right. I love your attitude about it. I’ve heard that about martial arts because I think writing is, as you’ve said, a very solitary career, right? And so you don’t have that team aspect. You can get very shut in into your office or your space or at the beach, wherever you write, but that outlook is very correct in just like, seeing it as a challenge and seeing it, how can I get better? And I want to be better at this. We also have to realize that editors are experts and so they’re going to tell you the best, right? So just having that attitude. I love getting editing back now as an “older” writer, putting quotes around that everyone. And I think this is part of the journey also of just like hitting a certain part of life, right, where you realize, yeah, it’s okay if I don’t have all the answers. You spent years gathering all these answers, so please now give them to me and mark up my page and let me see what it is and just having the confidence to be able to take what I need to and learn and keep going. So you said that this is going to be a series or are you writing one? Is it going to follow the same doctor or how is that going to go?

Chris

Same guy, I leave it kind of a little bit of a cliffhanger where he’s in trouble. So now I’m working on book two, now. I was hoping to get it done last year, but definitely the book marketing side I struggled with.

Kat

Book marketing is rough, isn’t it? It takes time. Let me ask you this. Why did you choose indie publishing over traditionally published?

Chris

Because I was not what any of the publishing companies are going to look for.

Kat

Really? Why do you think that?

Chris

Yeah. I just don’t think the voice of a middle aged, white male they’re not looking for okay. Anyway.

Kat

And they’re about to collapse.

Chris

I think the other side, too, is from my research, they don’t do that much for you. And my friends who I spoke to, they didn’t help with the marketing. And one of my friends, they actually launched three other books the same week that his was coming out. They released…

Kat

The same house?

Chris

Yeah. And he wasn’t pleased about that. You still have to do most of the marketing yourself. I am fortunate that I have the resources where it wasn’t a big deal. And Amazon makes it really easy. They do make it super easy.

Kat

And you earn more money just to come down to the nitty gritty. You’re going to do the work anyway. You must be pretty comfortable with the idea of this is a business because you’re an entrepreneur. I think that all writers these days, even traditionally, but mostly us indie writers are entrepreneurs. That’s what you’re doing. You’re creating a business, right? An entertainment business.

Chris

Entertainment, yeah. Marketing was never my strong suit.

Kat

You’re learning writing and marketing.

Chris

Yeah. And I’m really bad at it. I don’t think that way. I’m a pretty smart guy and really good with analytical finance strategy and on the creative side. But when it comes to things on marketing, my brain just doesn’t really think about those things. And when I do, I’d rather you just punch me in the face than have to do it. It would be less painful, I think. So, everything to do with it now. I love giving book readings. I love being out in front of people. Like I said, I’m an extrovert. I can do Q&A all day, these types of things. I love doing this stuff. It’s fun for me. But if you want me to be the one to go out and get the people to be it in their seats, just break my finger. It’ll be easy. Yeah. So now in the next book, I’m going to do it a little bit better and find people who can help me. I don’t like social media. I don’t think about posting stuff. It’s just not something, although extroverted, I’m not a person who wants to broadcast my life. And I just don’t think about things that and then things that are actually useful, you know, where I’ve talked to other people and you know, it’s just it’s just not an area like so I’d rather not do it. So I just have to figure out a way. I did investigate in some ads. I thought that was a waste of money.

Kat

Well, and it’s harder starting out, as they say, with every book, it gets easier for people to find you. It’s horrible to hear, but when I was writing, way back when I was a student and my first manuscript got rejected and Orson Scott Card was sitting in my boyfriend at the time’s restaurant, and he was serving him. He didn’t know who he was because my husband doesn’t read. He reads nonfiction. So Orson Scott Card is there, and he was telling him her manuscript got rejected. What should she do? And he said, write another book. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I can’t believe he said that. But it’s true. It’s true, isn’t it? You just write another one.

Chris

I think I also had unrealistic expectations just because in that case, where my startup mentality came, everything goes pretty fast. You’re really moving light. And this is a glacial business. I have worked in 37 different industries, and this is the hardest to break in for the least amount of return on investment.

Kat

Oh, my gosh.

Chris

From my experience and the amount of money, I paid it right, so I don’t think I get paid. I paid it right, but I do think it’s still… so for me, I’m trying not to think of it as a business, because then when I started launching the book, I did, and the CFO creeped back in and kind of took over and really killed the creative voice. So I think the other thing is just producing a bunch of books. I saw an article in the Times about this romance writer. I forget her name, but she had the top seven books in romance.

Kat

Colleen Hoover?

Chris

Yeah, I think so. And then I looked at like, I said, all right, I’m going to look up each one of those books. I’m like, oh, 2006, 2008. So I’m looking at mine, I’m like, I’m six months into this, very unrealistic expectations that this takes time, it takes years. So I said, you know what? I’m just going to focus on getting the second one. Let me get my process down. Let me get my writing process down. Let me get better as a writer. Let me really improve in my craft. And I’ll worry about sales and things like that later, or just I believe that I’ll come across the right people in the right place. And who knows? It could be two years from now. And then all of a sudden it’s picked up as a show or an athlete reads and goes, oh, my god, you got to read this. And he’s got a gazillion followers. And then all of a sudden, you just don’t know.

Kat

I think Colleen Hoover got it because people were TikToking it, and she wasn’t. It was another reader. So I think you’re right, and I think this goes into mental health as well as for writers, is just really reminding ourselves, right? This is an art. Art is glacial, and it’s just like inch-by-inch and at the same time just keep writing. Because that feeds us, right? We want to write. We have the stories in our head. We want to get it out. And just knowing little by little, I mean, I think it’s great that Colleen Hoover got to that point, but not everyone is Harry Potter lady Rowling. They knew where this was going and what they could get from it. That’s after like, 50 rejections or something that she had, right? So just knowing that and reminding ourselves of that is always good, I think.

Chris

I think it’s so hard to tell when it’s going to get picked up and whatnot and when something hits the zeitgeist as mental health and sports is starting to get rich, people as athletes are coming out and talking about it, it’s really great. But who knows? So this year after feeling even and my best friend is great, and I wouldn’t know what to do without him because I’m so results. I’m like, oh, man, I really failed last year. He’s like, you put out your book, you put out the audio. You won several awards. How is that a failure? Because I’m looking at numbers, right? I got my first royalty check, and it was less than 1 hour of my consulting time. I’m like, oh my god. But then I said, luckily enough, I don’t need this to live on. I have other things to do. I can focus on it. And I know that’s not for every writer, but I also think if you go into writing, for the money. Unless you’re a nonfiction, if you’re a nonfiction author and you’ve done well in business and you have, like, a methodology, and you’re putting that in, and that’s going to lead to speaking engagements. And that’s your business. And your book is your calling card. Great. That’s awesome. And that’s usually where the top 10% of writers think there’s less than 10% who make over 150,000. And most of that’s from speaking, not from their writing. But that’s okay. That’s okay. This is your calling card. Love it. I love nonfiction, too. If you’re a fiction writer, if you’re going in it for the money, I think that’s a tough thing to do. I think it’s kind of like being a day trader and expecting to pay your mortgage with your day trading. I think that’s a very dangerous point. And I think also writing to market, one, you don’t know, you don’t know. And I honestly don’t think that anyone really knows what’s going to be a success, what’s not. I mean, for every Silent Patient there is. And I love his book. I loved it. Alex Michaelides, that just his first book hit. But that was so many years as a failed screenwriter and then his first book, boom.

Kat

Right? You always have to look behind, right?

Chris

But that’s the exception, not the rule. So one of the things I did for a series is I went and read David Baldacci’s first book, John Grisham’s first book, and Lee Child’s first book. And I wanted to compare where I was compared to where these wonderful authors that I love and adore, and I want to see, all right. Their first book, right? Same thing. All right.

Kat

That’s interesting that you point that out, though. Their first book. Not their latest book.

Chris

No, I went back to their first one, right, and see, like, okay, where am I compared to them? Like, okay, I think I’m holding my own. I think I told a good story, not kind of compared to what their sales did or this or that, but just like this story. Where were they in their journey? Where am I in my journey? And I’m just a beginner. And I think keeping that beginner’s mind is important because you stay excited and you stay motivated, and you want to just tell your story. And hopefully for me, how I want to measure success is that some person someday comes up to me and goes, Chris, because of your book, I changed what I was doing. I got help. I stopped whatever I was doing, whether it was drugs or alcohol or gambling, and I got sober and straight. If someone said that to me, I think, oh, my god, then I succeeded because I influenced some person’s life, right? And I made them make a change.

Kat

You went into this really thinking, and I think that’s great to have more than just the story, but mental health is really important to you, right? And you said, even for yourself, writing was a therapy for you. And I’ve heard several authors say that their first book was just, like, the best therapy that they could go through. So you went into this with that really focus of mental health. Was it mostly for men? Like, focusing on mental health for men or just mental health?

Chris

No, I mean, every character in there has got their issues, every character. Obviously, I’m coming from a male perspective, and I’m still working on my female voice. One of my readers, one of my readers, she said it was a very interesting look into the male psyche.

Kat

Oh, that’s cool.

Chris

This is, like, how men think. I’m like, Well, I didn’t write it like that. I’m a male.

Kat

I’m a male, and I think this.

Chris

How my character thinks.

Kat

Well, but you’ve been around a lot of sports, is dominated a lot by men, right? So, I mean, that’s cool because a lot of books are more female psyche.

Chris

That was interesting. It wasn’t my intent, right? But I think it’s very important to work on. But I have very strong female characters. I grew up around very strong women my mom, my grandparents. I grew up with very strong women in my life, and I like strong women characters. And I think the women in Headcase are also very strong. It’s very interesting when some of the guys would come back and one of their favorite characters was this very strong, feisty, redheaded, Scottish woman, Lori, and she didn’t play around yet. She had a good heart and was really trying to protect Andrew from himself in this gambling den, the Five Iron, where they were from her boss Fergus, and who was really getting him into a really deep, dark place where he could control him. So it’s interesting. One of the feedback that I got and people really like that character and yeah, she’s a badass. And I like writing strong female characters. I’m learning my female voice. I’m not an expert at it, I write males very good. And I write kids voices very good.

Kat

Oh, that’s awesome. Hey, we can’t do everything perfectly, but is mental health going to be a theme going forward throughout the whole series, do you think?

Chris

Yeah, definitely, with this and everything else, even other books I have that I have my list of things to do to get through. I think mental health is always going to be a part of it because I think it’s something that we all have. We all have our traumas and we all have our experiences. I had mine and helping work through it. I had eating disorders and from trying to lose weight for wrestling, and I was bulimic for many years just so I could eat and then make weight. And that did a lot of damage to my head, my body issues. I didn’t prepare well to go on because I just wanted to beat the scale. I was fighting the scale, but that’s why judo was so great for me. It was actually my Buddhist teacher was the one who told me to take judo and it changed everything for me because I went out in a very healthy way with a healthy mindset. I didn’t cut weight, I played my natural weight. I had fun with it and I really was focused on the opponent and I did really well. I won a lot and I won tournaments and it did quite well. So, yeah, mental health is always going to be a part of anything I write because I just think it’s so important that it’s something I work on every day on myself. I think that’s great, how to have a good approach to life and make a difference. At this point, I just want to be able to make a difference and hopefully I can do that with my writing. I want to ask your opinion on something. I’ve been thinking about this with this whole I know this is off track with this ChatGPT thing or IPT, whatever it is, and people now writing books through AI. I thought about writing in my next book. Like, none of this book was done with using chat or GPT. Yeah. None of this book was inquired using artificial intelligence.

Kat

We might have to start doing that.

Chris

Some people know. This all came from my brain. I don’t think an AI engine, which I actually have a company that uses AI, can write the characters that I can write.

Kat

No, I don’t think so

Chris

Don’t feel threatened by it.

Kat

No, exactly. Everyone is seeing, unfortunately, what it’s doing is it’s causing, especially in the short story world, it’s causing a traffic jam. So people have started to push send them in. And so all the literary magazines and that sort of world, they’re getting inundated with just this junk. And so now there’s this contest that I love doing, NYC Midnight. And they now have a whole terms and conditions there. If it even smells slightly of ChatGPT or AI, they’ll just toss it. And I think that’s good. But of course, there’s trolls everywhere now, so they’re just going to make this sort of traffic jam we talked about. You got to sell that book, man. Go ahead and get a ChatGPT to spit it out. Good luck selling it. That’s the rest.

Chris

Well, I think the next thing will come is just someone’s going to come up with just an AI detector.

Kat

Yeah, probably.

Chris

Right. So you have the offense right now. You’re going to come up with defense, right? So same thing. If this one person has this one move that you can’t beat no matter what, someone will come up with a defense to it. So the next thing that’s going to come out is an AI detector. Oh, yeah, we did. Because I’m sure the universities, they’ll sell it to all the universities because all the teachers are concerned about kids doing plagiarism. And to me, that’s an ethics issue. And I think that’s a failure in ethics that you feel like because of all these cheat codes and games and you hear about these hacks rather than this is hard, and it’s good to do very hard things in life. It takes sacrifice. I made a lot of sacrifices in my life.

Kat

It builds character, right?

Chris

Yeah. And I don’t think you get anywhere without hard work, sacrifice and skill.

Kat

Yeah. I don’t think you’re going to feel good about yourself either if you take the easy way out. Great. You wrote a book. ChatGPT wrote a book for you. Okay, what does that even mean? You didn’t write a book. You slapped your name on something that a robot created. And technically the robot didn’t create it. They took it from the millions of places that it sees on the web. So they took the words of other people to put into your book. So you’re right, it is just an ethics problem. And I don’t worry about it because people, if they want the magic pill, I can’t do anything about that. I would rather struggle with my characters and write. We miss our characters. We got to go write with them. I don’t know.

Chris

Write yourself into a corner and then.

Kat

Go into despair and then eventually have your mom say, this is good. I mean, that is like the best thing ever. Don’t worry about it, guys. Just keep going.

Chris

Just get through it. Just put in the time, put in the sweat. Like you said, Kat, that you’ll have something that you’re proud of. So I’m very proud of it. The audiobook, actually, the audiobook is amazing. The actor who did it, I had 60 different speaking parts, so I had to count them all. And he did all of them. And so I got New York accents, New England accents, two Scottish characters. All different people from different places. He was amazing. PJ. Oakland an award winning audio. And it was for me. I totally recommend it. If you can swing it, like hearing your work read by someone else, it’s really wonderful. And he’s a professional, trained actor, so he bought my characters alive. And the audiobook is absolutely fantastic.

Kat

That’s cool. That’s my next step. I’ll be doing a Kickstarter to get some audio in there. But I love I mean, there’s that other question, too, of using AI for audio. And I understand both sides of the argument. It sort of brings down the cost. But then I feel bad for the actors. I haven’t quite decided on that one.

Chris

I think what I would do for that is when I feel like my book was done I might use that AI audio for myself and my editor and like, all right, how does it sound? But then eventually give it to a real actor because there’s just going to be an energy, honestly, not to get too wooish, but there’s an energy that they bring to it that a machine does not and cannot. It’s not capable. And that energy is going to resound and connect. Think about the books that you’ve listened to, like Artemis from Andy Weir, that Rosario Dawson did. I can listen to that all day long because she’s amazing. Yeah, right. And you find those actors that you’ve listened to and they bring something to it. That’s true.

Kat

You can’t beat it. Honestly, a good actor on audio, there’s nothing better. Especially when they can do the accents.

Chris

Yeah, and mine were tough. And I think using it for yourself like I’ll use on Word, the read feature, because I want to hear it, too. And I think that’s a good thing. I think using it for yourself as a training tool. But as far as the publishing, I get it. I understand because money is money and this stuff isn’t cheap, it’s expensive. But I think if you think of your book, your art, that it has to be the best possible and bring out like you want it to touch somebody and affect them or just entertain them, right? And I think that’s what happens when you confuse the money part with I got to get it out there. I got to make it money and this and that with just this is the creation of something from your brain and your mind and sharing it. And that’s easy for me to say and I understand that because I don’t have to rely on my book writing. But it is something I think that’s important and it’s hard for me to remember that too, because it is because I have brain.

Kat

It’s good to be realistic as a writer too, though, that most people, if they’re on their own income, if they’re the primary income holder, the chances of quitting that job to become a full-time writer are pretty low. In fact, we interview people because of that. Those people who have made it that far, again, have been in the industry for a while, and in kudos to them, they work hard at it. It is a full-time job, and they’ve figured out a way to do it, but there aren’t very many. And so, just to be very realistic about, why are you writing? What do you want from it? Have your dreams, but also be realistic. And lots of people do other things. The majority of the indie authors that I know who work full time, me included, I make my money teaching over selling books. Now, is it still my dream to get to the point where I sell those books? Absolutely. But I need a couple more. I have three out, three more coming. But I have learned, I think, especially when you are starting out, of course, you have those dreams, like one book, and it will hit. At the same time even if it does hit, it will eventually fall off. It’s an art form. People move on, they’ve read the book. They told their friends, they read the book. Now they’re on to other things. There are people out there that read like 300 books a year. It will fall off. You will have to write another book, unless it’s the nonfiction calling card. So why are you writing? And so I always tell people that I coach, like, is this something that fulfills you just because you’re writing and you’re learning and you just love it, then it’s worth doing, even if it can sometimes make you want to punch a wall.

Chris

Yeah, absolutely.

Kat

I was doing my taxes and I was like, Look, I earned $15 last month. And it’s just one of the my husband was asking me, like, what what happened this month versus that month? I said I wasn’t doing promotions, I was doing something else. So it is one of those things. I know Kirsten Oliphant, she spends 5000 a month, or at least did to make 5000, so she would sell. So that it’s just all it’s a business. And once you get to that point, you have 20-25 books. It’s a business. You have to constantly be selling it. You have to be spending the money. And it’s just constantly changing that mindset.

Chris

If you think about the business model and why it’s so difficult and why I said this one is with many businesses, you have a subscription model, so right. Your book cost $20. They’re paying $20 a month for something. This person, you had this time and effort to acquire the customer, they buy one book. It’s only one book at a time. And now you got to do the whole thing again. Right? It’s not like they’re buying a book every month from you or it’s not repeatable where you get that customer and you have them forever. And the only bad thing about Amazon is you never know who your customers are. So you don’t have that type of relationship. And again, where I struggle with I’m like, build your mailing list. How? Every time I pray is like, how do you do that? Yes, I went through the people that I know and yes, they joined and this and that, but okay, how do I get people who don’t know me? So these are really hard things to do. And again, it’s a model where you get sell one book, you make $4 or $5 at most.

Chris

And you got to go find the next.

Chris

You can’t even buy one of Starbucks with that. So it’s very interesting. And you spent all this effort time, you did a reading, you did that, you may never see them again. They might not write a review.

Kat

And you’ll do a promotion where you’ll put it on sale, and then you’ll start getting emails of, well, the sale is over, but can you sell it to me for that sale price, or can you give it to me for free? Lots of people get books for free now. And so there are times that it’s frustrating where you just want to say, I put a lot of time into this book. And I tell people all the time, if you buy a print book, the author is getting maybe $3 from it. Maybe with paper prices going up and shipping fees going up, it’s gone down a lot. I had to up my book because one of my books is pretty long. Amazon told me it has to be up to $17, otherwise you will owe us every time somebody buys this.

Chris

That happened with me on Ingramspark and Lulu. So on ingramspark I was like, negative. I had to increase the price.

Kat

You have to pay them. So it’s just these little things behind the scenes that people don’t understand. And I get it. It feels like a lot to spend $18 per book, but you can get it on ebook. But it just goes into a lot. And it’s a rough industry.

Chris

Like I said, 37 Industries. This is the toughest to break into and make a good return of all the industries I’ve been in. But when we look at the reward, it’s pretty rewarding. And I get to live in my imagination, which is a lot of fun. These characters are…

Kat

You get to explore some really dark things without having to be dark.

Chris

Yeah. That’s another thing people ask, like, oh, are you like your character, Andrew? I’m like, no, we’re nothing in like.

Kat

I don’t want to gamble away my life.

Chris

What are you talking about? No, actually, but real quick story. So my friends were playing cards. We’re like nine or ten years old. So we go out, play card, and I showed up late, and we get done playing, and I was just having fun. They’re like, okay, Chris, you owe, like, $3. And so I’m like, what? We were playing for real money. You didn’t tell me. I was so mad. And I remember leaving, like, having to go get my money. I’m never going to gamble ever again. This is the stupidest day ever.

Kat

Yeah, it’s great. We get to walk in the shoes of someone we’re curious about, but we don’t really want to be. We don’t want to risk that, but we want to see what it would be like if somebody would risk it. I think it’s great.

Chris

Andrew’s favorite drink is scotch. And until after I finished the book, someone said, don’t you think you should? And I said, do you drink it? I’m like, no, I’ve never had it in my life. Why don’t you go try it? I’m like, okay. And now I like it. There’s so many things I had to learn how to play poker because I didn’t know, like, Texas Hold them, I learned for the book. So luckily, my editor was a poker player, so he helped me with some of the terminology. And honestly, I never play video games, but I downloaded a game on my phone, and it really helped me understand positioning when to fold, when not, bluffing. It really helped me understand the game by playing the video game. So I played that. I watched on masterclass, Daniel Negreanu, who’s a professional one, and how he reads people. And that’s what Andrew gets off on. He doesn’t care so much about the money. He’s a psychologist, and he wants to use all of his psychology to read someone and master their mind and own them. And that’s where he gets his thrill from, that he can predict to the point when they’re going to fold and what cards they have. Yeah. And that’s what he gets off on, and that’s why he gets that thrill. So, yeah, I can go to these dark places, these people that I see, and they’ve had horrific but doesn’t mean I would ever do any of this.

Kat

Exactly. Well, as we close out, how can people find you and your next if you do any readings or anything? And where can they find the book?

Chris

Yes. So you can go to my website, it’s ChrisKJones.com, and you can actually, for your readers, if you sign up for the newsletter, you can get the first seven chapters free. So happy to do that. If any of your listeners have any direct questions, they can email me at headcase@chriskjones.com and I’d be more than happy to answer any questions. My social media is headcase_novel on Twitter, Instagram. LinkedIn is Christopher K. Jones, and Facebook is Chris K. Jones author.

Kat

Awesome. We’ll have all those links in the show notes for you guys, seven chapters free is very generous. So I think everyone should go over there and check out this new book.

Chris

If you don’t like it after seven chapters, then don’t buy the book.

Kat

That’s true. I mean, I like that attitude too. We don’t really want to gather readers who aren’t going to really read the book, right? So we need something.

The post Ep 179 The Dream to Write with Chris K Jones first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.

Today we’re talking about Author Newsletters. Why? Because I still have seasoned authors ask me why I feel so strongly that they need one. I break down why I think you should have one and go over the items you need from the beginning to have a successful author newsletter.

Check out my mini author newsletter course here. https://pencilsandlipstick.com/author-newsletter

In the course I break down exactly how to set one up, what to put in it, how to use BookFunnel and StoryOriginapp, what a lead magnet it, what to talk about PLUS you get access to my PDFs Author Email Ideas and Lead Magnet Ideas for Authors included.

I can’t say enough about how much I love the Author Accelerator program! If you want to know more about becoming a book coach, click on my affiliate link here: https://katcaldwell.com/fiction-certificate

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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 STARTS HERE:

Kat

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Pencils & Lipstick. I am Kat Caldwell, and this is Episode 178 of the podcast. And today, we do not have an interview, but we will be back next week with a guest. Today, we are going to talk about a couple of different things going on in the indie world. And we’re going to talk about author newsletters. So before we get into that, I want to remind you as always, that it helps us if you share out the podcast, if you subscribe on the app so that you are listening to, if you could review. I know on iTunes, we’re six or maybe eight months out from the last review we have. I know reviews are a bit of a pain, but they definitely help the podcast. So if you are willing to do that, even giving some stars, whatever you think of it, but sharing it out with other people. We have some wonderful guests who know a lot about the publishing world and the writing world, and I hope that they’re bringing you some really good content that you can apply to your writing and to your marketing and to your publishing and all that.

Last week we had Jennie Nash on and she was talking about book coaching and why you might want a coach and why you might want to become a coach. So if you haven’t checked out that episode, go and do that. Author Accelerator is still running until the end of the month. There are spring sales where you always get these tons of bonuses if you sign up to become a book coach. And I can’t say enough about the community. The links will be in the show notes below. And if you want to hear more from Jennie Nash, the founder of Author Accelerator, go to Episode 177, and you can listen to her talk all about it and listen to me gush all about it, basically.

So if you guys don’t know, Kobo has rolled out their subscription book service in the states now. I believe it’s the states and the UK, that was next in line. They already had it in the Netherlands, and I think they had it in Canada as well. So the subscription based service is like Kindle Unlimited, in which you pay per month to get access to all the books in there. But the difference is that they aren’t exclusive. So if you don’t know if an author has their book within KU, so you can get it with your subscription, they are limited to only having their book with Amazon. They cannot have their eBook with anybody else. And that’s what we differentiate between wide and KU, because KU is the only subscription service in which an author has to limit the sale of their book only to Amazon. So they can have it in KU, so anybody with the subscription to Kindle Unlimited can access that book. And they can sell the eBook on Amazon as well to anybody who doesn’t own the subscription service, and they can have their paperback wide if they want to. With their eBook, they cannot have anywhere, they cannot even really, they shouldn’t be giving it away themselves. I’m sure there are others out there that skirt the rules, but if Amazon finds out, you can get a big old slap on your wrist. So Kobo is different in that they are not limiting authors to be exclusively to Kobo. And that’s just good business sense because I believe they have less than half of the titles that Amazon has. Amazon almost has so many books out there. Just FYI to readers, I loved Kindle Unlimited, especially while I was living in Europe. It gave me access to a lot of books. I have cut down on all my subscriptions, so I don’t have that anymore. But anytime that you’re buying a book from, even if it’s Kobo, Amazon, you don’t actually own the book. What you’re doing is paying to rent the book, right? And especially your subscription service. And a lot of authors make most of their money from KU. This is typically romance writers, YA writers, fantasy writers, people whose fan base consumes a lot of books in a short amount of time. So a lot of romance readers will read books just all day long. So they are going to make most of their money there. And that’s why a lot of them argue against going wide. For the rest of you, you need to decide for yourself where your audience is. I personally am wide. I sometimes put my books into KU every once in a while just to see what they will do. But I don’t write to market and I don’t write fast, consumable books. I think an Audience with a King is probably my quickest read, and it’s not a series. It helps if it’s a series. So yeah, I’ve put them into KU every once in a while because you can put them in for 90 days. You’re not stuck in there for life, but you are stuck there for 90 days. And just to see what happens. And like anything, you cannot just stick your book somewhere and expect something to happen. You have to do a lot of promotions. You have to do a lot of sales and marketing and pushing. And so I put Coffee Stains in there in last fall, late last fall. And that is how it got up to number two on the top 100 in the contemporary new adult. And that’s fun to see. But quite frankly, it helps sales for a couple of weeks. And then, of course, everyone moves on, basically, because we’ve got busy lives and anybody who wanted the book gets it. And the other problem with it is you see a book when you have KU, you take it, you put it into your TBR pile. And so just like our TBR of physical books keeps piling up, your TBR of Kindle books can fill up. So just because somebody downloads your book doesn’t mean that they’re going to read it right away. And then you don’t get paid until they read it. So just because somebody takes your book with KU doesn’t mean that you’re getting paid. You actually get paid per page read. And what’s great about that is that you can get a lot of data, especially if you have a series and you can see what your read through rate is from book one to two, two to three, and so on. And even for your book, do people finish the book or do they not finish the book? But it’s not great for initial sales. So you might get 100 people that download the book and put it into their KU, TBR, and you won’t see sales until they get to reading it. And let’s just raise our hands if you have a book in your kindle that you haven’t yet read. So I don’t have KU, so I buy it so they have been paid, but I haven’t read it. So there’s like 10 of them on there. Kobo is going to do the same subscription. Mine are in the Kobo subscription because you don’t have to be exclusive. And I think why not? Why not have them there? Same thing, Kobo requires some marketing. The great thing about Kobo is that they do have promotions on the site that deal specifically with Kobo products and get your book specifically out in front of an audience that you might not be able to reach on your own. So Canada, New Zealand, UK, Australia, India, Europe. So if you’re going to go wide, it’s worth playing around in Kobo. They have excellent customer service. It’s really worth checking them out. If you guys have any questions and I will try my best to answer them, you can get me over on Twitter @pencilslipstick, and you can get me on Instagram @PencilsandLipstick, all spelled out, or @KatCaldwell.author. I will try to answer your questions. I am trying to get Kobo to come on the show and to tell us all about it. So hopefully they will be able to answer all the questions when they come on the show and try to convince you all to go wide. I think you should go wide, but that’s just me.

So that’s exciting news. I think that it’s good for Amazon to have competition. I know we all have mixed feelings about Amazon and their takeover of America and possibly the world. I think it’s good for companies to have competition. I think it’s good for them to have competition on the subscription service. So I don’t think that Amazon will change their exclusivity. I think it’s working for a lot of people, and I don’t think books are their priority. It’s working, why fix something that ain’t broke? So that’s just a decision you’re going to have to make if you’re going to stay exclusive to Amazon. But I will repeat myself, it does not matter as much whether you go wide or you go specifically KU. Your book isn’t going to sell if you don’t push it. So it is easier to publish your book these days. It’s easier to get it out there. I think KU has 3 million titles on it. So you have a lot of competition. We have a lot of competition. It is getting harder and harder to differentiate yourself in the crowd and to be seen and to be not only bought but be read. So there’s a couple of different steps along the way in getting your book consumed by the reader. And so whether you decide to go wide or direct sales or KU or a mix, you are going to have to find a way to market. I can’t stress enough that you are a salesperson as an author, you are a small business, and it is worth looking into learning how to sell and learning how to run a small business. That is what I have been doing for about nine months. It’s slow going. And I feel like we’re doing that from the beginning too, but it’s just a lot. And so with all of our busy lives, I feel like we have to take it in stages. I am in my fifth decade of life. So I’m not in college and I don’t just have the time to go and take a business class. And anyway, it’s an online small business and all the things are different.

So you need to learn how to sell. You need to learn how to promote your book, how to talk about your book. And that is why I want to talk to you guys about your author newsletter. So your author newsletter is going to help teach you to do these things, to talk about your book, to talk about your small business, your brand, which is usually you or your pen name, unless you’re J.K. Rowling’s and it’s Harry Potter or Potter’s World or whatever that is. And yeah, you can make a brand around the series if you want to make maybe several brands, or you think that series will really be the Harry Potter in your world, take off and be worth spending a lot of time on. It’s a lot of decisions to make before you even know. That’s what I find so hard about it. So for most authors, their brand is their pen name or their author name. It’s amazing to me how many people still struggle with author newsletter, how many people resist making an author newsletter. That’s one thing of all the things that I didn’t get right, that’s one thing I got right. And I still didn’t do it completely right from the beginning. But an author newsletter has been a thing since 2014, 2013. I mean, ever since I really started looking into becoming an author, seriously, with babies in my arms and on my legs, hugging my legs. I just have this visual of me standing with a newborn baby and a toddler on one leg and another toddler on another leg. That’s why I always say that. So in author newsletters, I know people resist it. And I think the reason that you resist it is the fear, like a couple of different fears, but it’s based on fears. Your first fear is no one’s on your list. How do you even start? What is zero at first? And this is the biggest question I get or the number one question over and over and over again is how do I start? And the mechanics of starting is not hard. I can tell you, go to MailerLite, go to Mailchimp, go to Flodesk, go to ConvertKit, go anywhere and start a mailing list. But really what people are asking is how do they get people on their list? So we are going to tackle that question. And I think the next question that is based in fear is, what do I talk about in my author newsletter? And so those are the things that trip us up and keep us from doing it and keep us from being consistent. So we are going to talk about that right now after this little commercial.

Okay, so we are going to talk about author newsletters now that I have talked your ear off about becoming a book coach. I am going to go into marketing coach mode, and we are going to talk about author newsletters. Why, first of all, do you need an author newsletter? So author newsletter is the same as all those other newsletters that you sign up for at your favorite shops. You know how when you get on to, I don’t know, whatever shop online, toms.com. And the pop up says, give us your email address and we’ll give you 15% off. And what do you do? You give them your email address because you want that 15% off. And then what do they do? They send you sales and announcements and newsletters and all these things. That is a newsletter, and that is what you want as an author. You want access to your clients, direct access. Now, why do stores do this? Because they have your full attention. Yes, they’re going to run ads. Yes, they’re going to do other things. But in your email box, your inbox, that is worth money. You know how we talk about how these corporations sell our information, Facebook sells our information? They are selling your email address because it’s worth money. Your attention is worth money. So as an author, you are competing with Barnes & noble, and Amazon, and Bookshop, and Kobo, and all the other authors. Plus you’re competing with the time suckers, the social media, and the Netflix, and the Hulu, and all that, because what you’re selling is entertainment as well. You’re trying to grab the reader by their face and say, look at me. Look at this book I wrote just for you. Please read it. So you want it because you own the right to email them. Now, if they unsubscribed, you no longer own that right. But it is the one thing that you can control to get in front of them. If you put something on social media, you cross your fingers that the right people saw it because you have no control over who sees it. If you run ads, you have a little bit more control. But quite frankly, that is a whole different thing. Running ads, a lot of times people have to see an ad two, three, four, five, six, seven times before they will actually buy. And we’ve all been there. We’ve clicked on ads, we’ve clicked on them again, we’ve clicked on them again, and then we’ve decided, no, I’m not going to buy.

So you are going to own this little road that leads to your readers or potential readers. And that is called your author newsletter. Now, the other reason that you should do it is because in the States, at least, they’re talking about banning TikTok. I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to ban Facebook, or if Facebook tries to own everything, or the worst could happen and you could spend all your time building up your Facebook, or your TikTok, or your Instagram, or your LinkedIn, or your Nostr, or whatever, all these weird things that are coming up. They all have weird names. And then they take you off for no reason. So Russell Knowlty, who’s never not followed the rules on Facebook, as far as I can tell, and has been there, he’s probably my age about and has been on Facebook since almost the conception of Facebook, and they just deleted him. And I would assume it was a mistake, but it’s gone. It’s not just that he’s logged out, it’s gone. All of his posts are gone. All of his work is gone. All of the page is completely gone. So whether that is a human error, whether it is something that their terms and conditions change and all of a sudden they don’t like your kind of book or whatever, because it’s so subjective, you do not have control over what Facebook decides to do or TikTok or whoever. It is a private company. They can kick off whoever they want. You also, on Facebook, even if you have a group and it’s pretty active, pretty active means that 30 % of the people who are in that group are active. So whenever in business, and this is the weirdest thing when you start learning about business, you’re good if 30 to 40% of people in your group that like you are active and actively participating with your brand. That’s something to come to terms with, right? So your author newsletter is a way for you to get in front of the reader, present yourself, present your books, and see if they will become a fan and away from the maddening crowd, basically. So if they click on your email and they’re reading your email, you have their full attention for all of two and a half minutes according to studies. So I will always push an author newsletter. And I do think that if you’re resisting an author newsletter right now, it’s based in fear and a couple of different fears that are completely founded. Yes, there are fears to this. And it is like anything, you have to get started.

So before we get into those fears, the next question people ask me that’s like a non… I think it’s like keeping them from starting, but they say, when should you send out your newsletter? And that just really doesn’t matter. I think it’s one of those questions we ask because we think it matters, and yet I think it’s just a procrastination tool. I send out my reader newsletter, so my author newsletter, every two weeks. I have done it every month and I would forget. So I moved it to every two weeks. I did it every week for a while and then I pulled my subscribers and they said every two weeks would be fine. So I moved to every two weeks. It doesn’t matter. What matters is consistency. So whatever you can do. So go ahead and try every month and giving yourself space to have a typical reader newsletter. Okay, I’m going to say reader newsletter, author newsletter is interchangeable here. So you’re connecting with your readers. Having that newsletter that comes on the day that you claim that it’s going to come. So mine comes every other Thursday. And then leaving yourself some room to do promotions whenever you want to do promotions. So you don’t only email them on every other Thursday. That’s when my typical one comes out. So I will tell them what I am writing. I will tell them if maybe I got a short story published and where they can go read it, if they want to sign up to be an alpha reader, if they want to sign up to be on your arc team, who I am promoting that week, whatever promotion I am doing. So that is the typical. And then if I have something special going on, I have left myself room to send out extra emails without being overwhelming to my readers. So where do I start? That is the number one fear based question that people always ask. And the truth is, you start wherever you can. If you are not published yet or you’ve just published one book, you go out and you physically ask your friends and family and people on Facebook and people on whatever groups you are in, would you like to join my newsletter and hear about what I’m writing? Now, are these people going to become your biggest fans? Maybe, but probably not. But it at least gives you somebody to talk to, and it gives you some numbers on your list. So also, when you’re putting it out, if you’re very active on Facebook, let’s say, or very active on LinkedIn, and this goes for you, nonfiction writers as well, you need an author newsletter. Let’s say you’ve curated a certain group there. You don’t just put it out once, you put it out twice, three times a week. This is what you’re going to get on my newsletter. You need to decide what you’re going to… let’s say you’re a fantasy YA author. You need to decide what you are going to give them. Are you going to talk about the greatest fantasy books that you’ve ever read? Are you going to talk about how you’ve built the world? Are you going to talk about what you’ve based your book on? Are you going to review other fantasy books? Are you going to I don’t know, what are you going to do? So that’s really up to you. I do have some ideas for you, and we’ll talk about that later. But what you want to do is ask, ask, ask, ask, ask. So ask your friends, ask your family, put it out on Facebook, constantly be putting it out there. And yes, you will start out with 5, 10, 12, 25 people. If you are in different writing groups, you can suggest that you exchange signups. I’ll sign up for your author newsletter if you sign up for mine, because in the beginning, what you just need is a handful of people on your list. Where do you go from there? You need a lead magnet. So it is that 15% off on Tom’s shoes. As an author, it’s probably not going to be 15% off, right? So here are the most typical lead magnet. So the freebie that entices somebody to come onto your newsletter. And this specifically will help you find people who might become your fans, because it’s going to be a short story, a novella, a character write up. Let’s say some people do some really fun things with their characters. They make AI photos of them, or a Pinterest board for them. They write up their backstory and make this fun little worksheet that you can go in and see the characters. So if you know how to do that, go ahead and do that. That’s awesome. People will get to know your characters and then they’ll say, okay, I want to read this book. It can be also the first five chapters, first three chapters of your book, so that it entices them with a link to go buy the full thing. You have to be very careful if you’re on KU. Yeah, you just have to be careful if you’re on KU, I’ll leave it there. So you need something that tells the reader about you as a writer and about your writing to entice them over. So I think the “easiest” thing is, and I say easy with quotes, to write up a short story or a novella, like a prequels to your book or your series. I think that’s the easiest. A lot of people give away a full book. Okay, we’ll talk about that in a little bit, or your first five chapters.

So why are you going to do this? This will help people decide if they want to be on your author newsletter because if they are not a fantasy reader, they are not going to click and get that book. Or maybe they will think, oh, I’m going to read this to see if it’s good for my child, if you’re a YA writer, or I’m going to try this new genre. I’m a wide reader, so I try lots of different genres. So this will weed through the crowd. Now, the best way to do this is to have a novella, if possible, or a short story, which you could, if it’s long enough, 12, 15, 20 pages, you could call it a novella. And then you’re going to start finding other writers who are within the realm-ish of your writing. So again, if you’re a contemporary sweet romance writer, find other contemporary sweet romance writers. And I think the best way to do that is to… if you write medical romance and they write small town romance, see if their readers will hop on over to your list as well. Now, if you’re small town romance, maybe hooking up with another small town romance writer will work as well. You’re just going to have to figure that out. So this does take asking. So I was talking to a young writer the other day, and she said, Well, how do you find those writers? And I said, It just takes asking. You go into Facebook writing groups, LinkedIn writing groups. You find people and follow them on Instagram and you just ask them, do you have an author newsletter? Would you ever want to cross promote each other’s books? Now, you can either cross promote the book, but the smartest thing would be to cross promote your lead magnet. So then the readers from their author newsletter will click on your lead magnet, they will sign up for your author newsletter, they will get their free lead magnet, and you might be making a friend for life or fan for life. The way that you get your lead magnet to people is you can either host all of your media files on your website, which can start getting pretty heavy, or you can become part of BookFunnel.com. Yes, things cost money. BookFunnel does cost money. I believe it’s $120 a year. I think it starts at $70 a year. I should have figured that out. But BookFunnel.com is the way that most people then deliver their files to the reader. It’s not impossible to do it hosted on your own website. I have done it before, especially for smaller files where it just has its own landing page on my website and people can download it. But if you want to know more about BookFunnel, go over to BookFunnel.com. Again, you can ask me questions if you want.

So where do you start? You start with the people around you. You start with people that you know. You start asking on social media and you start talking about your author newsletter. And you’re excited about your author newsletter because you are excited to tell people about your book. Again, I said you are now a salesperson, right? You are a small business owner. Follow some small businesses on Instagram or on TikTok, and they are talking about their business all the time because they’re excited. Aren’t you excited about your book? Yes, you’re excited about your book. We just got to learn to talk about it and to share our excitement. Which goes into the what will I even tell people on my author newsletter, which is the other question I get, which I think is based in fear and not unfounded. I get it. I have done many things on my author newsletter. I have done writing prompts, I’ve done poetry. Every other week for a while, I did send out, I found poetry to go with it. And then I would write my own little story. I’ve done flash fiction where I would put out a prompt, and then I would set the timer and try to write a little story from it, about 300 to 500 words every week, that got a lot. I have written letters between my characters for my readers just to give them something to read. But I think the easiest thing to do is to talk about your business, which is you as a writer and your books. So you can do fun things. You can write letters, you can do deleted scenes every once in a while. I wouldn’t promise it, though, like I did. And then I have to be like, whoa, this is way too much work. Yeah, we’re going to stop this now. What you talk about is what you’re learning as a writer. And these don’t have to be long. In fact, I recommend that you do not have an email in which you have to scroll down very much. It’s hard to do that. And I recommend this. And then somebody pointed it out to me the other day that sometimes they have to do two scroll ups with their fingers on my emails, which is not my goal. My goal is to maybe do one scroll up. So you’re going to give updates. You’re going to say what you’re learning. You’re going to say a character that you love. You’re going to tell them how you came up with the idea, what changed as you wrote it, where you came up with the scene, what is maybe based on real life. Maybe you have an ice cream shop in your story that everyone gathers at and that it’s based off of your grandmother’s stories when she was young. I don’t know. Who is based on somebody that you know? Is it true that authors kill off their ex-boyfriends in their books? I don’t know. If you scroll down roll through social media, I do this sometimes, and just see what people are talking about. And then I talk to my newsletter about it. I’ve never killed off anyone that I quote unquote based on somebody I know in a book. But I also don’t write those books. So did you base a character off of somebody that you know? Did you write about high school because you wanted to change your years in high school? It’s really about getting personal and yet be sure to keep those boundaries.

So I like telling people where I’m at in my writing. I like telling them what I’m reading, which is a great thing to do because I can’t feed them everything that they want to read. I’m not that fast of a writer, so I want to recommend other people. And number one, after you’re talking about your book and your writing, talk about other authors and other books. So cross promotion, collaboration, multiple author promotions, these are key. These are not only key to getting more people on your author newsletter. So as I said, you ask an author friend, will you cross promote my book or my lead magnet? And I’ll cross promote your lead magnet. So you’re getting readers over to your author newsletter. But you’re feeding the book world, right? And you’re helping lift up other authors. Now, where you can get this… It can become a lot to find these people on your own. So that is where BookFunnel, again, comes in and storyorigin.com. So these are where you can go and find large group author promotions going on. And those are either newsletter builders, which is usually promoting your lead magnet. And there are different rules to that. Sometimes it has to be a full book and a novella would count for a full book. Sometimes it can be a snippet of your book. And so I recommend wherever you can to just give out the first five chapters. That’s just me personally. And I’ve talked about that a couple of times of not giving out your full book. Sometimes you have to and sometimes it’s worth it. You can also do one-on-one author connections there. So if you don’t, if you’ve exhausted your list of authors that you know via internet or personally, you can go to storyorigin.com or bookfunnel.com and meet even more. And it’s a big list there and you can just click on them and ask to cross promote. And so no verbal words are needed, which is amazing for all of us, for all of us introverts. So I do think your next step after you create it is to get on BookFunnel or Story Origin, or both. And that is how you are going to be able to cross promote. And that is how you are going to be able to fill that newsletter. So if you get tired of talking about yourself, let’s say you do one every other week. One week you can give news and updates on your book and on your author brand. And then the next week you can do a promotion and just have, I just want to give you guys great books to be able to read and check out and help uplift other indie authors, which I think is great. Karma will always come back to you well. I want you to start your author newsletter. There’s a lot more that we could get into, but I hope that this actually got you thinking, especially if you’re resisting it. Yes, it’s scary to build your own business, and that is what you are doing as an author. But it is possible to do it. It’s possible to take small steps doing it. It is possible to grow your list as fast or as slow as you can keep up with and handle.

Now, I have a full one-hour, very detailed lecture about this that you can click the link below and you can get if you want. It is a little mini-course. It gives a lot of information on literally where you can go to literally start signing up with a newsletter software company. You cannot start it just on your Gmail. You have to go the legal route with MailerLite or Constant Contact or ConvertKit. There’s a ton of them out there. And so I go into that, I go into more detail on the author promotions. And with that, you also get author email ideas. So I have four pages of author email ideas, just what you can do. You can print it out and you can put it up on your board or near your desk, and that will keep you busy writing author newsletters for at least a year. I go into your welcome sequence and a little bit more on your lead magnet. So if that interests you, you can get that whole bundle just for nine dollars. It’s just a lot more information for you on your author newsletter. I hope that I’ve convinced you a little bit, at least, to start thinking about it. Without my author newsletter, I would not be able to have moved my books. And if you are a book coach, if you become a book coach, you are going to need another newsletter in which you write to authors. So every time I’m pushing a summit, or I am pushing a workshop, or whatever, everyone, all my signups come from my newsletter. I have never run ads for them yet. That will be a different step, and that’s fine. And I’m ready for that step when it comes. But your author newsletter, your business newsletter is going to bring you the people who are really, truly interested in you and help you understand your fans even more because you’re going to be able to talk to them directly, ask them questions directly. They can hit reply on your author newsletter and get you directly, it goes straight to your inbox. They can ask you questions or answer the question that you have asked. So you are going to get to know them better as well, which will only help your marketing skills. See how this goes? It’s just a constant cycle and it’s great. We get to know each other and they will tell you what they want to read and you will tell them what you want to write and hopefully it will convert. So if you guys have any questions, you can sign up for my author newsletter down below, my readers newsletter, if you want to see it in action. You want to see my welcome sequence in action, you can sign up for either my Reader’s Newsletter or my Writer’s Newsletter below. You can ask me questions on Instagram or Twitter. Those links are below as well. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you can ask in the comments. There’s so many places that you can do that. I hope I at least answered some questions and helped you decide to start your author newsletter today. Until next week, happy writing and happy reading. See you later.

The post Ep 178 Mastering Author Newsletters first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.

What does it take to be a book coach? Do you have to be a writer to understand writing? Jennie Nash doesn’t think so. After teaching writing for years as a professor, Jennie decided the way we teach writing.

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TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:

Kat

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Pencils & Lipstick. Today, I’m very excited to have with me, Jennie Nash. She is the one and only who started Author Accelerator, and that is how I found her. I found her by looking for a way to become a book coach or study more about stories. So we’re going to pull Jennie’s story out of her today. Hello, Jennie. How are you doing?

Jennie

Hi. It’s really great to be here. I’m well, thank you.

Kat

So I wanted to have you on because I think I learn a lot from you on all of the teachings that you do over on Author Accelerator. I think they’re really great. I think your program is amazing. I tell my listeners all the time I’m so pleased that I found it. I want to know just a little bit more about Jennie. How did you become a person in the book world? And then we’ll get into how you created Author Accelerator. So who are you? Where are you from?

Jennie

Who am I? Well, it’s a long story, which I will try to make very short. I always wanted to be in the book world from the time I was in fourth grade. I remember in our fourth grade class, we made a book of poems. We physically made the book with a cardboard cover, and it was, back in the day, mimeographed pages. And you could contribute a poem. And I think I had half of the book because I just thought it was the coolest thing, that we were going to write things and give them to people in a package that they could consume. It was just the coolest thing in my mind ever. And from that moment on, I wanted to be in that world. And for a very long time, I thought I wanted to be a writer. And I was a writer. I had an incredible career as a writer. My first job out of college was actually at a Random House, and I worked for both a fiction and a nonfiction editor. And I worked at magazines. I was all over the world of writing. And when I said I had a career, I published seven books with Big Five publishers in two different areas. And I was a solid mid-list writer, I was no big debut, no big breakthrough book. I was doing just fine. And in order to support myself as a writer, I started teaching at the UCLA Writers Program, which I loved. I loved being in the classroom. I loved teaching. It turned out I was really good at it. And I just had a great time. I taught there for 12 years. But I also became increasingly frustrated. And the reason is that the way we teach writing typically isn’t very helpful to the writer. You go into a class and you have 10 weeks at the most, usually sometimes shorter, if you’re doing a weekend thing or a four-week thing or a little workshop or what have you. And so what happens is you default to being able to teach what is possible. So what is possible is, well, we’ll learn how to write a scene, or we’ll learn how to write dialog, or we’ll learn a lot of craft focused things. Or the other side is, we’ll talk about how to get an agent or how to pitch. There is almost nothing in the middle. How do you actually write a book? How do you actually go from beginning to end? What is the process? And as the instructor, it was frustrating because everyone’s pressing their pages into your hands and what they want is for someone to pay attention, and you can’t. For what they’re paying you in the time that you have, you can’t with that many people. So I had an incredible opportunity fall into my lap, which was that one of my colleagues who knew me as a very strategic and market focused teacher. I was always talking about the meta parts of the book process and always thinking about how do we write something that people want to read? How do we make something for the commercial marketplace? And she asked if I would help her. She was an agent and she asked if I would help her write a book from zero. She actually had never written a book, even though she was an agent. And so I had the chance to say, well, can I do exactly what I want to do? And I began. And she said yes. And I began to develop the tools that became the blueprint framework for starting a book and the processes that I used to coach somebody all the way through and to help them prepare for the marketplace. And that writer and that book turned out to be Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story.

Kat

I love that book.

Jennie

She got a two-book deal at Ten Speed and wrote Story Genius after that. And suddenly people were lined up at my door wanting the same thing.

Kat

Oh, so they heard that you helped her do it? Ok.

Jennie

Yeah. And my next two clients got book deals at Big Five Publishers. So the first three writers I worked with landed book deals. And I suddenly began to think, maybe I’m actually better at this than I am at writing. And certainly, this feels more impactful and effective than being in the classroom. Because one of the things we saw in the classroom, and we would all laugh about it, the instructors, is that students would cycle through. They’d take all my classes, and then they’d take all this next person’s classes, and then they’d take the other person’s classes, and then they might come back to me. And they were eager to learn, and they were engaged, and they were committed, but they were not getting anywhere. So I began helping people, actually pull them through the process, guide them through the process, coach them through the whole process. And that’s how I became a book coach.

Kat

I love that story. That’s so cool. Because you’re thinking of this question, and I love it because, partly, I was thinking of that question. We always like it when somebody else is thinking of the same thing. I’m like, how do you get through this, sometimes? When we were talking before we were recording, it’s like you write a book and suddenly people come and ask you questions, right? How do you do it? Can you help me do it? I mean, you found the process because I’m always like, well, there are so many pieces and I have no idea. Trying to figure out that whole process is huge. I mean, you’ve put together a really well developed, there are lots of little pieces, but it all goes together and it all really makes sense. You must have spent a lot of time thinking of where you would put different pieces because is this exactly what you would do with your seven novels, or did you have to sit down and really think about how you would do it if you were going to actually teach somebody else?

Jennie

I did not come up with these processes as a writer. As a writer, I did what everybody does, which is flounder around, write 300 pages that didn’t work and throw them out. I had one book I wrote a novel where I turned it into my editor and she said everything is great up until the very last scene, and I think your last scene is wrong. And if you change that last scene, you’re going to have to change the whole story, which I actually did because she was absolutely right. So I was just floundering around. And what I realized is that that’s the way most people get to writing a book. And there’s not one single solitary thing wrong with that process. It’s what so many creators and writers go through. It’s the creative process. It’s trying, it’s failing, it’s iterating, it’s thinking, it’s figuring. It’s a good process. But as a teacher of writers, that’s what forced me to think there’s got to be a way to organize this process, to contain it. There are patterns that everybody goes through. Everyone’s creative process is totally different, but there are patterns. There are things that you have to hit certain milestones in order to produce this book. And it just was very surprising to me that nobody was talking about that in that very big picture way. And when you look around at where do you go to learn to write a novel? Well, you go to these types of classes like I’m talking about, where you go for a week with a famous writer, or you take a 10-week class and learn a craft thing, or you go to a conference and you hear whatever can be taught in a 45-minute panel, or you’re in a writers group with other writers who are also trying to figure it out, or you go get an MFA, which is actually not focused on developing a book for the market at all, or you go get a certificate in copywriting, which is a totally different thing. So there’s nowhere to go to actually learn how to do this thing. And it’s an incredibly complex undertaking to write a book that holds together. So you can tell when I start talking about it, I’m such an evangelist for book coaching because A, I absolutely know without a doubt that it works. And then B, there’s nothing else that does that does what it does.

Kat

No, it’s true. I’ve had some people ask me, why would I pay for a book coach if I can find the information out there? And my answer is, you can if you gather all the books. Definitely start with Lisa Cron’s book, start there. But even as somebody who had written a few books when I picked up Lisa’s book, it made sense. And yet when you sit down to follow her instructions, you still feel like, okay, what? I really think that the beauty of book coaching is you’re talking to somebody else. You’re actually going through the process of what is this story? Because it starts from maybe a scene that you’ve thought of or a question that you want to answer. But that’s not a book. That’s not a whole story. It can become an anecdote without any of the other pieces. And so I think book coaching is talking it through until you get to the point where you’re like, oh, I don’t actually have a lot, or, oh, that’s actually not going to work, or, maybe it will work. But I think it’s that exchange out loud that is worth every penny.

Jennie

Absolutely. It’s collaborative, you’re bringing in somebody else’s brain, and that doesn’t mean that you’re giving away your story or you’re giving away your ownership or your authority. It just means you’re bringing in, I think of it as a mirror to hold up to you, does this work? Is this holding together? Is this doing what I think I’m doing? Am I bringing forth the thing that I can see in my head? Can another human see what I’m trying to do? And that intimate exchange is what it’s about, and it’s inherently inefficient. That’s the thing about it. It is not an efficient process. And so when people and writers think, why would I pay all this money when I could do this by myself? You can do by yourself. There’s no doubt that it is possible. But doing it with somebody else is… Well, first of all, it’s way less lonely, because you have somebody else pulling for you, with you, cheering you on, holding you up when things fall apart, really paying attention to you and your work. And you’re giving money in exchange for that. But what writers usually give in exchange for that is their attention on somebody else’s work. So if you’re in a writers group or a critique group, you have to pay with your time and your attention. I did that for many, many years, and I found it very frustrating. I would get very resentful. I was really good at it. So I was often the person that would be asked in whatever group. I was also that person in a book group. I can’t be in a book group because I become, by default, the person everyone turns to or looks to because that’s how my brain thinks. And even back in the day before I did this professionally. So I would be spending a lot of time, energy, talent, money, not money, time, energy, talent on other people’s work to help them in exchange for them to look at my work in a way that wasn’t actually very helpful or satisfying. It would be, well, here’s a chapter that I read, or maybe they read your whole manuscript in exchange for you reading theirs, but then you’ve got all these notes and ideas and processes and things for them, and they have a few comments for you. And you’re like, oh. So I like the, I guess you would call it more pure exchange of here’s my money. I want you to pay attention to my words and my ideas and my work without distraction because I need you to. I’m actually in the middle right now of being coached my own self on two books. I have a coach helping me with two nonfiction books. I love it when I get on the calls with her. I don’t have to ask her how she’s doing or how her work is going or split the time. It’s like, this is all about me and I got some questions and we got to hash some things out and solve some problems. And it’s not therapy, absolutely, but it’s kind of like therapy in that I’ve been in therapy and what I love about it is, again, I don’t have to care about how that person is doing. It’s not my responsibility. They’re there for me because I’m paying.

Kat

Yes. I think it’s a lot like everyone gets a job review, except for us writers when we wait till the reviews come in. And then I think avoiding that moment like you got with your editor, okay, change the ending. I just spent all this time. But if I’m working with a book coach, it’s a business exchange, like you said. It’s a little more pure. I’m paying you to pay attention to me. Tell me if I got on the page what I wanted. Here’s what I wanted. Give me feedback as I’m going through it. I’ve been there with my first book. I gave it to an editor, and thank god she told me, cut 40,000 words. And I think that’s great. But she didn’t tell me how. She was like, here you go, on your way. And you go, okay, two and a half years later.

Jennie

Well, and it turns out that a lot of editors these days don’t actually edit. Some do. There are some for sure that do. Most don’t, and agents most don’t edit either. And they say incredibly unhelpful things. Here are two recent things I’ve heard from agents to writers that they literally said these words, I wish it were a little more sparkly. What does that mean? And then the second one, it was so crazy. It was, oh, it was, this writing feels a little self-centered. Could you do another pass on the manuscript? That was her editing feedback.

Kat

What does that mean?

Jennie

And so then the writer, right, to your point is, what does that mean? And then what am I supposed to do with it? And that’s where a book coach comes in is we’ve… I mean, in that case, try to decipher what the agent means, but all along…

Kat

Maybe move on to another agent.

Jennie

Yeah, actually. But a book coach is there to both analyze and strategize with you what’s working and then help you to actually execute and fix it. And to me, what that does is it creates a safe space for failure. I just told you that I’m working with my own book coach, and in my last deadline with her feedback was, you’re not doing the thing that you said you wanted to do. You’re absolutely not doing it on the page. Try again. And it was like, oh. And so my job as the writer in that situation is to think, do I agree? Why do I agree? What do I feel in my gut? Is she right? If she’s right, what does that mean for me? So my job is to use her feedback as a measuring mechanism against what I want for my own self. Now, I could well say, I don’t think you’re right, coach, and let’s have a discussion about that. I want to argue my point. And a lot of writers will do that. And what they’re actually doing is they’re saying, this is the vision in my head. But what the coach is saying is great, but it’s not on the page. But if a writer comes back and they’re arguing for their case for why what’s on the page is holding together, the mere fact of them having to articulate that and argue it and voice it helps them to refine it and do what they’re doing and make it better. So it’s not that the writer has to do what the coach thinks or what the coach says, or the coach doesn’t say things like, this romance that you’re writing really should be a mystery. It’s not like that. It’s more asking questions and curious, did you mean for this to come across this way? Was this the mood you were going for? Is this the impact you wanted to have on your reader? And this is my experience of being in your story or in your idea. Is that what you meant? Did it hit me the right way? It’s more that thing. I think writers sometimes think the coach is going to become their story, and that’s not at all.

Kat

No, and that’s such a strange thing that we’ve gotten into in the last probably 30 years. We really think we’re supposed to do it all by ourselves, even though every other art doesn’t do that. Every other artist has a mentor, they take classes, they get feedback, and yet here we are trying to do this all by ourselves. And I think it’s really silly. One of the books that you recommend we read the Artful Edit, that was really insightful to me to think that… Now I can’t think of his name. What’s the writer’s name?

Jennie

F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Kat

Fitzgerald, yes. His editor was a coach. The letters that they write back and forth, and it’s just like, that’s how it used to be. The editor was on his side and telling him, no, Daisy’s not coming across like that. No, or yes, or whatever it is, can you do this? That was just so eye opening to me to think, okay, all of the greats had a coach. So why don’t we do that? We need coaches. It’s okay to need a coach and to have somebody just work it through with you.

Jennie

Well, it’s so normalized to have a coach in athletics, or you mentioned the other arts, ballet dancers go to class every day, or in the singing realm, or if you play violin, you’re going to have a coach, you’re going to have a teacher for your entire career. I’ve heard Yo-Yo Ma talk about this, one of the greatest cellists of all time, still taking classes. And that’s because you can’t hear your own voice in playing. Obviously, your ear is trained over time to be a nuanced, incredible machine to hear, but it’s impossible to get outside of your own self and see what it’s like in the world. And that’s how it’s impacting or hitting the reader. And that’s what a coach provides for a writer. I literally can’t imagine how anybody would or why body would do it without a coach. And just because you can, now that I just am so immersed in the coaching world, if I run into somebody and they’re struggling and they’re going in circles or it hasn’t worked, or they’ve gotten rejected, or they’ve written and written and written and put their book in a drawer, all those things, I just think it doesn’t have to be that way.

Kat

Yeah, it’s difficult. You put together a program, you have a nonfiction side and you have a fiction side, which I think is amazing. So I finished the fiction side, but I’m doing the nonfiction because a friend came to me with his manuscript and I didn’t know how to help him. But I did know, probably like many agents, this isn’t it. This is too much childhood. It’s not it. So it’s that gut feeling. And so I sent him to find a coach. But it’s like, if you don’t have somebody who is educated in a certain way, they actually can’t help you. It doesn’t matter how many books they’ve written because they haven’t found that process that you found to actually bring together this step by step process. Because at least I didn’t. I don’t know. Maybe…

Jennie

Well, most writers, when you think about it, it’s obvious. Most writers are learning their own process. That’s what they’re doing. It’s like, how do I write a book? How do I get this done? How do I figure it out? And when we go to listen to those writers talk about their process, I remember once hearing Harlan Coben speak. He’s a very big selling thriller writer. And he was talking about his process. And I can’t remember it precisely. It was a long time ago, but I remember very clearly my reaction. He said something like, And then at a certain point, I just sit down and I write 50 pages a day. And everyone in the audience was like, what? That’s superhuman. That’s crazy sauce. What is that? And you all walk out of there going, oh, I must not be doing this right because I don’t write 50 pages a day. And for me, as the developer of this system, that is not the important piece. The important piece is where in the process did he do that generative work? What did he do before he could write those 50 pages? What did he do with those 50 pages? Because that’s the part of the process when I said every writer has to hit certain milestones. Every writer has to get the words on the page. And however you do that is how you do that. But for the coach, the important part is how is the writer getting the words on the page, over what period of time. At what point are they sharing them with you? What are they looking for? I once worked with a… he was a Wall Street Journal reporter. He was writing a book and I helped him with the blueprint. We hashed out what it was going to be and he wanted to just put his head down and write. And he did not want to turn pages in. He just wanted to get it done. But he said, I want you to know that I’m doing it. I want that accountability. So we made a spreadsheet that every day, it was a Google Doc, every day he would write down how many words he wrote, and I had a column and I would literally put a check in the column. That was my whole job. My whole job was just, I see you doing this. I see that you’re making progress. I’m holding you accountable. And that was what I did. And it worked for him. So that’s what I mean by there’s a part of the process that’s unique to a writer. But for the coach, seeing them make progress is what we need to do. That has to happen. So my processes and systems came out of thinking not of my own process as a writer, but how do I help these other people to do this thing in a way that is helpful and efficient and makes them a better writer?

Kat

Yes. And what I really like about the system for both nonfiction and fiction is how much thinking you push the writer to do. Because I do think the one theory out there all the time, we can NaNoWriMo’s great in some ways, but really just ticking the box of the 2,000 words a day, if they’re not 2,000 words that contribute to an actual story, they don’t do anything. They don’t take you anywhere. You’re going to end up throwing them away. And I don’t know how many writers I’ve heard say, yeah, I’ve never finished that story, that I was just so intent on putting words down on the page. So it’s a lot. That writer was able to do that because you had gone through the blueprint with them and thought through and thought through, what is this story? What’s the middle, especially because everyone gets stuck in the middle. How do they get to the climax and how do they get to the end? That’s what the genius of this process that you put together is.

Jennie

Well, you’re talking about the blueprint, and it’s interesting because there’s a blueprint for a book which is fiction. There’s a blueprint for a nonfiction book which is nonfiction. And the book I’m currently writing is the Memoir Blueprint. And what’s fascinating for me is I developed this system or process. It’s a 14-step process, and it happens before you write,2 that’s its intention. You work out the story fundamentals before you write. And it’s very different from plotting out a book, a story, or hashing out a table of contents. It’s a 360 look at how the story is going to function in the world. And as far as I know, it’s the only system that does that. All the other Story Grid and Save the Cat, and even Lisa’s Wired for Story, all great systems. I love them all. My writers have used them all. They’re all great. But none of them ask these foundational questions about story. And the longer I work with the blueprint and see coaches working with their writers of the blueprint, the more convinced I am of its power. And I used to be softer about it. This would be a good place to start. This would be a good idea. This is how we could get into it. And the longer I do it, the fiercer I get. If you don’t do this, you’re just wasting time. And NaNoWriMo, I love NaNoWriMo’s spirit. I love the energy of everybody doing a thing together and challenging themselves. There’s so much about it that’s lovely and great. But anybody who does that without doing some sort of blueprint for their book before they do it is actually just wasting a lot of time. A lot of time and a lot of words and a lot of energy not going anywhere. I know a lot of pros, meaning authors who make their living writing, who use NaNoWriMo to draft fast draft books, but they spend the three months beforehand getting ready to do that.

Kat

Yeah. And it’s interesting because the indie world or the writing world is figuring that out because now you have Preptober, right? So now we’re prepping our book. But really, again, it’s more than just plotting because I came across plotting because for one book, I decided it needed to be actually two books. I really wanted to explore two different characters. And so I pulled one character and what I realized is, I don’t know that much about this character because the other person was the main character. And so now I need to find out this character and what is his story and am I really going to do this? And I looked at plotting because I got very frustrated because he became very annoying as a character. So I looked at plotting and I thought, well, that’s great. If you know the points, if it’s Star Wars, everyone always uses Star Wars, and I know that they have to go fight, but I don’t know what he’s doing. So what am I going to plot? And I do like Lisa Cron’s book but still, and even Story Genius, I still got frustrated of like, okay, but I need to, even for the story cards, okay, I could make up a story card, but that doesn’t help me make a scene that’s worth keeping in the book. I just need it. And so when I found you, I was like, finally. It really… I took it. We talked about why people would want to coach, but why would you want to become a coach? I took the course primarily for myself because I had these questions of how does story work? And I kept asking people that I really admire, what is the difference between a scene that I see in my head and an anecdote in a story? What is that? What makes the whole story, beginning, middle, and end, is what I got a lot of times, or whatever, the climax and a premise, and it’s like, oh, okay. But your blueprint is actually what the story is. It is looking at the 360. It is seeing everything and then having an ending to it.

Jennie

Yeah, right. Having it go where it needs to go. It’s stepping out of the story itself and looking at how is that story going to function? What is its form and function? And asking those questions separate from the writing, which is a thing that really got hammered home to me by that book, Rachel Aaron’s 2000 to 10,000 is a tiny little self-published book that I just love because she’s a writer who examined her own process. And what she was looking for was, how can I write more words in a single session? So that’s the 2000 to 10,000. But what she does is she analyzes her productivity based on where she’s writing, what she’s done beforehand, and her conclusion, how she came to be able to go in a single session from writing 2,000 words to 10,000 words is separating out the thinking from the doing. So if you spend the time thinking, why is this scene here? How is it going to function in the whole? What is the whole? All those questions, then you can write much more in any given session. And I just love that concept. And it’s not only about efficiency, although working with a coach and doing that thinking and strategizing definitely makes you a more efficient writer.

Jennie

But I think it’s also about confidence, knowing that you can do this, knowing. Again, I talked about that safe space to fail, that collaborative process, being less alone. There’s so many things about working with a coach that help you as a writer. But what you’re talking about is if I study these systems that a book coach uses, can I help my own self? And I, to be perfectly honest, never thought about that. When I created the program for coaches, I never thought, oh, this would be great for writers. And so many writers have taken it for that reason and found it to be helpful that now I understand that piece of it. And the way that I describe it is it’s like taking yoga teacher training, a 200-hour course or a 300-hours course to deepen your own practice and to deepen your own understanding of yourself in space and breathing and all the things, not necessarily because you want to teach, but because you just want a deeper relationship to your practice. And I’ve come to see that that’s what taking our course can do for a writer who wants a way to understand their work better and have a deeper relationship to it. And I think it’s really cool, especially because it’s not a thing I planned, but I see it now and it makes me really happy.

Kat

That’s cool. But it’s not just write,  some of us have taken the course and we’re certified and we become coaches, whether it’s one-on-one or groups or anything like that. For me, it was also a separation between, like you mentioned before, editors out there on the internet that don’t really give any feedback. I mean, we see them all over Instagram and people who read a lot think that suddenly they are editors. And I really wanted a way to differentiate that because I want to give people classes because I want to be able to answer the questions that I had. So that was one reason I wanted to do it. But what are other reasons that people come and want to become a coach that you’ve experienced? Do you have to be a writer to become a book coach?

Jennie

Not at all. I think it’s a very different skill, and I don’t think that being a writer makes you a good book coach. It can, and certainly, if you are a writer that’s doing well in the world and selling your books, that will help you with your marketing, to be sure. But it’s a different skill. The reasons people come, I find these reasons so fascinating. Some of the reasons are negative. They’re running from something. So by that, I mean, we have a lot of former teachers and former professors who really just want to teach and they don’t want all of the politics and demands and the pay from being a teacher or being in academia. And so a lot of them come to it because they’re running from a thing. We do have people who are the editors that you describe where they started helping their friends editing or reading manuscripts, and they realize their businesses are not making the money. They’re taking a lot of time and energy. They’re not doing well running those businesses, and they’re seeking help to run a better business. We’ve increasingly started seeing people like career coaches and in some cases, life coaches because guess what? Everybody wants to write a book. When those folks are helping people try to figure out what they want in their lives or their careers, a lot of people are giving the answer, I always wanted to write, or my dream is to write. And so those coaches are coming and saying, okay, I already coach, I already help people make progress and set goals and all these things. If I can learn how to help them tell a story and do this work, then I could serve them in that way or at least be able to speak to them more formally or in a more organized fashion about that goal. So that’s been an interesting trend. It is cool. And it goes to the idea, there’s some maybe purists out there who would say, Well, that’s ridiculous. Not everybody off the street can be a good book coach. And my contention is actually, I think they can. If they have the right temperament and characteristics and understanding and training, I think they absolutely can. And we’ve seen it become true. So those are some of the reasons we see people coming to the program. And this one makes me sad. The last one makes me a little bit sad, but especially lately. So here we are talking in 2023 and the pandemic is over. But a lot of people come saying they just want a community to be part of that loves what they love as a writer. And they haven’t been able to find that out in the world. And they see what’s happening in our community and people talking about it’s a beautiful community. I mean, you. Probably speak to it better than I can, but I find it to be uplifting and collaborative and mutually beneficial. People are not competitive. They’re really service-minded people. They’re book living people. It’s a great community. When I say it’s sad, what’s sad is I’ve had quite a few people ask, c an I be in your community without going through the certification class and program? I just want to leap over all that and be in your community. I say no, because I think the reason the community is what it is is because everybody has gone through that rigorous program. I don’t want to dilute that by saying, sure, just anybody who wants to pay can be part of this community. It would diminish what it is. And so when I say that it’s sad, I see a lot of loneliness and lack of community for writers and people looking for that. And so that’s a reason they tend to come. Yeah.

Kat

But it is a wonderful community. I’m surprised when I think of it how many people there are in there and there’s never really tension, ever. I’ve never seen it. Maybe you have on the other end, but you see it everywhere else. There’s always something. But I think part of that is the teaching of the program. So you’re right. If they don’t go through the teaching, because you talk a lot about being respectful of the kind of writing that a writer wants to write. This is not your time as a coach to give your opinion on the genre or the style of writing or anything like that. It’s to coach them through the storytelling process of finishing their book. And you even encourage us to find that niche that really excites us to not do whatever, even if we don’t like that genre or whatever, so that we don’t develop a sour attitude, I guess, to it. And I think that is really important and a really clear distinction. You as the book coach are not there to make them change the story or the characters or whatever to your liking. That’s not what this is about. This is about them and their writing and their book.

Jennie

My philosophy has always been that I’m tool agnostic. Although I teach tools and frameworks and I give people those to use, they can use anything they want and they should use anything they want. If they’re trained in another method of writing or story coaching or story structure, and it’s right for the writer, that’s what you do. Or if you come from another industry and you have some framework or process that works in another industry or another realm, and that’s going to help the writer, that’s what you do. I’m thinking right now of Danny Abernathy, one of our coaches, who’s an expert in the enneagram, and she uses that in her coaching. I have no idea what the enneagram is. I mean, I do.

Kat

But not at her level.

Jennie

It is so far from my area of expertise. And it’s not like, oh, why is she using that and not using our program? It’s because it’s a great tool and she’s deploying it effectively and helping writers. And that’s what we all share is the desire to help writers do better work and do their best work. And it’s a pretty cool unifying mission.

Kat

Yes, it is very cool. I’m very happy with it. I’m very pleased. I think Lisa Cron, I’m sure she’s listening, for pointing me to you. So we’ve talked about two things. You can become a book coach through this amazing program, or you can find a book coach. So where do people start for both of those things? And where would you recommend that they go? Well, the easiest.

Jennie

Thing is to go to authoraccelerator.com. On that page, you can choose if you want to hire a book coach or become a book coach. We’re actually about to unveil a searchable coach directory. I’m not quite sure when this podcast will come out, but it’s about a month from when we’re speaking, we’re going to unveil this very cool tool, which is the first time that we will do that. So the experience will be changing shortly for a writer coming to look for a coach, they’ll be able to search for that. And for someone who wants to become a book coach, use the link that Kat gives you on the show notes for this episode because she’ll get credit, which you should get credit for. And if you use that link to sign up to become a coach, then she’ll get credit. But to learn about it, you can go to authoraccelerator.com and say, I want to be a coach. And there’s so much content. There’s success stories. There’s a video series on, I think it’s 12 videos on book coaching that I’ve done. There’s a quiz you can take. There’s all kinds of resources to figure out what is this thing and do I want to be it. But when you’re ready to sign up, go use Kat’s link because I would love for her to get some credit for if you heard it here first.

Kat

Yeah. And you can you guys can always ask me what it was like. And I think it’s a go at your own pace course. I would recommend you even say in the course, set it on your calendar, get it done, keep going through it. And the community is so good that even if you feel slightly intimidated, they’re just so encouraging. So I think I can’t tell that enough. Everyone is just encouraging and you can do it and it’s great. And we help find each other practicum clients and get through the nervousness and practice and all that. So it’s really great. So we will have the links in the show notes for sure. We’ll have the links to both places and to the books that Jennie has mentioned. And thank you so much, Jennie, for coming on and talking to us about author accelerator and your journey to developing it.

Jennie

Well, thank you for having me and thank you for being such an amazing advocate and evangelist for book coaching. I mean, you’re doing beautiful work, your own self, and you’re helping people through this podcast and through your classes and your coaching and all of it. And you’re just a shining light in the universe. And thank you for being that.

The post Ep 177 Teaching Writing and Book Coaching with Jennie Nash first appeared on Pencils&Lipstick.