The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

Tristra Newyear Yeager, AI expert, discusses generative AI impact on music industry, musician revenue sources, & AI role in music creation & business models. Insights on AI applications for mixing/mastering, content saturation, DIY approaches in the digital era, & direct sales strategies.

Rachael Herron shares insights on overcoming fears to pursue creative projects and making life changes. Topics include leaving secure jobs, launching Kickstarter campaigns, and embracing fear in writing. The discussion also touches on AI applications, pitching horror movies, and marketing strategies for authors.

Learn about different book marketing strategies with expert Joanna Penn, from traditional vs indie publishing to short term vs long term approaches. Dive into the importance of developing an author persona, using AI tools like Claude III, and crafting engaging writing. Discover the benefits of exclusive vs wide publishing, publishing fast vs slowly, and the balance between income and brand building in the writing journey.

What mindset shift do you need if you want to sell direct? How can you use Meta and AI tools to amplify your marketing? Matt Holmes gives his tips as well as insights from running my ads for my store, JFPennBooks.com. In the intro, how to sell more books at live events [BookBub]; Future of publishing and LBF, includes video of our live panel [Orna Ross on SelfPublishingAdvice]; 5 Trends we learned at the Future of Publishing [Kickstart Your Book Sales]; Author business and Author Nation [Wish I'd Known Then]; Amazon de-lists my Companion workbooks, but you can buy the spiral-bound versions and bundles on my store, CreativePennBooks.com. Plus, Nvidia's Earth2 digital twin development platform for climate science; Moonshots and Mindsets Podcast with Peter Diamandis; Sam Altman on GPT-5 [Lex Fridman] ; Using Claude for Shopify mass upload template [M.C.A. Hogarth]; Plus, join me and Joseph Michael for our AI webinar, 4 April, 8pm UK — register here to join us live or get the replay. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with Scrivener, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 25% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna Matthew J. Holmes is a book marketing and direct sales specialist and the business partner of fantasy author, Lori Holmes. Matt has a great newsletter and courses for authors around Facebook ads and direct sales. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes A mindset shift when switching from KU to direct sales Control of your cash flow and customer base with direct sales Email marketing strategies AI automatic targeting vs. manual targetting Tools to create better ads for targeting your ideal reader Matthew's ad testing methodology The influx of print sales when selling direct and how to source them The Direct Sales Blueprint for Authors and Facebook ad courses You can find Matt at MatthewJHolmes.com. Transcript of Interview with Matthew J. Holmes Joanna: Matthew J. Holmes is a book marketing and direct sales specialist and the business partner of fantasy author, Lori Holmes. Matt has a great newsletter and courses for authors around Facebook ads and direct sales. Welcome to the show, Matt. Matthew: Hi, Jo. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you. First up, just— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into the self-publishing and book marketing space. Matthew:   Sure. So actually, Jo, it's probably your fault, really. We actually found you, I think it was about 2016 – 2018, somewhere around there. Lori, who as you said, is an author. She had a publishing deal with a publisher that fell through. Then we were deciding, should we go and find another publisher or should we try this self-publishing thing we thought about? We did lots of Googling and came across your blog and your podcast and your YouTube videos. It was through that, that we decided, okay, let's try the self-publishing route. So that's the route we went because all of the content you were putting out. So it's funny to really come full circle and be on your podcast now. So that sort of started off the self-publishing thing with Lori's book. She originally launched it in 2020, but that was after a rebrand before with the publishers, and she expanded that first book. We launched in April 2020, and that is about the time when COVID hit. From about 2010, up to COVID, I ran a video production company. Before that, I worked at the BBC. When COVID hit, my video production company just crashed and burned because you obviously couldn't go out and film people. I couldn't be around people, you had to be in bubbles and all that kind of thing. So that whole business just disappeared overnight, pretty much. We had our first twin boys coming about two months later, and we suddenly found ourselves in this position where we have no income apart from the government furlough. That saw us through the first few months of COVID, really. So I had a lot of time on my hands, and I like to keep busy. So I don't like to do nothing. So I launched myself into learning Facebook ads to advertise Lori's books. That's really how I got started with it all. I found I really enjoyed the Facebook ads dashboard, creating ads and all that kind of stuff, and all that the geeky stuff around ads. So I just launched myself into advertising Lori's books. It was just book one to begin with in April, and then book two came out in May. So a month later, because it was already written. Then we launched like a side novel, which again, was already written. I think it was June or July of that year, 2020. Since then, Lori's launched one book a year. So she's got a total now of six books published. It's just been one book a year, really. So that's our cadence. She's a very slow writer, but that's just the way she works, and it works for her. So over time, we've just gradually increased the budgets, and we've obviously increased earnings as well. We're up to about $17,000 – $18,000 a month in royalties, with about 2x return on ad spend, about 2.5x, something like that. So we're spending sort of $7,000 to $8,000 a month on Facebook ads. Then back in 2023, we started dabbling a bit in the direct sales side of things. We eventually pulled Lori's books out of KU in about October of 2023, and then went all in on the direct sales. Even now, we are still selling on Amazon, and we're doing pretty well on Amazon. Just most of our budget now is going into the direct sales. Joanna: I love this. So there's a few things. One, Lori is not a slow writer, she is a normal writer, writing one book a year. People have to remember this, like the indie author rapid release thing, that is not normal! Also, she writes pretty hefty books, doesn't she? Like they're fantasy books, right?What's the word count on her books? Matthew:  The first ones about 80,000, and then the other ones are up to about 150,000, something like that. Somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000. But there's a lot of background research that goes into them. Joanna: Yes, I just wanted to point out that Lori has six books, and they are good size books. I think this is so important because so many people think you can only be successful if you have like— well, the 20 books to 50k is kind of the model that has been talked about, but of course, you don't need to have that many books. That model I think is the old kind of KU model. What I love, and why you're here, is because you teach the newer model of using direct sales, but also using Meta ads, which we're going to come to. Thanks for sharing the numbers by the way, I think that's very generous of you to actually say numbers. So Lori's books were in KU, and you pulled them out towards the end of last year, as you mentioned. For people listening, KU is just for eBooks. You were just doing print on the direct sales. Tell us— How does the mindset have to shift between KU and selling direct? Matthew: It's quite a big shift. It took us a while to work on, and I guess some days we still are whenever we have a slow day on the store. With direct sales, you really are responsible for every single sale that comes in. Whether that's through ads, whether that's through email marketing, whether that's through any organic social media, you're responsible for all of it. Whereas with Amazon, you have to get your books to a certain point in the store, and then Amazon can take over with the organic sales based on the Amazon bestseller rank. You have to shift away from relying on Amazon to do all the selling for you, to you taking 100% responsibility for every sale. That's probably the biggest shift we found. It's a pretty daunting prospect to step away from KU. Particularly, Lori, she just has the one series. Well, okay, there's book one in the new series, but that's not doing much at the minute because it's not complete series. It's just that all her books were in one series, and they were all in KU, and we pulled all of them out at once. About 50% of Lori's royalties were from KU, so it was a big drop. So we had to make that work on a direct sales basis to get it to almost replace that income. Joanna: Why did you do it? People are like, why did you do it then? Matthew: Why did we do it? To have more control and have more ownership, really, of the people that are purchasing the books. To have a more direct channel of communication to every reader, to be able to nurture the relationship with every reader a lot more than we can with the likes of Amazon. Also, we can earn a lot more with the store in terms of the royalties we get because we don't have the Amazon's cut to pay. So we can earn a lot more for every sale that we generate through the store. They were the biggest reasons, really. Joanna: Just on the money, so you mentioned the amount that you spend on Facebook ads. The other thing is cashflow, right, because if you send traffic to Amazon, you're not getting paid for that for 60 days. Whereas with selling direct, you can get paid the same day or within 24 to 48 hours. Matthew: Yes, that's the other big thing, actually. We've set it to every week now. So you can choose your cadence of how often you're paid, so we set it every week. Yes, in terms of cash flow and supporting the ads, yes, you haven't got to wait. If you have a big month, you haven't got to wait two months to get that income into your bank account to pay for the ads if you want to start scaling up. So you can make decisions much more quickly because you have the cash flow to support it. Joanna: Also, talk about the difference between spending money on ads to your store and getting customer data versus sending traffic to Amazon. In terms of email marketing, how much can you sell in different ways? It's not all ads, is it? Matthew: No, very much not. The email is a big thing because you can send traffic to your store, and okay, people may not buy straightaway there and then, but they may sign up to your email list through whatever you're offering. Whether it's a sample chapter, or sample chapters, a free book, or maybe it's a discount code. They may sign up for that, but not make a decision to buy straightaway. But you can have a flow of emails, a sequence of emails, that are automatically sent to these people over a certain timeframe. Those can bring them back to your store to make a decision further down the line. So that's the big thing. Okay, the ads. Books are a fairly impulse buy, I guess, because they're relatively cheap compared to other products online. You also have to think about people have got to be spending, with Lori's books, about 10, 12, 14 hours to read them. So that's a big-time investment there. So it's not just, oh, it's a three pound or $3 thing to buy. It's the time element as well, because that's obviously our biggest, most valuable asset is time. We can always make more money, we can't make more time. So we have to position the value of buying this book in the first place that it's going to be worth their time, not just their money. We can do that over email. If we send people to Amazon and they decide not to buy, okay, Amazon may email them a day or so later and remind them of the book. That can generate some good sales for you, without a doubt. But you didn't have control over that. You can't build that personal connection with every reader like you can when you're selling direct. Joanna: Another big difference is we have—I say we, I mean I, and many of us—have spent many years get building our email list through freebies. Here's a free book in exchange for signing up for the email. With selling direct, you're actually getting emails of buyers, which is a complete shift in mindset. So it changes things because these are people who have already paid for a book. The other thing that's different with the way you're now doing things, and can do, is conversion ads versus the pay-per-click ads. Can you explain the difference of conversion ads, and why selling direct enables us to use this in a different way? Matthew: Sure. So this is a big topic, but I'll try to condense it down. So when we're sending traffic from Facebook or Meta ads to Amazon, we have to use something called the traffic objective. This is just where Facebook is optimizing to get the most number of clicks on your ads for the lowest possible cost. So once someone clicks on an ad and leaves Facebook and goes to Amazon, Facebook or Meta, they have no idea what's happening after the click. So you can get a lot of clicks over to Amazon, and we can track the conversions to an extent with Amazon attribution. But when we start sending people from our Meta ads to our store, our direct sales store, we use something called the sales objective. What that allows us to do, is once we have installed the Facebook pixel and the conversion API on our store, which is a piece of code you put on your store to allow your store to speak to Meta and Facebook —  Meta can then optimize your ads to show them to people who have an intent to make a purchase. This is really powerful, because it's not just optimizing for clicks anymore to get the cheapest possible clicks, it's trying to get you purchases of your products, in our case, our books. So it can find people that have a good history and behavioral signs of actually making purchases online and making purchases that are similar to what you are selling. So that's probably the biggest difference. These ads are slightly bit more expensive, but they're not massively. When we're sending traffic from our ads to Amazon, they're probably 10 – 15 pence a click, whereas to our store, they're perhaps 35 – 40 pence, something like that. So okay, it's a little bit more expensive, but in terms of the conversions we get, it's converting much better with our store than it was on Amazon. That's with the data we got through Amazon attribution to track the sales and the page-read that were coming from the ads. So when you use a sales objective, it allows Facebook to just optimize for a more valuable interaction with whatever you're selling. We found it to be a much better way to actually generate sales on our store is through the sales objective, rather than the traffic objective. I have tested the traffic objective to direct sales, and it generated zero sales because there was no intent behind the people clicking on the ad. All they have shown a history of is clicking on ads. So we want to find people that have a history of making purchases, rather than just clicking on ads. So yes, it's a much better objective really to use when you're selling direct. Joanna: Obviously, this is an audio podcast, so we're not showing you all this, but you have a very useful newsletter, and you have very reasonably priced courses. So people can go find out more about that. We're not going to get too much into technical detail. One of the things that I really like about the way you do things, too, is you know, everyone listening knows, I'm AI positive. Every week right now, the AI systems are getting better and better and better. Some people will find that scary, for sure. Scary on the one hand, but on the other hand — AI is useful in terms of helping us with marketing. It is one of the things we should all be leaning on because most authors want to write, they don't want to market. So tell people how you're using Meta's AI targeting instead of what we've been talking about for years as authors, which is doing all this manual targeting. So I guess auto targeting versus manual targeting. Matthew: So I used to do the detailed targeting, and quite intensely. At the end of 2022, our Facebook ads completely crashed and burned, and I panicked for a bit. I did a lot of testing, and what I ended up doing was doing zero targeting, so something called broad targeting or unrestricted targeting. So typically what you would do historically, you would say, “I want to show my ads to people who have an interest in crime books,” for example, or “Stephen King.” And also, “I want to make sure I only show it to people who have an interest in Amazon Kindle,” or something like that. We have to really narrow down the audience. It worked for a bit and then it would just sort of die off. Joanna: There weren't any people left in that bucket, for example. Matthew: That's right. Exactly. What I learned through going through this process of our ads not working and trying to get them working again, was that the detailed targeting doesn't do the targeting of your ads. It's the ad creative itself that creates the audience that does the targeting for you. So that was a big sort of shift for me, in that, okay, I needed to —  Get out of Facebook's way and just create ads that resonate with our ideal readers and let Facebook find those readers for me. So, now I didn't do any detail targeting at all. All I do is age, gender, and location. Even then, I keep it pretty broad. So I'll say United States, male and female, 18 to 65, or 35 to 65+, something like that. That's all I'll do for the targeting. Then on the ad side of things, the ad creative, I'm just creating ads that speak to our ideal reader. They resonate with the ideal reader, they position the books to our ideal readers, and then I just let Facebook get on with it and find the people that we want to show these ads to. So it's a lot easier, it's a lot simpler to manage, because I had spreadsheets testing lots of different audiences and how they performed, and it was pretty complex. ‘ So now I just get out of Facebook's way or Meta's way, and just let the algorithm, the machine learning the AI, do all of that for me. So it's a much simpler way to run ads now. Joanna: Yes, so everyone listening who is still listening, who hasn't been like, oh, no, ads. This is very, very exciting. In fact, I heard an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, who basically said, look, we want to be able to do all this for you. Of course, image generation is becoming better and better in terms of AI-generated. So let's talk about that because when we started talking like six months ago, I kind of showed you how to use some of these AI tools for images. So I know you've been playing with that. So talk about how you are—because you mentioned there, ads that speak to an ideal reader and that the ad creative is so important. How do people do that? How might they use some tools to help them? Matthew: Yes, so you, Jo, introduced me to a tool called Midjourney, which has been a game changer for me. I use it every week. Joanna: It's so much fun, right? Matthew: It is. I could spend hours in there. The other tool I use is called Claude. This is similar to ChatGPT, but I find it a lot better. I get a lot more creative output from Claude than ChatGPT. I use those tools in conjunction with each other, which is something you taught me as well, which was using Claude to create prompts that we can use in Midjourney to create the images. So Claude is like a text-based AI tool. And Midjourney is more of an image-based AI tool that uses text to create the images. So you put in what you want to create in terms of an image, what you want the image to look like, what you want in the image. It will create some images for you that you can then go ahead and tweak and refine to what you want it to be. Is that a good way? You're much better at the AI stuff than me, Jo. So is that a good explanation? How would you describe it? Joanna: Yes, I mean, technically, that's a way of doing it. You can either go to claude.ai or use poe.com if your country doesn't have direct access to Claude. I also think ChatGPT with DALL-E has got a lot better. So just coming back to it, fair enough, we can create images with Midjourney. How do you know which ads will speak to that ideal reader? Like you have a testing process, don't you? You might create 10 images, but you're not just throwing them all and leaving them all running? Matthew: No, no. I'm quite methodical about what I'm testing. Once I figure out something that works, then I'll try and refine that and create variations off that to try and improve it. In terms of images that speak to your ideal readers, what I found initially worked well was just the sort of background image of a book cover works well. Once I've started using these AI tools, I've taken scenes out of the book, and pop that into Claude, the AI tool, and asked Claude to create prompts I can use in Midjourney to create images around that particular scene. These are scenes that are going to be quite prominent in the book. So if you write a fantasy book, it could be something like dragons or some sort of magical thing going on. If you write action-type books, then you can have people jumping off cliffs or running across rooftops, that sort of thing. Just think of little things like that that just speak to the genre that you write in. That's the sort of way I've been doing it, really. Then on top of that, what I find works really well, and it's always worked really well, from the beginning to even now, it's just using little review quotes, little snippets from readers who have left a review on your books on Amazon or on your store or another retailer, that just speak to your ideal reader. So perhaps in the review they mentioned a trope, or they mentioned, “Best fantasy series I've ever read,” or, “Best historical fantasy series I've ever read,” or, “Best crime book,” or, “I fell in love with the characters in this fantasy book.” Something that mentions the genre that you write in, that really helps with the AI side of things to find the right audience in terms of Meta's AI. Also, it helps for once Meta's actually created the audience and found the audience, it's going to speak to particular segments of that audience it's found as well. So that's the way I've been using it, really. Joanna: Then as you said, you test things in a particular way. I think your testing methodology is easier to understand than some people's, but it's your methodology. So people can find that on your website. We will talk about this in a minute, in terms of the course. I did want to ask you—okay, so just to be clear for everyone, you have been doing my ads for JFPennBooks.com for almost six months. Matthew: Probably is about six months now. Joanna: Yes, 5 – 6 months at this point. Obviously, I wanted you to do my ads for reasons of — selling books. What I love is that every single day, I'm selling more fiction now than I have sold in a really long time. That is very exciting for me. In terms of what we are selling most of, it's the eBook box set of my first three books in the ARKANE series. That's Stone of Fire, Crypt of Bone, and Ark of Blood, three full-length thrillers. There's a special deal for the bundle. That's another thing with direct sales, you can do these bundles. But we have upsells, so quite a lot of people end up buying the 12-book eBook bundle, and quite a lot of people also will buy the print books, and even the 12 print books. I'm like, seriously, from one advert on Facebook, someone is buying 12 print books? It's something I think that people don't realize if they've been advertising into KU. The KU audience is not the same audience as the people who will buy 12 print books (from an author they have never heard of.) So I guess—From the data that you have gleaned from my website, what are some of the things that you've learned? Matthew: Yes, so we've tested quite a bit with your books. We've tested various different individual books, we've tested different box sets, we've tested paperbacks. I think that the biggest thing, really, is when you've got such a big collection of books like you have, Jo, it can be very tempting to advertise everything. What we've really learned through this process was, okay, none of these other books—I'm not saying they're bad books at all, nothing like that—but what I'm saying is that — The ads are really working for one particular box set, one particular series, and that's where we need to focus the budget. It doesn't mean the other books aren't going to sell or nobody wants to read them, but if we can get people into your ecosystem through one series, then we can use the email marketing to introduce them to other series in your catalog that they'll enjoy. So we tested various different books and eBooks and bundles and paperbacks. We landed on this box set that just kept performing again, and again, and again. It was this three-book bundle, the ARKANE bundle, and the first few books in that series. It had a good deal on it and it had the upsell, which obviously works. Rather than just forcing money into advertising books that weren't selling through the Facebook ads, we just doubled down on that hero product, so to speak. That box set, that bundle were clearly what was working. So there's no point spreading the budget across other books that weren't really working well, when we could just put more budget into this box set that is working. Once they're into your system, into your ecosystem, into your world, then they can start getting introduced to the other books in your catalogue through the email. Once you've got that first customer in and they're on your email list, you don't have to pay to acquire them again. You don't have to pay through the ads to acquire them again for a second time because they're already in your system. You can just use the email to introduce them to these other books. So it's obviously easier to sell another book, or another box set, or another bundle, to someone who's already experienced your work in the first place. They're not coming to you cold to these other books in your catalog. So it's a much warmer sort of introduction to these other books that you have for sale. They've obviously got a good sense of what your work is like, they enjoy your work, and they want to read more of your work. The email marketing will help do that in a very effective way. Joanna: Yes, my email list is growing so much faster than it did do for a long time. That is really interesting. The other thing is, I kind of think of the Meta algorithm now as a little engine that's learning who markets those books for me. Again, when you start doing this, as with anything, whether you're sending traffic to Amazon or anything, you have to allow a period of time for it to adjust. It's going to put your ad up in front of a load of people, and a lot of them won't click at all, some might click and not convert, and then this is learning. It feels like the snowball does get bigger and bigger, even though we've kept the spend pretty similar. We haven't changed the spend, but I feel like some mornings I wake up and there's just all these sales. It's like, what just happened? Okay, so let's just talk about the downside. So we use the AI images, I don't know if you've seen this because I look at the comments, but— People have been saying, “Oh, you've got AI images. Does that mean your books are AI?” Do you get that with Lori's? Matthew: We haven't yet, actually. No. That's actually interesting to hear that. No, we've never had anything like that on Lori's ads. Joanna: I've started to get a few, but it is interesting. Some of them I delete because they're just offensive, but some of them I'll comment back and say, “I wrote this a decade ago. These are the first books in a 13-book series. So no, they're not by AI.” Some of them I'll just joke and say, “Yes, I want Gal Gadot to play Morgan Sierra,” or whatever. So that's interesting. I think the print sales are interesting because I feel like with Amazon, getting print fiction sales is actually a lot harder than it seems to be. Matthew: We're selling a lot more direct with Lori's store than we ever did on Amazon. We're also selling more bundles, which is $70 for five books on the store. We're selling more of those than individual books on Amazon. Joanna: Yes, exactly. And just so people know—you're using Bookvault as well, aren't you? Matthew: Yes, we are. Joanna: So we get a lot more profit selling print books when we sell direct. I mean, it's crazy. I think the other thing is indies are so used to the very little money you make on print on Amazon compared to the amount you can make on print when you're using Bookvault through Shopify or one of their other integrations. Suddenly, print becomes a much more important part of the business. Matthew: It does very much. Also, it's going to depend a bit on your audience and who you write for. A lot of Lori's audience, for example, are 60+. Not all of them, but a lot of them, like to have physical books in their hand. Whereas there'll be some genres that attract a much younger audience, and they will devour books on their Kindle or their e-reader of choice, much more than buying a print book. They want instant access to it. They want to read five or ten books a week, which they can't do when you're waiting for print books to be printed and delivered. Joanna: No, exactly. It's a totally different audience. They're also, presumably, not so price sensitive, because as you say, people are dropping like $90 on 12 books from an author they've never heard of. Matthew: Yes, exactly. Joanna: I'm like, how did that happen? Well, I say that, and then I'll spend that much on some cat toy I see on Instagram. Then that, like you say, becomes an impulse purchase. I feel like sometimes we forget that people who love books will just buy books on impulse, you know. We go to a bookstore and do that, right? So yes, I think that's different. I guess one of the other things as we think about the way AI is developing, is what else do you think is going to get better and get easier for us? As AI is developing, what else will we be able to outsource? What else are you looking at or investigating? Matthew: The other thing we're using AI for at the moment is writing the actual copy of the ads themselves. So I'm not using the copy straight from AI as it is, I am editing and tweaking quite a bit. For example, like the headlines in the ads and the primary text in the ads, that's something we're using AI just to help us create some different options for our ad copy. I'm also using it to track different desires and different segments of readers, and I'm using something like Claude to do that for me, to write copy for a particular market awareness or a particular market sophistication. That's something I'm doing a lot with at the moment. Also inside of Meta when you're creating your ads, if you put in some primary text, they will have some AI-generated primary text that you could use as well. I haven't used them yet, but they look pretty good. You put in a piece of primary text and it will give you some other options that its AI engine has written for you based on that piece of primary text. You can then use that or you can tweak and then add it into your ad as well. Also, video is becoming pretty big now. So it was recently, you will know more about this than me, Jo, but was it— Joanna: Sora. Matthew: Sora, wasn't it? Yes. So that's like a text-to-video tool, I believe. I haven't looked into it yet, but that's something that I think will be very powerful. I've been looking at all the examples I've seen on X about it and there's lots of amazing possibilities you can do with that. So I mean, I think there really is no limit apart from your imagination with these AI tools of what is actually possible. I think it's just going to get better and better, but at the moment, that's what we're really using it for. Joanna: I totally agree. That's why I wanted you to come on, is to really encourage people. If you're like me, and sort of just didn't want to get involved at all with ads, there's just more and more opportunities for AI to do some of this marketing. So this isn't about Facebook, but in 2023, I was paying someone to manage my Amazon ads. I only do them for nonfiction now, but I have them running just the auto ads. So there might come a point where that's what we're able to do on Meta and as well. You don't do this as a service, but what you do is teach people how to do it themselves. Tell us about your new course, The Direct Sales Blueprint for Authors, and also a bit about your Facebook ads stuff. Just tell people a bit more about it so they might know if they're interested. Matthew: Yes, sure. Thank you. So the Facebook ads course, which is the one that's been around for the longest now, that is really just sharing my strategy on Facebook ads. We dive into the basics of setting up your Facebook ads account, and then moving into creating ads that stop the scroll and ads that really speak to your ideal readers. There's going to be a new module coming in the next few months. I'm going to be diving into my research process of how I actually create ads and really understanding the reader. It'll include all my different tools and strategies for identifying what readers are looking for in a book and particular types of book that you're advertising. So I'm really going through that now. I have a Facebook ads coach I work with that really helps me understand all this in a lot more detail and really understand the market awareness and market sophistication. So that's been really beneficial. It's really helping me craft better ads. So then it walks through the actual setting up of the ads themselves in the Facebook ads dashboard, and creating the campaigns and the ad sets and the ads, and then also what to look for when you're deciding is this a good ad or is this a bad ad. It helps in making much more informed and confident decisions in which ad you keep running, which ones you turn off, which ones you make iterations of, which ones do you make variations of, and then also how to scale up your ads when you're in a position to do so. It helps with what metrics to look for to know when it's time to scale up, and how to track everything so you have all the numbers that you need to make those decisions. There's quite a few authors that are obviously still selling on Amazon and using their ads to drive traffic to sell the books on Amazon, but there's also quite a few authors now that are selling direct and want to know more about how to use Facebook ads or Meta ads to sell direct on their own stores. So we cover a bit of that in there as well, in terms of the strategy and how it differs very slightly for selling direct versus sending to a retailer. So that's the Facebook ads course. I should probably rename that to Meta ads. As part of that course, as well, there's also a Facebook group. So there's lots and lots of people in there that will help you answer questions and give feedback on your ads. I'm in there as well, answering questions or giving feedback, and just helping people out to really support them in their own journey with ads, their Facebook ads. Yes, the course lays out everything for you, but you can come across issues that are a little bit more specific to you. You might want support on that. I don't want to leave you on your own stranded on top of a hill with no way to get any help or any assistance. So that's why the Facebook group is there, to help you with all of that. Then if you want to get some feedback on your ads, or on your blurb, or on your headlines, your images, etc, that's going to be done through the Facebook group. Then leading on from that is that there's The Direct Sales Blueprint for Authors course. Which when this goes out, it will be live and available to sign up for. In that course, yes, we have a module in there on Facebook ads for direct sales specifically, but that's just one module. The rest of the course is all about getting your store set up. So the minimum viable store that you need to really get going in direct sales. We walk through how to set up a Shopify account, how to set up your email marketing, how to create product pages, how to create a theme, how to optimize your sales pages, how to create offers, and how to build your email list, and how to scale up your store. So there's lots of lots of detail in there about really running a direct sales store for your books. It is specifically about books and how to get eBooks into your store, the different options there. It covers how to integrate a company like Bookvault to print your print books on demand and get them shipped off to your customers all without you having to do anything. It all happens in the background automatically. So we'll show you how to integrate all of that. So it's really the blueprint for just getting everything set up for your direct sales store. It can be another income stream for you, or it could be your main income stream. It could just be a supplementary income stream for you if you want it to be, or it could be your main thing. So there's no right or wrong way to do it here, but direct sales is a really powerful platform. We're really enjoying it ourselves. It's made a big difference to Lori's business and also to enable the relationship she has with her readers as well. It's been a big, big change that we've never had before. We've never experienced it before with Amazon. Joanna: Yes, exactly. Everyone knows I've done quite a lot of shows now on selling direct, and I really appreciate your approach, and also that you are taking advantage of the AI tools. Authors who don't want to use AI for writing, no worries, but you can use it for marketing. So I love that you take advantage of that. You also have an email newsletter which gives people quite a lot of tips and things. Tell people where they can find your newsletter, and the courses, and everything you and Lori do online. Matthew: Sure. Thank you. Yes, so I have a free daily-ish newsletter. It goes out three or four days a week. In that, I just share tips on sometimes it's Facebook ads, sometimes it's direct sales, sometimes it's more about the mindset about running an author business. It's just really everything I've learned in the past and everything I'm learning right now about running an author business, and in particular, Lori's author business. When you sign up for that, you also get access to the Facebook Ads for Authors Masterclass. It's a seven or eight lesson video course, completely free, that just walks you through my strategy for Facebook ads. It will show you how to get everything set up and show you some winning Facebook ad examples. It'll just really help get you started on getting going with your Facebook ads if you're coming to them fresh, or your Facebook ads, like us, just crashed and burned and you don't know where to turn. This course will just lay out everything that I've learned the hard way and get you going again with your Facebook ads. I've had plenty of authors come through that course who haven't even bought my paid course, but they've seen a massive transformation in their Facebook ads performance, just through what I'm sharing in that free course. So that's completely free when you sign up for the newsletter. Then Lori's books are at LoriHolmesBooks.com. That's where you can see her store. They're also on Amazon, and they're on the other retailers such as Kobo and Barnes and Noble. But primarily, we're really focused on the direct sale store. Joanna: I don't think you gave the URL for your newsletter. Matthew: I didn't, you're right. It's MatthewJHolmes.com. That's where you go for the newsletter and for my free Facebook ads course. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Matt. That was great. Matthew: Thank you so much, Jo. It's been a pleasure to be here. Thank you.The post Tips For Selling And Marketing Direct Using Meta Ads With Matthew J Holmes first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you use insights from the Enneagram to help you with a sustainable author career? How can you get past your blocks and move towards success, whatever that means for you? Claire Taylor provides her insights. In the intro, will TikTok be banned in the USA, and how will this impact authors and publishing? [TechCrunch; Kathleen Schmidt]; Hugh Howey on the Tim Ferriss show; I, Cyborg: Using Co-Intelligence [Ethan Mollick]; Using AI in award-winning writing [Smithsonian Mag; Editor and Publisher]; Plus, I'm now an award-winning author for Pilgrimage! [Pics on Instagram, Buy the book from me, or on other stores]; Spear of Destiny, Unstuck with Rachael Herron; I'm interviewed on the Casual Author Podcast, and Cops and Writers. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital to get started. Claire Taylor writes comedy fiction, science fiction, paranormal cozy mystery, and serial killer crime, with more than 40 books under various pen names. She also teaches authors through courses, consulting, and her books for writers, which include Reclaim Your Author Career, and her new book, Sustain Your Author Career. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes What is the Enneagram is and how can it help authors Differentiating questions to determine your Enneagram type Dealing with the unhealthy sides of your Enneagram type Overcoming blocks that authors may face Navigating changes in the (ever-changing) indie author industry Building resilience to sustain a long-term author career You can find Claire at FFS.media, and Sustain your Author Career here on Kickstarter. Transcript of Interview with Claire Taylor Joanna: Claire Taylor writes comedy fiction, science fiction, paranormal cozy mystery, and serial killer crime, with more than 40 books under various pen names. She also teaches authors through courses, consulting, and her books for writers, which include Reclaim Your Author Career, and the new book, Sustain Your Author Career. So welcome to the show, Claire. Claire: Hi, thank you so much for having me. Joanna: There's lots to talk about today, but first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Claire: Well, I was one of those people who wanted to be a writer since I was like 10 years old. Then I had just years of people telling me that was unrealistic. So that was fun. Luckily, I'm a little bit bullheaded. So I decided I was going to keep writing anyway and studied it in college. All of my professors basically frowned upon the kind of writing that I wanted to do, so I was trying to figure out, well, how am I going to do this anyway? Then I joined a critique group after college. That's where I met Alyssa Archer, who introduced me to all of the options that are included in publishing independently. I knew immediately that's what I wanted to do. So I skipped all the querying and just started learning the skills of self-publishing, and it's basically just been from there. I like being a one woman show and being able to call the shots. So I never looked back once I went indie. Joanna: Just give people a date then. When did you start self-publishing? Claire: Well, I did like a semi-self-publishing thing, one of those hybrid borderline rip off kind of things in like 2012. Then in 2014, I started publishing my own stuff through KDP. Joanna: You mentioned that you're a bit bullheaded and like to be in control. I've been wondering about this, because I feel like I'm similar, and— Do you think that there is a personality type who does well as an indie author, or can anyone be successful in this industry? Claire: I think anyone can find something that really resonates with them in this industry. I think as far as the perspective I come from with all of my training, every personality type, every positive healthy quality we have, can be overdone and work against us. So it's really about finding out the way that you want to go about this indie publishing business and making sure that you're not overdoing it. Joanna: Yes, I do wonder, though, because people email me now, and they say, “Oh, it seems like a lot of work.” I'm like, yes, it's work to do this career. If you don't want to do the work of publishing, then you need a publisher, like a traditional publisher. Claire: Yes, so I would say that if you don't want to do work, this is probably not the path for you. If you don't want to do a whole lot of work, maybe just publish it as a blog or something like that. I mean, I love a good challenge. So I love teaching myself new skills, I find that very engaging. So I think that is probably a necessary thing. Also, I think it's not just the person, I think it's the time of life where you're approaching this. Maybe you were a person who had a lot of energy to do this and that might have been the right time, and now with just the situation of your life, you're like, I just don't care to do this much work anymore. Then maybe it's time to switch. Joanna: Interesting. Okay, so you're well known in the author community for your work around the Enneagram and how that helps writers. So for anyone who doesn't know— Can you outline what the Enneagram is and how it can help authors? Claire: Of course. So the Enneagram, it's a personality system that describes nine core fears and desires. So we classify those as types or sometimes a lens, or sometimes we call it an Enneagram style. Each type is defined by what it fears and desires most. So those fears are very deep things, like being bad or corrupt, or lacking value, or being trapped in deprivation. They're not like a fear of snakes, that sort of thing. What arises from our core fear are these patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing that we can get very, very stuck in. So it's like having these blinders on before we start doing this work. So those blinders really limit our options. In our industry, we have a crisis of people being stuck and trapped because they've limited their options. Their subconscious mind has limited their options because of the patterns that it's functioning in as a default. So they can't always see an aligned path forward when the industry undergoes swift changes, which it does very frequently. So I can give you an example. If you're an author who's what we call a type three, this is the achiever, then your core fear is lacking value or being worthless, and pretty much everything you do is to avoid confronting this fear or feeling like you lack value or are worthless, if you're three. A pattern that almost always arises from this is the belief that they earn value through accomplishments and achievements. This can look like how many books they have in their catalog, how high their books rank after launch, and how many subscribers they have on their email list. So it all seems well and good to attach your sense of worth to those things when they're going well for you, but everyone who has been in this industry for a little while sees that all of those numeric indicators are becoming more difficult to come by. The result is that we have a bunch of Enneagram three authors whose self-worth is being eroded because they've attached it to something fleeting. So they may be trapped in that pattern, and they may not see another way of being because it's kind of the water they swim in. The Enneagram is a roadmap for many, many other ways of being and how we can be the healthiest and most sustainable version of ourselves. Joanna: I like the idea of the lens because I think that's important. Obviously, we're both friends with Becca Syme and that Clifton Strengths side of things. I also like the Myers Briggs. All of these are different elements of personality, and they can all help in different ways. So it's funny because people did recommend to me your work and the Enneagram, and I didn't go anywhere near it. I just didn't have time to look at it. Then when we arranged this interview, I'm like, okay, I need to read your books. So I've read both of these books now. So we're going to do a bit of diagnosis for the listeners. I'm going to get some free consulting on the show. I was reading it, and like you mentioned there, this achiever, the type three, and I'm like, yes, that's me. I just work really hard. I'm goal orientated. Some of the things you said weren't necessarily true, but I do have on my wall, “Measure your life by what you create.” I'm quite fixated on making and creating things, and work is my worth. I definitely am questioning this in the age of AI, you know, if a machine can generate stuff, what does that make me? So I'm definitely going through that. Then our mutual friend Becca Syme said that she thinks I'm a five, which is more about curiosity. I was like, oh, my goodness, that's totally me too. I'm sure this will happen to other people, like if they read your book, they'll be like, “Oh, but that's me, and that's me, and that's me.” How do we work out which Enneagram type we are? Maybe we can work out what I am together? Claire: Okay. Yes, definitely. So it is a thing that a lot of people run into because we often haven't thought of ourselves and sorted it into these sorts of terms before. So it can take a little bit of time, and there's value in that discovery process. If you're going between a couple, and you're like, “I don't know if I'm this or this, they both seem really common,” then there are some different differentiating questions that we can refer to. So it's kind of like, okay, if you answered more this way, then you're probably going to want to read a little bit more about this type versus if you answer a little more this way. So it's very useful. There's a process for this. You can also take a test online, but the tests aren't super accurate, with the exception of the iEQ9, which is one that I can administer and work with you on. That one's about 95% accurate on type and subtype. You don't have to take a test though, you can read about it. So if you're looking between a three and a five, there's going to be some major differences and a lot of overlap. This is why we always want to go back and look at those core motivations rather than the behaviors. If you're looking at someone who's like a real high achiever, they're not necessarily an achiever. They could be, but maybe they're a high achiever because they actually think that good people are hard workers, and they want to be a good person. In that case, they're probably an Enneagram one. So we want to make sure that we're not looking too much at behavior. So if you're ready, I can ask you some differentiating questions. Joanna: Yes. Claire: Okay. Do you find that your sense of competence is more about the results of your efforts and what you can achieve, or more about what you know? Joanna: Oh, this is hard because I turn everything I know into a book. I love, love, love research. I am so deep in research right now for my next novel, Spear of Destiny. I've read all these books on the Nazis, and the occult, and all this. I consider it the way to turn my curiosity into something. So the process is I guess why I do it. This is why I love it, but then I need to turn it into something in order to say like the process is finished. Isn't that right down the middle? Claire: That's pretty close down the middle. Do you use the books as an excuse to validate what you want to learn about? Joanna: I think it's the other way around. For example, I'll go to a place, like I went to Amsterdam one time. I had an amazing time, I went to all these cool places, found out all this stuff, and then said I need to write a book about it. The curiosity definitely comes first, and I use that to drive the outcome. I think then it gives me an excuse to spend more time on it. Claire: Okay, so let me go to the next question. So the five is in the thinking triad. The three is in the heart triad, so that's the emotion. Joanna: I'm thinking. I'm definitely thinking. Claire: Okay, all right. So, now the three doesn't look a whole lot like a feeling type because it's what's called the contradicted type of the triad. So threes can put their feelings aside to get things done, but they can also kind of access those feelings from time to time. Now, the five is much more in their head. Probably early in life, and as you're getting older maybe now you've done a lot of work, but the feelings are a little harder to access for the five. Fives tend to tell you what they think when you ask them how they feel. Joanna: Oh, yes, that's totally me. Do you know what's so funny with AI? A lot of the stuff I do now with AI, is I'll be like, “Can you help me make this more emotional?” Claire: Please help me, computer. Joanna: Okay, I genuinely trust whatever Becca says, so I was like, okay, maybe I'm a five. So yes, I'm definitely more of a thinking type. Claire: I would say that you might want to look at the five. The five can be very productive as an investigator, it can be this sort of high achieving type. That's a pretty healthy five. So sometimes fives get stuck in the thinking realm, and they don't remember to necessarily use that knowledge that they've gained. So they gain a bunch of knowledge for this sort of sense of security of like, okay, I know how to do the things, I'm capable, I'm competent. That's the core desire of the five. As the five has these healthy expressions, it starts to take on some of the qualities of the type eight, which is the challenger. So that's more of the doing energy. The challengers are in the body or gut triad, so that's the action triad. They are going out and doing things. So the five tends to actually use that knowledge and expertise. Joanna: Okay, so that sounds good. I'm going to read more about that. Then I guess we have to be very clear that there's some dark sides. I mean, you mentioned fear and desires, and these things can be not so healthy. So just give it to me, like— What are the unhealthy sides of a five that I might be struggling with? Claire: Okay, yes. So Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson have this measurement, they call it the levels of development, for each type. So each of the nine types has nine levels of development. Three are healthy, three are average, and three are unhealthy. So it's kind of the sliding scale. Now the healthiest level is called liberation, and people like to learn about what their liberation looks like. That's when we've integrated the truth, we already feel like we are the thing we've been seeking. So our core fear feels unimportant, and our core desire feels fulfilled. No one spends that much time in liberation, so nobody freak out. But that's the part that we like to learn about because it's like, oh, look, it's our higher self. We spend most of our time at the average levels. So that's where we can get in our own way about some things, and we're not necessarily living for a higher ideal, but the things that we're doing aren't immediately harmful. Then we get down into those unhealthy levels and things get very dicey. So the unhealthy levels are the ones that people tend to create these boundaries around of like, that's not me, and that will never be me. So when we do the shadow work, we want to accept that that could be you, and in accepting that, we really lessen the likelihood that it will be. So these unhealthy levels, it's where we start to not just kind of get in our own way, but we start to create harm. We harm ourselves and others, and we don't have the tools of self-awareness to actually get out of them sometimes. So we can get trapped in these lower levels, and that's where we spiral. For a five, this can look a little bit like hoarding. The need for security and the need for gathering resources can get a little out of control. Joanna: I'm laughing because you can't see. We're not on video. You can't see my office. I have so many books. We have a rule between my husband and I that spending money on books doesn't count. I mentioned the research with Spear of Destiny, I mean, I kid you not, I have so many books. What I also do is hoard books for future projects, and a lot of them are hard backs, a lot of them are expensive, beautiful books. I literally pile them up around me. Here in my office right now I am surrounded by piles and piles of books that contain knowledge that I need to learn to turn into books. I think the word hoarding made me laugh because I think books are an acceptable form of hoarding for writers, I suppose. Claire: You're absolutely welcome to tell yourself that! Joanna: So maybe some people listening are like, okay, hoarding. It's an interesting word. Claire: Yes, I mean, so it's sort of fortifying this fortress of knowledge to keep ourselves safe. That's what can happen with the five, and that's pretty average five. Most fives I know have an extensive library, especially author fives. I mean, the rule about how it doesn't count if you're buying books, you can just buy as many books as you want, that's very common. Joanna: That's good. I feel I feel better. I guess I'm thinking, I know sometimes, I'll admit it— I can be a bit of a know it all. Is that a bad side of it? I try not to be, but sometimes I want to prove that I know all this stuff. Claire: I would say that's a pretty average expression of a five. The average expressions are kind of things that we're like, yes, I know that about myself, and I try not to, but it just kind of happens. There are things that people may note about us, but may not be like deal breakers for friendship and that sort of thing. Joanna: What else is in the shadow? Claire: So the five tends to go into, “I have to know things other people don't.” So the dark side of five can be almost trollish behavior. So sometimes the five will, because they've become so detached from their own heart center, they will try to needle people to get the other person emotional, almost like to torment them. So that can be the trolling, right? This is very dark stuff. It can be if someone is giving some heartfelt thing online, and they use the wrong version of “your,” the response just being the asterisk and then the correct spelling of “your.” That would be sort of an unhealthy behavior of a five. Joanna: Okay, I definitely don't do that, mainly because I'm not on social media. I do feel myself in my head sometimes, I might think things like that. So yes, I can see that. Claire: Yes, so the five moves towards isolation, because the five can feel like, okay, I have this limited amount of energy, and if I let too many people in, they're going to just completely drain me of all of this energy. So that sort of awareness of the battery of the five can lead to the five building a lot of obstacles between them and the outside world, so the outside world can't encroach on their energy. Joanna: I put that down to being an introvert. Do you think that's like a double whammy? Claire: I think it might be a double whammy. I think that might be a multiplier. I mean, you're going to have the boundaries, but the five is really aware of it, and so that can turn into that isolation. Over time, the five can build a fortress around them if they're unhealthy. The stereotype would be like the person living in their mother's basement on the computer all the time. Which I don't think you're in jeopardy of becoming, but there's probably a part of you that can kind of relate to that isolation. Joanna: I might be happier in the basement, not at my mum's though, I must say! I mean, obviously people listening might not be a five. So we should just say that in both the books, in Reclaim Your Author Career and Sustain Your Author Career— You talk about all these types in both of the books. Claire: Yes, yes. So I talk a lot more about defining them in Reclaim Your Author Career. I do have a section on it in Sustain Your Author Career. It's okay if you're coming into Sustain Your Author Career and you're not 100% sure of your type. There's still something that you can get out of it. Thankfully, we can read books more than once. So you can read it saying, well, what if I'm a four, and then over the course of reading it, there may be information there that I described about the four that you're like, I just don't think this is it. That's okay. So this discovery process can take a really long time for some people, but it doesn't have to. If you're getting frustrated, and you just want to know your type, you can come talk to me and I can help you get there. So I do talk about the types. There's a lot of information throughout the book of, you know, this is what resilience might look like for each type. This is the problems that you're going to run into for each type. I have these concepts in action, where after I discuss a concept, I'll give an example of someone I was working with, very well disguised. Don't worry, guys, I keep your keep your identity safe. I give examples of a specific type dealing with that issue. So you can see, oh, is that kind of like me? Is that not like me? So there's a lot of, is this like me, is this not like me, that you can do with the book. Joanna: Well, just being practical then about how people turn this knowledge into useful information. I mean, like in Sustain Your Author Career, you do have these types of blocks that authors might face. Maybe you could outline some of the most common blocks that you see and what authors can do about those. Because I guess they're also related to the types. Claire: Yes, definitely. So there are a few blocks that authors face, regardless of their type, that I keep seeing come up again and again in my coaching. So one is that they need to build more rest into their daily routine. So no one really taught us what rest looks like, which means our idea is kind of this monolithic, like laying on the couch and watching TV. That's almost never restful. That's almost never the kind of rest that you need. So I try and expand our idea of what rest looks like in the book. It's really about getting into different patterns and figuring out is it my head, my heart or my body, that's tired. That can really lead us to some new interesting ways of resting and refreshing in small amounts on a daily basis, so that we don't have to take a month off to get over burnout. Another block that I see coming up a lot is the need for certainty. So people get a little bit confused around certainty because, oftentimes, they're waiting to have certainty in the outcome before they take the action. So we can never have certainty in an outcome. So sometimes the information we need can only be found by taking the action, by running the experiment, by testing the ads. We can't learn everything ahead of time and be like, okay, then this is guaranteed to succeed. There's some action that needs to be involved before we start to have, not certainty, but confidence that we can figure it out. So that shift from certainty to self-assurance is a way to get past the block. As far as like an Enneagram-specific block, one that I include is this over labeling that we tend to do. So each type tends to attach two particular labels to everything. So this is a subconscious pattern, and we're just not aware that we're doing it most of the time. So our subconscious filters things for us. Then if it passes the subconscious filter, our conscious mind might become aware of it. So you may not know that this is happening, but a lot of the times when I'm interviewing people and working with people, I can hear these labels come through in their language. For example, if you are an Enneagram one, this is the reformer. This is a person who's concerned about being a good person and doing everything right. So they start to slap on labels of right and wrong to everything. They're over labeling things as, “This is the right way to do it. This is the wrong way to do it.” It can even be right in sort of an ethical sense, wrong in an ethical sense. Their subconscious is painting with this really broad brush too. So the reformer ends up ruling out a lot of potentially useful options for their career without even recognizing it. So they go, “Oh, this is wrong, so I'm not going to do this. This kind of thing is wrong.” A lot of times there's a sort of knee-jerk ick with the ones when it comes to marketing and marketing options. So we want to dive in and just hold these things up and say, is this actually wrong? Or is there a way that you could do it that felt good to you? So we stop painting with a broad brush. Now for a three, the labels are success and failure. For the seven, the labels are pleasurable or painful. So each type has these labels to look through and say, am I attaching these labels to things where they just frankly don't belong? Joanna: You have to say the five now. Claire: The five is wise and foolish. Joanna: Oh, okay. Yes, and foolish not being the word, stupid would be the word. Claire: Right, yes. Would a smart person do this or what a dumb person do this? That's kind of the label. Joanna: It's so funny, isn't it? Labeling is a difficult problem, when you label something, as you say, almost without knowing that you're labeling it, but then you recognize it later. So yes, I think both your books definitely have this insight that's fascinating. Is it easier to see these things in other people than it is in yourself? Claire: Oh, absolutely. Joanna: Wait, you have to tell us what you are. Claire: I am a one. So I am the reformer. I was over labeling things as right and wrong too much, and it really narrowed my options. I mean, I think that's why this is like the biggest secret weapon of the book, this over labeling, because I was doing that so much. Then when I realized that, like, “Oh, gee, Claire. Maybe there's not a morally right or wrong way to do most things in this business.” It was like the clouds parted and the angels were singing down to me like, “Oh, you have options. Congratulations.” So, yes, there's plenty of things that just are perfectly reasonable options and they don't conflict with my morals, but I had experienced this sort of ick around them. Ones really have this gut sense of like, I don't like that. So I had experienced that and written off a bunch of stuff, and now kind of going back and be like, well, is there a way that I can do this that is perfectly fine and works morally and ethically for me? And the answer is almost always yes. Joanna: That's good to know. So coming to this, because I think the labeling might help, in Reclaim Your Author Career, you say, “As the indie publishing industry matures, the cracks begin to show.” I was like, yes, that's totally it. I've talked about the splintering of business models, and also the splintering of the community. Now, it's happened many times since I started here in like 2007 when I started self-publishing. I mean, there's been a lot of splintering. I like your phrase, “The cracks begin to show.” So what do you mean by that? How can authors navigate these changes and this need for certainty? Claire: I certainly agree with your assessment of the cracks that are showing. On top of that, from what I do and my perspective, I think we've had really unreasonable expectations of this career as a collective. So those expectations are very slow to catch up to the reality. So some of the beliefs that were proliferated were just out of touch and really played on the desperation of a bunch of people trying to make writing work as a profession. There's this hope and this desperation to get there, and these ideas were sort of these false promises that we saw some examples of happening. Like, oh, yes, there's a few people who did these things and followed these ideas and had this success, the sort of nebulous dream of being an indie author. So like, the idea that there was a silver bullet, right? If you just start doing Amazon ads, your books will take off. Or TikTok, that's your ticket to the big time. These silver bullets, we're starting to see, I think more collectively, that they don't exist. There's also that belief that if you do X tactic, then Y sales are guaranteed, and if it didn't work that way, that was because you didn't do something right. So those beliefs aren't really built on any solid foundation, and now I think the cracks are showing with them. I think we're starting to see that they aren't true, and they probably never were true. We're seeing people burnt out as a result of that. People's frustration with their own lack of sales, it's more morphing into these moral panics in the industry. So much of that intensity can be calmed simply by turning our attention to the basics of what we can and can't control. So you can control what you do, and you can't control the results of it, including how other people feel about what you do. It's a very basic concept, but I think we kind of got outside of that wisdom when we started thinking that certain actions in this industry would lead to certain results, and that if it didn't happen, something was just not right about it, rather than the assumption was faulty. So I think that a lot of that basic wisdom was being drowned out by the sort of six-, seven-figure author razzle dazzle. Like if there was a way to guarantee that your formula resulted in authors making six figures a year, then every author would be making six figures a year. So I just think as an industry, the promises and the expectations that were these givens or these accepted beliefs, by and large, are just being proven false. We're seeing the fallout of it through the negative emotions that are resulting from it. So those cracks are starting to show in those beliefs. The people who are going to stay on and stay in this game are the ones who are adjusting to the reality. Joanna: I was just thinking then about the Japanese art of kintsugi, where they fix broken pottery with gold and silver. I would love that to be our community. I feel quite sad, having attracted quite a lot of negativity myself, and some other people in the community. I just wish we were just this healthy, happy, creative community. Is that just unrealistic? I mean— How can we mend these cracks and make it something beautiful? Claire: Well, I think that might be an unrealistic goal, but I think it's a perfectly fine purpose. Joanna: I think I should just hang onto that. Claire: Well, you know, a purpose is just something we move toward each day. It's this ideal, and we don't get frustrated when we're not there, but we can commit ourselves to making it a little bit more like that. I think that if enough people are doing that, then we can make progress, and we can at least create a space where the people who do want to be part of that sort of vibrant, nurturing community have a place to come. Then the people who don't want to be a part of that can go be disgruntled elsewhere. I really think that the upheaval of our industry, which this industry is kind of one upheaval after another. You kind of ride the waves and learn to surf. It's an opportunity for us to really get serious and look at ourselves and build the sustainable author, who then will build a sustainable author career. So I think that that metaphor used of the gold filling in the cracks, that really is it. Like we have an opportunity to fill in these cracks of, not just our author career, but who we are as humans, and to heal these parts of ourselves that have been sort of thrown into the light in this environment. That's really, I think, what keeps me going. I know that some of the stuff in my new book is a little bit iconoclastic. So I know I'll get some heat. But for every person who is mad at me, there's a lot of people who are falling back in love with their writing, connecting with it again, letting it nourish them after this work, and watching the benefits of it expand into their life as a whole. That seems like it's worth the time for me. Joanna: Well, it's interesting, because I referenced your book in my book, Writing the Shadow, because so many people said it was a good way to look into the shadow work. I felt when I put that book out, oh, my goodness, I'm going to get some response to this. It's interesting, and I think the same with your books, is — The people who read these types of books are looking to do the deeper work around their personality and their lifestyle and build resilience — and all that kind of thing. I don't think they're the ones who react so negatively. So it's been positive response to Writing the Shadow. The people who do read it, think about it, even if it does trigger them in some way. Just as your book certainly could as well. So I want to encourage you there. It might not be so bad. Claire: Yes, I've been very lucky to have most of the people who have a strong reaction just kind of show themselves out. Joanna: You mean, as in they're not talking to you any more, they're not buying your books, but they've just left the building? Claire: They've left the building, they keep their trash talk to back channels that I never see. That's blissful for me. I was just thinking about this recently. It's so amazing when we do this work, when we ask people to look at themselves honestly, and share honestly, and be this like authentic version of themselves, and when we show them that that is okay, all of the parts of them are okay, like I've ended up surrounded by these amazing human beings, where I'm like, wow. You know, people come to being an author a lot of the times after they've lived these full lives doing completely different things. Then you get to meet them, and you're just like, wait, you did what? They're just so insightful and wise. It's really amazing. So it does make me nervous. I would be lying if I didn't say that I get a little anxiety every time I publish something, but, man, it's added so much to my life being able to meet so many people. Joanna: Yes, it's worth doing, for sure. So you've mentioned resilience a few times. I guess I've always talked about the long-term game and always thought ahead. I'm a futurist type person. So I've always mentioned that. I've definitely always been fascinated by authors who are still publishing decades after they started because they have something and they've survived all the changes and all of that. So— How can authors build resilience in order to sustain their author career for the long term? Claire: I think the biggest tool for resilience is recognizing that we're already resilient, that we've already done the hard things. We tend to dismiss the challenges that we've overcome almost as soon as we overcome them. Like, well, if I could do it, that obviously wasn't that hard. I think really taking a moment to look back can help us recognize that we have tools that we haven't been naming. So naming those tools can be really useful. We tend to carry around a lot of anxiety about like, what if the worst happens? Will I be able to handle it if my book flops? What will I do? How will I be able to live with myself? So it can be really helpful to remember that we've already had bad things happen to us, and we've found a way forward. Maybe the exact details are different, but if you found a way before, you will find it again. Like there's more evidence for your resilience than there is against it. So on top of that trick, which can be eye opening in itself, each Enneagram type has this force inside of them that they can fall back on. So for example, sixes have a huge amount of courage and a sense of duty to the group. That can light them up, if given enough space. They get knocked down, and why did they get back up? Because they have this sense of duty to the group. They have the most fear of any type, sixes. Due to that, they've built their muscle of courage the most because they know how to act in spite of the fear. So nines are urged on by the sense of harmony, and they have this gift of perspective. These are healing forces that we have, but they're also really subtle. So learning what they are and how to spot them, that's what gives us a leg up and the confidence that they'll be there when we need them. So, it's always okay to lick your wounds a little bit. You know, you have a book that fails, get up from the computer, go do whatever you want to get your mind off it, talk to your friends, rage, cry a little, whatever works for you. Go lick your wounds, that's fine, but the healing process requires a little bit of space to get started, and these forces that we have that get us back up are a little bit quiet. So knowing what they are and how to name them, and you know, how to recognize them, we can take heart in knowing that they will show up for us. As long as we don't fall irreversibly into self-pity, we'll be fine. Joanna: Eventually, yes. As this goes out, you have a Kickstarter for Sustain Your Author Career. [Click here for Claire's Sustain Your Author Career Kickstarter.] Tell people what they can find in the book and in the campaign, and hopefully, they'll come over and have a look. Claire: The Kickstarter runs through March 29th. That includes the book in its various forms. You can also pick up Reclaim Your Author Career through there if you haven't done that yet. Then I'm offering all of my author services through there at a discounted rate, or the regular rate, but you get a book with it. Some of the stuff is limited seating, so the first place you can get it is through Kickstarter. That includes any coaching, I have some workshops in there, I have a book club with reflection questions, my Liberated Writer Course is offered through there, that's a five-week course. My Liberated Writer Retreat, which is in October, all of that you can get through there. So basically, look at the book and say, okay, how much support do I need? Because we are very independent people, by and large indie authors, and we sometimes overlook the step of finding the support we need. We can do anything if we have the support we need for it. So just kind of understanding like, okay, I'm new to this, I don't have a whole lot of help at home, or my energy is limited, a lot of people I work with are dealing with chronic illness, how much support do you need? Then you can look at the tiers and find what makes sense for you. That's how I've designed it. Joanna: Fantastic. Where else can people find you, and your books, and everything you do online? Claire: Well, so I should say the Kickstarter. If you go to kickffs.com, you will go to the Kickstarter. Then everything else for me can be found at FFS.media. That's all of my other offerings and books, including my fiction. Joanna: Yes, your fiction. We didn't even talk about that. You have lots of quite unusual types of books, so definitely people should have a look at that. All right. Well, thanks so much for your time, Claire. That was great. Claire: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.The post Insights On The Enneagram And Sustain Your Author Career With Claire Taylor first appeared on The Creative Penn.

There are more options for publishing and reaching readers than ever before, and the indie author business models are splintering and diverging, so how do we know which path to follow? How do we deal with the changes due to generative AI, and how do we manage the grief and anxiety about these shifts? Becca Syme gives her perspective. In the intro, Kobo Plus launches in Ireland and South Africa [KWL]; Authors Equity [Publishing Perspectives]; Selling direct insights [Kindlepreneur]; Claude 3 [Anthropic]; Spear of Destiny. This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.  Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of The Better-Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small-town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the ‘Dear Writer' series of non-fiction books. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Saturation causing a shift in the indie author business model The importance of having certainty in your own process An ego shift when selling direct Deciding on a business path amid uncertainty Choosing your ‘hard' Adapting the vision of your future in an ever-changing industry Finding readers in an evolving publishing industry You can find Becca at BetterFasterAcademy.com. Transcript of Interview with Becca Syme Joanna: Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of The Better-Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small-town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the ‘Dear Writer' series of non-fiction books. So welcome back to the show, Becca. Becca: Thank you for having me, again. I love being here. Joanna: Now, you've been on the show a few times. So we're just going to jump into the topics today, as we've got so much to talk about now. I've really wanted to talk to you about some of the things I'm seeing in the community right now. You're so wise, and I think people need help and guidance. Sometimes I'm just a little bit blunt about stuff, and you have a different manner. So the first thing I want to talk about is a shift in the business model for indie authors. You and I were both at the last 20Books Vegas, the last ever one. It feels like what used to be one clear path is splintering into all different things. What changes are you seeing in the indie author business models? How is it affecting the authors you coach? Becca: The upside, I think, of some of the changes is that we're seeing a real trend away from this expectation of as many books as you can possibly produce — because we've hit the saturation point, basically, everywhere. There are always going to be these niche genres that pop up that aren't fully saturated yet, but they get to a saturation point pretty quickly. So when the whole of the industry is saturated, that changes the problems that readers have. So when readers were having a problem in 2012, there just weren't enough books. Like there weren't enough books for them to choose from, and New York sort of kept it that way on purpose, right. They kept the water blue on purpose. Now that we don't have that problem anymore and readers have different problems, then the way you solve them as a writer is different. So it becomes more and more important to find the people who are going to be your people that you're going to write for and to try to maintain some sense of having people that you are pleasing. Not that you have to write to market, not that you have to write for anyone but yourself, but we've lost this sense in the industry, I think, of like all you have to do is publish a book and it's going to sell. By the way, again, I always like to remind people that still wasn't the case, even in the Gold Rush. There still were plenty of books that weren't selling. We're facing that more now than we ever have because there are so many people who are having the experience of like, “Well, I came in and tried to do this model, and it's not working for me, and so now I have to think of something different.” The indicators are all there that the problems readers are having are different. So there's no more expectation, in my opinion. It's only grown over the last four or five years that what we're seeing are people who are writing fewer books a year and who are selling more. The faster and faster and faster you write, you have to know you can produce a product that people want to read if you're going to write that fast. Otherwise, writing that fast is not the way to go. Joanna: It's funny, I'm actually, as we record this, next week I'm speaking in Seville. I've kind of put a sort of tongue-in-cheek title on one of my slides, which is—“1BookTo50K,” instead of, “20BooksTo50K.” Do you agree with that? Becca: Oh, yes. I mean, I would say the problems that readers have are always the things that dictate the market, like the way the markets going to function. When there's too many books in the market—which obviously we're going to talk about that later on in this session as well—but when there's too many books in the market for readers to choose from, they have different problems. This becomes curation, right? Like, how do I find the books that are going to be the best for me to read? So putting more and more and more books and just not caring whether they meet reader expectations, not caring whether readers want them or not, that's not the way to solve the problem of curation. The way to solve the curation problem is to write a better book, and specifically to write a book that people will want to read. So I really believe that despite all the things that are happening in the industry, that for writers who want to write books, craft is going to become more important. Storytelling and pacing are going to become more important. There's going to be this resurgence almost of like, well, okay, now the pendulum has swung all the way to one side, in terms of like just creating anything just to put things out in the market, and we're recognizing that that's just not what readers want from us right now. Readers want better. They want books that they want to read, and however you personally can produce that is the model. Again, I would argue that has always been the model. Like the model for, let's say, 20BooksTo50K. For the people who can produce a lot of books, then that was the model. But for people who couldn't, there were still people who were only producing one, two, and three books a year, who were making a living writing, even during the gold rush. Joanna: Like me! Becca: Yes, like, it's always been that way. However you can produce a book people want to read is how you should produce it, and not pay attention to what other people are doing. Again, in an industry that's very competitive, it's hard to have that certainty about your own process. So I guess that's always what I'm hoping that I can do is to help people increase their certainty in their own process. Joanna: So I guess that's one thing, is the writing a lot of books. Especially, and we'll come back to AI, but there's a lot of ways to produce a lot of books very fast. So we can't compete on being a machine in terms of production. Another change, I think, is that the focus up until reasonably recently, I guess, was Amazon. Then, of course, there was KU plus ads, that digital-first model. Then even authors who go wide were focusing very much on retailers in general. It seems like there's also the shift into the selling direct model in different ways. What are those other business models you're seeing? Becca: I mean, I would agree with all of those, just in terms of the more reader-focused that we can become. I think the more we can think about how to solve the problems that readers are actually having, the more likely we are to maintain sustainability long-term. If what readers want is more of your world, then you giving them more of your world via something like Patreon, or doing Kickstarter or something like that, is going to be what will keep them invested in your platform, over choosing to go to other people's platforms. So there's this element for me of when the world shifts, we can't control what happens in the world, so you can either react to it or not. When the world shifts, and we move towards that people want curation, people want more good books, people want to go deeper into the things that they really like, they want more community, like those are problems that we can solve for them. Again, like not everybody's a community builder, I get that, but those are problems that we can solve for them. Using things that are more personal, that offer more access, that give us more control over the data, that seems to be the pendulum swing that we're in right now. Joanna: Well, can I just ask you then on the psychology side, because you're really good at this stuff, and there is a big ego shift when you move to selling direct. Like your Kickstarter, Shopify stores, Patreon, Ream, any of this stuff, there is no bestseller list, no one else can see how much money you're making. In one way it's freeing and in another way, well, no one can see your sales. Like most of my sales are now no longer tracked by any industry metric. They're kind of invisible. There's this invisibleness of selling direct. Which on the one hand, as I said, is great, and on the other hand, the ego sort of is blasted by this. A lot of people ask me this, they say, “But you can't hit a bestseller list this way.” What do you say to people who are like, well, I need to be seen in that way? Becca: I mean, I do think if you're a person who needs to be seen in that way, and that is genuinely something that you would say, “You know, I've never hit this list before, and I want to hit this list.” I would say it's fine to go ahead and do that. You just need to know that that is a model that's not necessarily moving forward in the future, especially as a lot of places are starting to get rid of their bestseller lists. Like we're not 100% sure that the USA Today list is going to last forever. We don't know what's going to happen with the New York Times list in the future. There's so much of that that we don't have control over. When I coach people individually about this kind of stuff, I'm super clear. Like there are still a lot of people who would benefit from being in trad publishing. There are still a lot of people who would benefit from doing the sort of older model of trying to hit a list because that's something that really is a marker for them, it's something they've always wanted. Similarly to, you know, talking about other topics that we're going to talk about, there's a level of grief of, well, that industry doesn't exist anymore. Like the industry that we had in 2012 and 2014, or in 2016, that doesn't exist anymore. So we can either be really frustrated by that and be caught up in this, “but I need it, but I need it,” or— We can shift into trying to find other ways to meet our ego needs. Just on a side note, because so much of this psychologically is when it meets an ego need for you, is it actually meeting a beneficial need? Or are you in survival mode when you think about not getting that thing, and you don't realize it? This is part of why I'm encouraging people to read Claire Taylor's books about the Enneagram because she deals a lot with that subconscious fear that's underneath. Like, what happens if I don't get what I want? I think a lot of us are caught up in ego stroking that is not coming from, let's say, a strengths place. There are some strengths that do need to be seen as being successful, and that's a beneficial thing because it motivates them and makes them successful. When it's coming from a place of fear, like I won't be okay if I can't prove to other people how much I'm selling, then that's a really different conversation from like, no, seeing those markers motivates me and helps me to compete with my peers and stuff like that. Those are two super different conversations. If I'm coaching someone and it's very clear that this doesn't feel beneficial, like this feels like a fear-based thing, I usually will refer them to Claire's book. Joanna: Well, Claire will be coming on the show soon. I haven't spoken to her yet, but— Becca: Yay. Joanna: On that, this is something I have been thinking about. There has been some things happening in the community where I've been then questioning, what if I let this go, this podcast go, and I let go my desire and the status I do get from being visible in the author community? Sometimes it's very difficult, as you know, because you're in a similar situation. Sometimes I just think, well, could I be just a writer and shut up and stop talking about it and just do it? I do question, like, is it coming from a place of fear? Like, could I survive that way? Or is it that, actually, I do want to be part of a community, I want to help people. Actually, this podcast helps more people than my books do. It's something I struggle with all the time. I mean, how do you deal with that? Becca: I have similar questions, too. Like, is it coming from a beneficial place for me? Here's how I internalize it, because I know you also have futuristic as one of the Clifton Strengths, right? I'm constantly imagining my paths forward and then living in that future of like, what would it feel like to exist as a writer, as a novelist, in an industry where I do have so much knowledge about how this works, and I have so much context about what success and failure looks like, and how to help people, could I sit back and watch people struggle? I'm never going to not be in community with writers if I'm a writer. I'm always going to be at conferences, I'm always going to be talking to people. Could I sit there and watch people struggle and know that I could be helpful and not help? Like, is that possible for me to do? When I imagine that future, I think, no. Like, I don't think I could do that. But what is it about my current situation that I don't like? I've been talking a lot lately about building a house that you want to live in, in terms of sustainability. What I've done in my nonfiction career is I've inadvertently built a house that I can't live in. It takes too much personal connection for me, it takes too much of my time, etc. So as a futuristic, what I'm trying to do is think about where is the level of energy that I'm willing to give to this business and this industry that is sustainable for me? And then how do I get from where I am now down to that place? That's what I'm navigating currently, and then what I'll do when I get there. I have some like metrics for my hours per month. How much time do I want to spend coaching? How much time do I want to spend writing? How much time do I want to spend on nonfiction content? Once I get to those numbers, then I'm going to stop and reevaluate and be like, okay, is this a house I can live in in terms of if I stay in the industry and I'm less visible than I used to be, can I imagine myself forward from that place? I do feel like the future changes so much from different vantage points. So I may not be able to tell, if I quit completely, if I'm going to be okay 10 years from now, but I can tell better if I minimize what I'm doing. Then I can pause in a year or pause in eight months, and say, okay, now am I okay? Then I'll ask that question differently at the end of 2024. If I were to say, zero is not possible. Otherwise, I'd have to stop writing if I was going to do zero nonfiction work at this point. So for me, I'm constantly thinking about, if I was doing it this way for the next 10 years solid, would I be able to maintain that? Then that's kind of how I set my expectations. Joanna: Yes, and I think for both of us, so people listening know, neither of us are going anywhere. We both feel like we are committed, it's just that there are ups and downs in the process. It is interesting, this future-casting. As you say, both of us have futuristic in our Clifton Strengths, but a lot of people don't. I feel like this splintering of the business models—I mean, I get emails every day right now, and I'm sure you do too, where people say, “I've heard that I can't just publish on Amazon and sell a book anymore. So what do I do? Like you're talking about Shopify and Kickstarter, but I don't have an audience.” Someone talks about Ream, or Patreon, or Substack, or now someone's doing a trade show or whatever. Like, how do people deal with the uncertainty? And it's, like you said, building for 10 years’ time, because that's what I say. It's like, well, if you started now on whatever path, in 10 years’ time, you're going be somewhere. So which path do you want to do? I mean, there is no single formula anymore, in terms of self-publishing, or marketing, or any of these things. There are so many choices. How do people deal with uncertainty around this? How can they choose the path? Becca: That is a great question. So I have a couple of different answers. The first is, any person who cannot commit the time or feels just really insecure about doing all of the direct sales and all of the in-person events and things like that, there still are a portion of people who are selling well on the retailers alone. It's harder to do that. It's much, much harder to get just your ads to deliver and to just sell ebooks only and to make a living doing that, but it's not that no one is doing it. It's just that it's much more difficult than it's ever been before. So I would say, if you know that that's the only thing that you can handle, then you want to set your expectations for that. You've got to think, well, I have got to do something to make sure that I am pleasing my audience. Whether that's writing the best book for me, like making me perfectly happy, or writing to market or whatever it is that you're doing — I have to be willing to take the lumps that come with the path that I choose. There's no lumpless path. There is no silver bullet. So whatever path I choose, I'm basically choosing the hard that I want to continue to replicate. So if it's too hard for me to imagine having enough self-confidence to do direct sales, to put myself out at a trade show or something like that, then I'm choosing a different version of hard, but it's still going to be hard. I've been doing a lot of listening to athletes and actors, just like interviews recently, trying to find these little snippets of conversation about things like luck and timing and hard work and talent. Like how do we balance all of the things that are necessary, and how do we increase resilience? If what we're expecting is that there's an easy button to hit, or there's an easy path, or a path that will not be difficult, then we should not be doing this job because that is definitely not the case. I mean, I don't think it was ever the case. I just think there are people who like hard work more than others, and so it seems easier for them because they really enjoy the hard work. For those of us who don't like hard work, we have to know that the path is going to be difficult. So that's kind of the one thing I want to start off with is there are still people who can sell on retailers only, but then you have to make the decisions that are the best for those retailers. So if you're going to go into KU, you have to make decisions that align well with KU. If you're going to be wide, you have to make decisions that align well with wide. You have to find the people who are talking about those strategies, and pick one strategy, and do it. This is the second thing I would say about the potential choosing of the path. It is so unlikely in this industry that you're going to have success, period. Like, it's just so unlikely that you're going to hit full-time author income that there needs to be some level of resilience in that space. So if you're going to work until you hit that, that you know that it's possible to not sell, and not sell, and not sell, and not sell, and then sell. So the commitment to just doing whatever it takes to hit that space is what I think is the missing piece for an awful lot of where I'm seeing the industry going right now. There are a lot of people who came in with the belief that it should be easy because the way that it was often talked about was how easy it was. I just think it's never actually been easy, though. I think we have to understand how much hard work is going to be involved in it, and we have to be willing to do that if what we want is that outcome. Of course, and I'm sure Claire will talk about this when she comes on, but not everyone should be shooting for full-time income. That's not what's going to make everyone the happiest, especially because—and I talk about this from a strengths perspective a lot—especially because trying to write full time for some brain wirings is actually not beneficial. For some people, putting the amount of pressure on yourself where you're tying your stability and security to your creativity is going to make your creativity go away. It's going to become harder and harder to produce, the more difficult the sales become. So there are a lot of people in this industry who, for reasons of safety and security being the number one goal, need to have at least a part-time job bringing in money so that writing never becomes the thing they rely on to pay their mortgage. If not, eventually the creativity is going to become inaccessible because the pressure will get to be too big. That's something we don't talk about a lot because it's not sexy. You're not going to make a class talking about how you shouldn't quit your day job. The reality is that an awful lot of us will function better in our creativity, and write better books, and make more money, if we don't have to rely on the books to produce our mortgage payments. Joanna: Yes. I mean, I've always talked about multiple streams of income. I do make good money from book sales alone, but like you, I have other forms of income. This podcast is one of them. I like having that. It makes me feel more secure. I love how you talk about choosing the hard you want. Because I also still see people who are like, “Oh, well, you know, it's easy to self-publish, and that's what makes it like almost worthless. Whereas getting a traditional publishing deal is hard.” You're completely right, like— Being a successful indie author is just as hard, just in a different way. Becca: It's a different kind of hard. Joanna: Yes, and it's so funny because at the moment some of the emails I get, I'm like, look, I think you should just go and pitch a publisher. If you're not willing to do the work around reaching readers yourself and you think a publisher will do it for you, then go pitch a publisher. I mean, do you find yourself saying that now? It's so weird. I haven't done that for a long time. Becca: Yes, and in fact, I regularly still have coaching calls where I'll say to someone, “I do think trad is a better fit for you.” Especially the people who are not in a place emotionally where they can handle a lot of attention. As an indie, you have to be your own salesperson. There are a lot of people who cannot do that for themselves because they just don't have the emotional tools for that right now. I have a Patreon/BeccaSyme where I write blog posts every once in a while, and I'm constantly saying in my Patreon, we need to increase our emotional resilience skills if we're going to remain indie. There's always going to be pain and difficulty, and you're going to get into fight or flight mode about things. If you don't have the capacity to regulate yourself, like your own nervous system, then you're not going to survive in this industry because it's so competitive, and it's so painful. Even in the places where it's like, “Oh my gosh, yes, it's so supportive and we're all talking about how supportive it is,” and by the way, if you have to talk about how supportive it is, I question how supportive it is. We're constantly having these conversations about like, yes, where there are these supportive corners. And yet, if you're talking just to individual authors, we know how difficult this job is. People who are trying to get into this job need to understand, like, I have to have emotional resilience, I have to be able to put myself out there in front of people. That might mean there's a skill that is not being executed in my brain right now that I might have to work on. I might have to reparent myself, so that I can have a better chance at doing well at this job. There's nothing shameful about that. That is actually really excellent self-management and self-leadership in knowing, you know what, I'm not great with criticism, so I'm going to go work on getting better at criticism because I want to write better books. Right now, every time my editor sends me feedback, I get triggered so bad, I can't read the feedback and work on the book. I have to put the book away. Then I'm like, great, let's work on some emotional resilience skills there then, so that you can take that criticism so that you can continue to grow and get better. That's definitely the key long-term in this industry: emotional resilience and growth. Joanna: Oh, so much there. Well, talking about resilience then, another big impact right now is the discussions around generative AI. I mean, you and I have been around this industry a while. We've dealt with some of the big waves of war within the community. I mean, there's been a number of these. There's also been some kind of real hate at different points around various people's choices. And a lot of, again, splintering. I feel like it's quite a relevant word around people's attitudes around generative AI. I mean, my listeners are at least AI-curious, or AI-positive. The anti-AI ones have gone away, generally, by now. So we sit in between the thing, but a lot of people are going through a difficult time. We mentioned grief earlier. I do want to come back to that because I feel like I faced some of these existential questions around AI a year or so ago. I feel like I've been through some of this, and there's a recalibration of what it means to be an author and why we write. There's this focus on craft and the process, rather than the outcome. Can a machine do this better than us? I mean, these are some big questions. How do you see people dealing with this change badly, and how do we deal with it well? Becca: I mean, there is so much grief around this process because, of course, so many of us grew up with these dreams of having a room of one's own and writing full time, right? Like so many of us grew up with these very vivid pictures. So when we hear about something like AI, and we think about the shift in the market, or even just you hear me talk about saturation in the market, and it's like, oh, there's this piece in my head, that's like, am I going to have this outcome? I would say, the important thing about this industry is that it goes through changes all the time, and no one is ever 100% correct about what's going to happen. If you are sort of struggling with this, I would read the book, Same as Ever by Morgan Housel. He goes through these really brilliant examples after examples of the things that change the most are the things that surprise us. It's never the stuff that we are prepared for that is what we really need to practice resilience for. This is what I would say to people. The changes that we know for sure are coming, in terms of we know there are going to be splinters right in the industry—okay, great— How do I make myself splinter-resilient? How do I find people around me that are going to be positive forces in my life relationally? How do I make connections with people? I can't change how other people feel or think on either side of this debate, pro AI or anti AI. I can't change how people think, and I can't change how people are going to act. The only thing I can change is myself. So I need to deal very quickly with whatever grief I'm having about whatever picture I had in my head about what the future would look like because the faster I can get to acceptance, and the faster I can recalibrate what my future could now look like, the better for me. So thinking about the larger industry—not from a Joanna and Becca perspective, but from like an individual author perspective—if I can't affect change in the larger industry, then I have to be willing to deal with whatever happens. That means I have to increase my ability to do emotionally resilient things. I have to increase my ability to feel successful no matter what happens. I have to increase my ability to be able to pivot quickly and release the future that I thought was coming, without releasing my hope for the future. Regardless of what happens in the industry, people are always going to want to read books, people are always going to want to write books. Like people people, not just machines, but people. So as long as I know that I'm always going to write no matter what happens, even if that means I have to get a day job to support it, even if that means that I have to change my expectations about the future in order to support it, I know I want to keep writing. Fixating on whether or not I can have this very specific picture of what I think the future should look like, that's only going to make it harder for me to adapt to the industry. It doesn't mean that I have to release any expectation of how I will feel because that's usually what the picture is going to produce for us. The picture produces freedom, or the picture produces gratitude, or it produces security, and there are other ways to find that other than the very specific picture that I have in my head. That's what I would say is I want us to all be as quick to accept and pivot as we can, and then as quick to provide ourselves with the needs that we have, rather than waiting for the industry to change back or waiting for the industry to catch up. Whatever it is that we're feeling, we have to take agency for ourselves and be responsible for our own emotions. Joanna: Absolutely. It's interesting, I mean, just in terms of practical steps. I mean, I'm an input person as well, so I input a lot on all of this stuff, and even I get overwhelmed sometimes. So my two things are I get off social media and the internet in general, go for a walk or something, and then also, I write. As in, I create. I find joy in the process of writing. We are writers. We write, and we love creating, and that's not going to stop. If the whole world loses their jobs to AI, everyone will be on universal basic income, and we'll still write. I think it's like, okay, this is actually amazing. It could be really amazing. So just thinking about it that way. I wanted to ask you about social media because we talked earlier about finding the people who are your people, finding readers. A lot of people are having to step off social media right now— How are people meant to find readers if things are changing so much? Becca: I would say every avenue that's open to you, I would use it as strategically as possible. So for instance, make sure that it is exceptionally clear how people get on your newsletter in every single book that you publish. Make sure that your funnel is super, super intact. I'm not talking about the 45 steps of creating a perfect funnel, I literally just mean if someone picks your book up, and they want more from you, is it easy for them to figure out how to get on your mailing list and how to get more from you? This is maybe the bigger piece for me about longevity and sustainability, is — We have to be willing to build slowly if that's what it's going to take to have a long-term sustainable career. It's possible that me getting a BookBub every once in a while, and me running some ads, and me sort of chugging along in my book sales, and then building my newsletter organically, or building my community or my Patreon organically, is going to be the way that I'm going to function the best because it allows me to not be as present on social media, if that's what I need to do. Then what I want to make sure that I do for myself, again, I need to practice agency with my own feelings and not allow myself to feel preyed upon by whatever is happening in the larger industry. That is where the most unhappiness and ineffectiveness comes from is where I get stuck in a space where I miss the fact that I can choose to do something different. I can choose to feel different. I can choose to look at different data. I can choose to not be present in some of those groups. I can choose to not listen to some of those people who are creating a lot of fear in me. I have agency over my own story. That's what I want us to remember. As long as I don't quit, as long as I don't give up, there's always more possibility in the future for me to grow more, to put more books out, to have more readers to make more money. There's always a possibility for that, but I have to be willing to do whatever it takes and not give up. Joanna: Yes, and it just comes back to what we love about this process. Like we talked about earlier, you and I back away sometimes, but we come back to this because we really do love it. We love the writing, we love the community. So yes, people listening, we're not going anywhere. You've mentioned sustainability and resilience a few times, and— You've got this brilliant digital conference coming up. Tell us a bit about that. Becca: Yes, we're going to do something a little different in this digital con. We're going to have a couple of days of presentations on the first weekend. It is going to be the second week in May is when we're going to start. Then we're going to give you a week off to go and do some homework. Then we're going to come back for a day and half on the second side. So the conference dates—and when you see the website, you'll see what I mean—but the conference dates are going to say something different. The goal is we want to give you a chance to put some of this into practice and to go and do some of the analysis, in terms of like my own stability, my own skills. What am I expecting from myself that I can't continue to produce for forever? How can I build a sustainable business? It is basically the question: how do I build a house that I can live in? So that's the big question for me in this conference. We call it the QTP Con, The Question The Premise Con. Basically, our goal this year is to talk about building sustainable author businesses. Joanna: Brilliant. Where can people find that, and you, and your books, and everything you do online? Becca: BetterFasterAcademy, all one word. BetterFasterAcademy.com. All of that should be in various places on that front page. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Becca. That was great. Becca: Thanks for having me.The post Dealing With Change And How To Build Resilience As An Author With Becca Syme first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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