The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

How can you adapt your novel into a comic or graphic form? What are the different types? How does a creative career develop over the long term and when do you need to take a step back to consider how to move forward? Barry Nugent talks about all this and more. In the intro, Amazon changes ebook return policy [Society of Authors]; Spotify introduces audiobooks [Spotify; FindawayVoices; Publishing Perspectives]; Neal Stephenson on The Sword Guy podcast. Please complete my Creative Penn Survey 2022 here (by 7 Oct). You can also get 30% off my courses here until the end of Sept with discount coupon: SUMMER22 This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com Barry Nugent is the author of the supernatural adventure Unseen Shadows Transmedia Universe, as well as the middle-grade adventure Trail of the Cursed Cobras. He's also the co-host of the Geek Syndicate podcast. 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 Shifting from traditional to indie publishing in the early days What is transmedia? The production and sales of full-color comics Different formats of graphic novels Crowdsourcing to cover the expense of creating a graphic novel The different artists that are needed for comics and graphic novels In the intro, I mentioned AI comic creation [Twist Street; Campfire] You can find Barry Nugent at BarryNugent.com and on Twitter @Unseen_Shadows Transcript of Interview with Barry Nugent Joanna: Barry Nugent is the author of the supernatural adventure Unseen Shadows Transmedia Universe, as well as the middle-grade adventure Trail of the Cursed Cobras. He's also the cohost of the Geek Syndicate podcast. Welcome, Barry. Barry: Hi, Jo. Thanks for having me on. Joanna: It’s an interesting topic today. First up, tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Barry: I am now at the ripe old age of 53, so we'd have to turn the clock all the way back to me being 11 years old, and my brother took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. Joanna: Ah, wonderful. Barry: Yeah. We're kindred spirits on this front. Joanna: Indeed. Barry: I remember I came out of that film and my mind was just completely blown. I knew I wanted to do something. I'd never written before. I knew I wanted to do something, but I didn't know what it was I wanted to do. I remember saying this to my mom, and my mom saying to me, ‘Why don't you write something?' So I did. I remember the story I wrote was particularly terrible because it was just a complete ripoff of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The weird thing was is that story never really saw the light of day, but the title for that story I lifted. And now that is the title for my middle-grade novel. Trail of the Cursed Cobras was actually the title of the very first story I tried to write when I was 11 years old. So I thought it was quite a nice nod to the 11-year-old me. Joanna: Did you write that for your kids or something? Barry: No. I don't have kids. It's a strange story. I'd basically I'd been approached by an agent who had read some of my other work, and she'd asked me had I ever thought about writing middle-grade fiction? And I'd said, ‘Nope. Never thought of it.' I've read a load of middle-grade fiction. I love that area, but I didn't think I could do it, I thought it was a lot more difficult than people think it is. But I gave it a go. As it turned out, me and the agent parted ways and I decided to carry on my own. And it's been great fun. I'm currently working on the follow-up to it at the moment, and yeah, it's been great fun. Joanna: You mentioned that you had an agent and you were originally traditionally published in 1999 with your novel Paladin but then you went indie. Tell us a bit more about how your publishing journey unfolded. Barry: Paladin got picked up by a traditional publisher who at the time… Let's just say I wasn't necessarily impressed with some of their business practices and we'll leave it there. And back then, I knew I wanted to do something on my own. I think I'd sort of came out of this and I'd started to approach other publishers and agents. This was when I'd finished Fallen Heroes. And basically, the feedback that I was getting were people were saying to me, ‘We can't find a space for it. We can't see where it would go on the bookshelf.' This might seem crazy now, but the term urban fantasy didn't exist back then. So, stuff like Da Vinci Code and even like your books, were very difficult to market back then because there was nowhere to really put it. Yes, you could call it a thriller, but I wouldn't say it was a thriller because they had all these different elements in it. So that drove me down the independent route. But what I realized when I got there was I had no idea what I was doing. There was no real help out there in the same way. ALLi (the Alliance of Independent Authors) didn't exist, and I was pretty much flying solo. I remember my sole guide was a book that I'd got on self-publishing. It was a little bit like one of those sort of guidebooks, but it was all I had. And they used lulu.com Joanna: Right. Barry: So I basically followed everything they said step-by-step in terms of putting a draft together, getting it onto Lulu, trying to get it onto Amazon, trying to get it into bookshops. The overriding thought that I had when I was doing this all was that I wanted this to look as professional as possible. That was the one thing that I wanted. It needed to be indistinguishable from a traditionally published book when it was on the bookshelf. And I was really lucky. I managed to find a cover artist that worked with me, and he came up with a brilliant cover. Then I published it, and then I started approaching bookshops. I think I contacted… As I said, that back then was very different. I contacted over 200 individual branches of Waterstones… Joanna: My goodness. Barry: …just to try to sort of get him to take a copy. And in the end, what happened was I contacted my local Waterstones, and with a sort of, ‘Read this book, if you don't like it you don't have to contact me again, but if you do like it maybe you think about putting it on the shelf.' They read it, they liked it, they took some copies, those copies sold, they took some more copies, they sold. They then invited me in for a book signing, and then a few other Waterstones got in contact. And it went from there really. Joanna: When you say went from there, because, it sounds like you had a difficult start. But you've got this whole sort of universe thing going on now. And yes, so your website talks about Unseen Shadows as a transmedia project. So you've certainly gone beyond sort of one book into this bigger world, this bigger universe. Where are you now and how do you define transmedia? Barry: I'll answer that where I am now, because I'm at a crossroads really. I'm sort of taking a…which is weird doing this interview, but I'm taking a bit of a step back from everything because I'm trying to finish my current book. I've still got my other trilogy to finish. What I found is that I think I've just gotten so confused with… there are so many different ways to market now compared to when I first started that I've just got a bit overwhelmed with it all, so I've decided to take a bit of a step back and refocus and repurpose. And actually, what I found is listening to your podcast especially, and listening to ALLi and being a member of ALLi now, that's really given me a lot more tools than I had before, but in terms of the transmedia stuff. I think that sometimes people can get confused. If you think of say one of your books, some people might think transmedia is literally someone takes your book and adapts it as a TV show, or they adapt it as a comic. Whereas how I think of transmedia is, for example, in one of my books there's a character called Reverent, who's a bit of a vigilante. And what we've done is there's a comic which always deals with how he got started, what his origins are, and there's another comic which is another adventure of him. Now, even though his origin is briefly mentioned in the actual book, I think there's basically a paragraph, the comics take that paragraph and expand upon it while staying within the confines of the story. So, the way I look at transmedia storytelling is it's basically telling a single story or story experience across many different formats. Does that make sense, Joanna? Joanna: Over a decade ago I interviewed an author, I think it was J. C. Hutchins, on transmedia. Literally, that's why it was so funny when you pitched me this topic because I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, I did this a decade ago.' What it was back then was the word was used as let's say you have a book that references the character's phone number, then that phone number actually gets set up or it references a certain talisman that they have, and that actually gets created. And you can follow the clues in the real world, or a website that a private detective agency actually has a website set up for that. Barry: Yes. Joanna: And in fact, in that TV show ‘Castle,' they actually published some of Castle's books, even though Castle was a character. Barry: Yeah, they did. Joanna: So, I see what you are saying is almost you are expanding. If the book is canon, you are expanding the canon with these offshoot comics. Barry: Yes. I think it was one of the draws for how the very members of the creative team got involved with it was what I said was, ‘Any of the other projects were 100% canon to my stories.' Because I think one of the things that you see in a lot of other transmedia projects, they did it with ‘Star Wars' where they do these offshoot stories, but they don't actually say that they're canon. They just say, ‘These are nice sort of little side stories,' but they don't really affect what's going on in the main story. Whereas I've done that differently. I've said, ‘No, this is all canon. Everything you read in the comics or you listen to an audio drama is canon.' To the point of there was one graphic novel which is actually set six months after the events of my first book, and it bridges the gap between the first and second book. But one of the things I've always tried to do is say that these can be independently enjoyed. So you don't have to have read my novel. You could just pick up one of the comics and just read the comic and just put it down. But obviously, you get a richer experience if you're aware of the story, the full story. Joanna: There's a few questions from this. First of all, this creative team. So tell us about this because so many of us as independents. There's been things like Kindle Worlds where authors could have other authors who would write in their world, so that's one model. But they're not canon, as you mentioned. Then there's the co-writing. So Michael Anderle and Craig Martelle in that business. They're getting a lot of co-writers to write in their universes, but the royalties are split differently. How did you attract your creative team? How does that all work? Barry: It's a bit of a weird one, and it's uncomfortable because in one respect, I don't really have the creative team anymore. It's almost come back to me just because we've done all these titles now. It completely came about by accident. I know it doesn't sound it, but it came about by accident. What happened was I'd been approached by a comic company who wanted to do a straight adaptation of Fallen Heroes. And I said, ‘That'd be lovely.' So, I started to work with them and the creative team that they had put together, which was a writer, artist, colorist, and a letterer. I'd started to work together with them. We'd got partway through the first issue when the company went bust. I didn't know what to do, but the team that were involved, they wanted to keep going and they said, ‘Is there any way that we can finish the comic and get it out?' And I was saying, ‘Well, I haven't got any money. I can't pay you.' And they were , ‘No, no, that's fine. We just want to get this out in some shape or form.'. So, because I was doing Geek Syndicate I knew a few companies in the comic sphere, and I was able to get some advertising. Basically, what I did was I offered advertising space at the back of the first issue at the comic. And that was enough to pay for the printing of the first comic. Then to cut a long story short, whilst we were working on all of that, one of the creative team had been talking to her partner who was a writer who had read Fallen Heroes and loved it. And he'd then said to me, ‘I'd like to be a part of it in some shape or form because. Maybe I could write a script for a comic, another comic.' And I was like, ‘Okay.' He said, ‘Would you want me to do it?' I said, ‘Well, just pitch me a story on one of the characters and we'll take it from there.' And we did that and we put together a team. Again, it was the same sort of thing. I got approached by people. I think a lot of it came because people knew me from the podcast and they knew me from comic conventions. What started to happen was other people got more involved because they could see certain other people were already involved. It was certain artists would need to work with certain writers, so they got involved. I think people just liked the idea of creating something that hadn't been done before. This idea of using prose within comics. And I think the fact that I was saying to people, ‘It was a 100% canon and effectively do what you want within certain guidelines, but, do what you want.' Does that make sense? Joanna; Don't throw a robot in or something, except it would fit. Barry: Well, yeah. It was weird, because all of the comics… I haven't written any of the scripts. These have been written by comic writers. My involvement has been just overseeing it, just making sure that everything makes sense within the confines of the world that I've built. But all of the writers have read the book. What amazed me was how well they were versed in the lore of the book. And some of the questions that they were firing back at me as they were developing scripts and stuff, that gave me ideas when I was then working on the sequel. It was a great experience doing all of these. But what's happened now is we've done them all. And because now I'm trying to get these other books done and stuff, I've taken a step back to really look at what's the best way I can sort of market the content that I have. I don't like that word content. Market the books and all this creative stuff that I've got, is what's the best way to get it out there to sort of proper showcase the work that these men and women have done. Joanna: Intellectual property. Let's call it that. Barry: There you go. Joanna: This is actually a question I have though, because one of the things that is very difficult with this work is the rights to the universe. So, let's say, Marvel come and they say, ‘Barry, we want everything.' Have you always done like the right kinds of contracts so it's yours to control, or do you only control the two books? Because the problem is characters and how they cross different intellectual property assets. Is that all in place in case you get a big film or a big gaming deal? Barry: To a certain extent. I think part of it was because a lot of it was people that I knew, and these were friends as opposed to straight-up business relationships. Luckily, one of the people who was involved with the original adaptation, who was Nikki, who made all this possible. She basically put together almost like a softer contract, which basically laid out to people that the right set of characters in the world still belongs to me. Joanna: Marvelous. Barry: Yeah. So everything still belongs to me. But I think they also know that I wouldn't leave anyone hanging. Joanna: Oh, no. I'm sure you wouldn't be a dick about it! Barry: No. Joanna: The reality is these things can be held up because of contracts. So, that sounds amazing. Let's just come back to the comics, because having a look at your website, there's loads of them. And it's so funny because you've …or it said that you didn't have to pay for these. They happen through the advertising model, or through relationships that you've made through your Geek Syndicate. This is one of the challenges of graphic novels is they are so expensive to make. Barry: Yeah. Joanna: Apart from the cost, which you managed to do, what are the other challenges? Because also, back when you started, I mean, ComiXology was later bought by Amazon. Barry: Yes. I think so. Joanna: How have you done the distribution of the comics? Barry: I've done like a small print run for when a title has come out. I've done a small print run which normally I then launch at a comic convention. But at the same time, I was doing digital additions which were available via Comixology. But even when Comixology was bought up by Amazon, I could still get my titles onto Amazon via Comixology, although they've now changed the format of Comixology on Amazon, so it's going to be rubbish at the moment, which is a real shame because actually how it used to look was amazing. There's a couple of other little more independent places where I can sell my stuff digitally. And the good thing about it is some of those places handled the tax, which I think was part of the reason why I struggled with the idea of selling the digital stuff directly myself, was because they brought in this whole sort of tax law was if you're selling digitally, you didn't have to pay tax on it as well, and it was just an extra. And because I have a full-time job, this isn't my full-time job, I didn't have that time to try and work out that side of things. To be honest, I wasn't making enough to make that time viable. Joanna: That's what I was thinking. I was like, ‘Goodness me. This looks like an incredible amount of comics for something that's emerged.' What are those other sites, if people listening are interested in those? Barry: See now you've put me in the spot. Comic-C, I think it's called. One is called Comic-C. That is probably the only one that I do use, because I've started to look into… I think it was on your podcast I heard it, which was Shopify. Because I know Shopify does digital stuff as well, doesn't it? Joanna: Yes. And also, it does print-on-demand drop-shipped. You can have the files at the printer and they get printed when it gets ordered. Barry: Yes. Which is one of the things that I've been experimenting with probably over the past sort of six months or so, which was putting the comic onto the likes of Lulu and Amazon as a print-on-demand model. The downside of that is that for the most part, it is still quite expensive. Joanna: Are you doing full-color print or just black and white? Barry: Full color. Joanna: To me, these lovely comics in physical editions are essentially special editions because they're so expensive. But obviously, if you go to a comic shop, they're always going to be a little bit cheaper because we can't print at that scale. Barry: Yeah. Joanna: Tell us a bit more about the comics. You've got Geeks Syndicate and obviously, you go to comic events. Tell us about the fan scene for it's more than just one genre obviously, but the formats for comics and graphic novels. It seems like it's huge now. Barry: It was weird because when we first started Geek Syndicate, I've always been a comic reader since I was a kid. I went away from it a little bit, but I've always been a fan of the comics. And then when we started doing the podcast, I realized I'd never been to a comic convention. That was the first thing we put right. We went to a comic convention in Birmingham. And even I went in with those sort of preconceived ideas. I think people have a lot of preconceived ideas about what a comic convention is like and stuff. Everyone is dressed in costumes and stuff like that. Which does happen. But what I loved about it, and it's something that I've missed over the last couple of years with the pandemic, is the level of creativity that's in the air when you go to one of these conventions. It's amazing. You can not come out of one of these conventions as a creative person and you just want to get home and create. It doesn't matter whether that creation is writing prose or comics or acting, or whatever. It's just being around like-minded creative people. It's the same. I haven't actually done many book conventions. It's something I want to do. But I imagine it's a similar vibe that you get from a book convention. I think one of the things you realize when you go to comic conventions, is all the different ways that people can create with comics, and the different types of stories that can be told. I think when you don't know about these things, you go straight to DC and Marvel and you think they're the only types of stories and comics that are out there. Don't get me wrong, I still love DC, Marvel stuff. But you wouldn't think all about graphical comics, the thrillers, romance, what they call slice-of-life, sports comic. there's a comic for every genre. I always say there's a comic for every person. It's just about matching you up with the right comic. Joanna: In fact, now there's a lot of nonfiction books being adapted to graphic nonfiction like Yuval Noah Harari's books. He's putting those out. The difference between a comic and a non-fiction book told in images in the panels, is it a fact of just the format, as in a book format versus a comic format, which to me is a sort of soft cover, quite thin as opposed to a book? Barry: No. See, I'm going to try and see if I get this right. If comic readers, if you're listening, I apologize if I now murder this. So let's start with a book. You have what they call comic or what they call a floppy. A floppy would be more your traditional comic, normally about 22 pages and it's floppy. Then if you're doing a series, after you've done six issues, you might bring out a collection of those first six issues. That would be called a trade. So that's called a trade paperback, I think. Joanna: And that is bound as a book? Barry: That's bound. So that looks like, as you say, like a book. Joanna: But a big book. Like oversized format. Barry: Yes. That's called a trade. Now, a graphic novel is basically a self-contained story which is bound, can be anything from 60 pages upwards to 200 pages. So, even if you go onto my site, you'll see that I have some floppies, but I also have some graphic novels as well, which are self-contained stories that are about 100 pages. I think sometimes people do get a bit confused, and sometimes I know some comic fans get a bit riled when people talk about a graphic novel and they think graphic novel is everything where actually it's a specific type of comic. Joanna: Right. Now, that's really interesting. And it's so funny because I mean, now, you and I both in the UK, and you go into bookstores, and even in a reasonably small bookstore now you'll get a section for graphic novels, some of which I presume are those trades that you talked about, like collections of comics. It seems like it's taken off a lot more even in the mainstream. And I can only link that to Netflix, and Amazon Studios, and a lot more of these properties being developed into transmedia, as you talked about, like TV shows. Neil Gaiman's work, for example, or, they're crossing. Is it because when people pick up a comic a lot of the work's already been done in terms of an adaptation to a visual format? It's like, ‘Here's a storyboard, basically.' Barry: Yeah. And also as well, I think the likes of Netflix have probably done that. It's become more acceptable I guess to experience it in that way. And now I have mixed feelings because there's some adaptations which come to the screen, or come to TV, which are brilliant, some which are less so. But also as well, I hate to be that guy, but most of them still don't hold a candle to reading the actual comic in the same way as reading the book. But it's, horses for courses. Joanna: It's probably it's a much bigger audience. Barry: Yeah. And also as well I think there are certain properties that if I said to people, ‘That was based on a comic.' They'd be, ‘Oh, it wasn't…' Road to Perdition with Tom Hanks, that was a comic. Joanna: I think isn't The Boys on Amazon Prime? Barry: Yes. Joanna: It's one of my favorite series. People listening, it's very, very violent. Do not watch it with children. Barry: Very violent. Joanna: I love that series. They've basically kept the comic splatter gore in that. What do you think about that adaptation? Barry: I think, well, weirdly, that's a really good one because I actually remember reading the first volume of The Boys and I stopped reading it because it was too much for me. Joanna: Oh, really? Barry: In some ways, the comic is still more than the TV show is. Joanna: Which is got a lot more comedy, I guess. There's a comedic edge to it too. Barry: I just think that with the comic there's so much stuff going on that my poor sensibilities…it was too much, whereas I absolutely love the TV show. Joanna: Me too. Barry: It's one of the few times where it is I actually prefer the TV show to the comic. And that's nothing against the comic. Garth Ennis did a brilliant…is a brilliant. Joanna: I think he produced the TV show as well. Barry: Yeah. Joanna: Which is amazing. This crossover environment is interesting. I have talked to people on the show before about graphic novels. I don't know if you've heard that episode. It was probably six or seven years ago. Probably more than that now. Probably was a decade ago. I've been doing this so long. [Interview with Nathan Massengill in 2014 on graphic novels.] But this guy, we did actually talk about maybe doing a Kickstarter or something because it's so expensive to adapt. If people listening, if they want to do a comic of their novel and they don't have all the mates like you do, are there ways to do that now? How would someone go about getting a graphic novel done of their work? Barry: I think what a lot of people are doing now, a lot more people in the comic scene are turning towards Kickstarter. I've seen a lot of people doing that now. And it's basically covering not only their printing costs, but the cost of paying their creative team. In many ways, that's probably one of the big ways now, because as you said, it is very expensive. I was just fortunate, I guess, at the time. And I think if I was to do it again now, I would be looking to do it in the Kickstarter for varying reasons, because I would want people to get some form of financial recompense for the work they're putting in. Also the fact that when you're going to come to do this, you've got to ask yourself how deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go. To put together any comic really, you could either do it yourself, which I've seen people do. Even people who wouldn't necessarily call themselves artists have done some… Joanna: I was going to say, there's a specific artistic skill involved. Barry: Well, yes and no. It depends on your view of comic artists, because there's some comics out there which you wouldn't necessarily say fall into that category of like fantastically great Marvel-style art, but have gone on to be hugely, hugely successful. Joanna: Interesting. Can you think of any specific example? Putting you on the spot here, but in my head I only have that Marvel style. Give us an example of something that might be a different style. Barry: Okay. I think different style is a better way to look at it because it doesn't mean it's better or worse. Rachael Smith, who is an artist and creator, and she did a comic during lockdown called Quarantine Comix: A memoir of a life in lockdown. She was doing it as like a web comic, and now it's all been packaged and released. And she's done a few other comics as well. Now, her art style is dramatically different from what you…as you said, you mentioned DC Marvel. Her art style is dramatically different from that. And yet I absolutely love her work. And if you look to it, you might not think, ‘Oh, well, I could do that.' But there're people out there would think, ‘Oh, I could actually have a go at that.' But I think with comics, it's the combination. It's the art and it's the writing. You can have amazing art and terrible writing, so you've got a terrible comic. Or you can have not great art but fantastic writing, and you can still have a terrible comic. Joanna: That's the truth with adaptation, isn't it? Regardless, whether it's TV, whatever it is, comics or anything. You can have an adaptation that it didn't fit what your words in your head, what your words were. Which I think it is the challenge. You've got me thinking again about my book Desecration, which is about body modification and the history of anatomy and corpse art. It's super dark and it's a murder mystery too. In my mind, it's always been visual, and I almost do see it like comic panels in my head. Now you've made me think that maybe that's a good way to go about trying to tell the story in a different way, because you do have that visual. Barry: If that's how you're think of it, the first thing you want to do is go online, look at some comic panels and some art, some different comic artists. And you can just search for stuff, or you can go on Amazon and look at the comics in Amazon. Get an account, maybe pick up a few digital comics and stuff and start to have a bit of a look and find the sort of style that you like. Like you said, you mentioned DC Marvel. That would cost you an arm and a leg. But then once you've got an idea of the sort of style, you could then start to shop around a bit and look for an artist that maybe you think would work quite well, and then approach them and then basically find out how much it would cost. They have what they call a page rate. So they will charge you per page that they do. Now, this is where it gets a bit complicated, because any comic that you put together tends to have these jobs. Now, these jobs can be done by the same person, or they can be done by multiple people. Say we'd have a writer. So even though you've written it, you might want to have an actual comic writer to adapt it, because there's a very specific way to write a comic script. Joanna: Sure. Barry: And if you've never done a comic script before. People keep asking me to try my hand at writing a comic. I'm like, ‘No. No.'. Joanna: Even though you're so embedded in it. Barry: It's a real skill. It is a real skill. So that's thing number one. Then you want a penciler. So, it'd be someone who just does the pencils. Then you would want an inker. So that's someone who then goes over the pencil with ink and sometimes they'll add extra sort of depth to it. Then a colorist would come in and add color, and then you'd get a letterer who would come in and would add the words. Now again, letterers are an overlooked job. A great letterer will do wonders for you. Joanna: And that's like the font and the layout of the dialogue, and the little inserts that… Barry: Yeah. The speech bubbles. Joanna: The speech bubbles and then almost the extra text that you have, like ‘Next day' and stuff like that. Barry: Yeah. And again, the type of lettering that you'll see in comics will vastly differ from comic to comic as well. Joanna: I guess in a way it's quite similar to when people do children's books and they have to work with illustrators and layout and stuff. It's a similar idea. It's just a very different thing. I've certainly talked a lot more to children's authors on the podcast. But I think this is super interesting. This is such an interesting topic. Tell us a bit more about Geek Syndicate and what that is, and how it relates to your creative life? Barry: Geek Syndicate is basically we look at geekdom through my eyes and the eyes of my best friend David Monteith, who we grew up together. I've known Dave since I was living and went to school together. And so we started it before podcasts had really started in the UK. Dave had been listening to some American podcasts, and then he got in contact with me. We've sort of lost touch, actually. And we saw the podcast as a get back into touch with our love of geek stuff, because where we grew up there wasn't a lot of geeks in Tottenham. Joanna: Tottenham back in the day. Back in the '80s and '90s. Barry: No, there wasn't. Not really. Joanna: It wasn't cool back then either. Barry: No. Joanna: It wasn't cool to be a geek. It is now. Barry: Supposedly. It depends on who you talk to. Joanna: That's a good point. Okay. It's cool for me. I think it's cool. Barry: We started doing the podcast with no thought that anyone was even going to listen to it. We started it. I was just of the view of it was almost like an extended phone call between the two of us for an hour and a half. 16 years later and we're still going. And it wasn't just Geek Syndicate. We then started to launch other podcasts on our feed. At one stage, I think we were running about eight or nine podcasts, which had different hosts on it, and sometimes we would pop on and whatever. We were doing interviews and we've hosted the panels at conventions. And then obviously, we ended up doing a two shows for the BBC, for the iPlayer. Joanna: Which is amazing. Barry: It was amazing. Just turned out. And it's one piece of advice I could give to anyone who's doing anything creatively, who's worried, as we all are, that no one is listening to me, or no one is reading my stuff, that sometimes… I know financially it's a different thing. Sometimes it isn't about the number of people who might be listening, who might be reading, but it's that right person at the right time. It turned out for us, one of our listeners we had no idea was a BBC producer. We had no idea. He used to listen to us, thought we were really funny, and then they were putting together this iPlayer show. Originally, it was going to be ‘Talking Heads,' so, we were going to be like just one of the people they would cut to talk to. And so they brought us down. I came down to London. They shot a little bit of footage of us just so they could see if they could use it or not. And they showed it to the bigwigs of the BBC, and they loved it so much that they changed the entire format and they made us the presenters. Joanna: Which says a lot, because they wouldn't have done that unless they thought you guys were good. And clearly, you've got chemistry between you because you are so good friends and you're super geeks. Barry: Yeah. So it worked. We were only supposed to do the one show. And then during that one show, they commissioned a second show where we got to then travel around the country because it was the year of sci-fi that they were celebrating at that time, and they were doing all these different events around the country. We went off to the British Museum to watch Flash Gordon and then we got to interview Brian Blessed. Joanna: I saw that clip on him and Gordon on BBC. Barry: You can't get it on the iPlayer anymore sadly, but it was a much longer sequence with us and Brian. He's quite the force to be reckoned with. Joanna: Goodness me. I think what's lovely is that when we started this conversation, you started in this way of, ‘Oh, a bit confused. Now there's different ways to market. I feel a bit overwhelmed. I'm taking a step back.' Now, we've gone through some of the things you've been doing over the years. It feels like you've almost fallen into all of this different stuff. And yet you've created this incredible body of work. I know it probably to you feels like a long time. I started my podcast in 2009. So you were a couple of years before me. Barry: Yeah. Joanna: Although I have a lot more episodes by the way. Barry: Yes. Joanna: So clearly I've been working harder! Barry: Yes. Right. Joanna: Coming back to what you said at the beginning, because you talked about being overwhelmed and that you're looking at refocusing and, really thinking about things. Looking back now, can you see how much you've achieved, and can you look forward into how this is going to go in the future? Barry: Yeah. I'm really lucky that I have an amazing wife who constantly says to me, ‘Look at what you've done.' Joanna: I'm with her. I'm saying that too. Barry: ‘Why are you sitting there feeling… Well, look at what you've done.' And yeah, every so often… I think sometimes when you are caught in the eye of the storm, you don't always see the great stuff swirling around you. I'm very proud of what we've all accomplished, because it's not just me. I'm very proud of it. And in terms of going forward, that's part of the reason why I do want to… Sometimes you've got to take a step back to run forward. And I think that's what I want to do, because I think I'm a little bit like one of those… I can't think of the bird if it's a Magpie, where I see something shiny and I automatically fly towards it. And I think that's what I've been doing. I think that hasn't been very healthy for me, I guess. What I wanted to do was just take that step back so I could look to just be a bit more laser focused about where I go next. Also sometimes when you're doing so many things, what can suffer is the one thing that you really want to be doing, which is being creative. sometimes you're so busy managing things, and editing, and stuff like that, you don't remember to sort of go, ‘Oh, hang on a minute. I'm a writer. I should actually get around to writing something.' Joanna: Yeah. It's one of the dangers of what I used to call a multi-passionate creative. Because even like this podcast is creative, and I do think about the podcast as part of my body of work, because this will help people. This will help other people move into their creativity. And you've given me ideas, and I hope you've been listening to the show, so I hope you've had ideas from the show. Barry: Yes. Plenty. Joanna: That's the thing and that's what keeps me going as well. It's, ‘Look. Okay. So it takes us both some time to do this,' but I've certainly got a lot out of this conversation and I know people listening will have. I'm just a couple of years younger than you are and I guess we've both been doing this for a long time. I feel the same way. I'm trying to refocus and think about where I want to go over the next decade, and maybe we are just in that midlife phase as well. Barry: I think as well, what happens with me is whenever I start to, or Dave does, because sometimes it's Dave as well, we think, ‘Oh, maybe we should wrap up the podcast or whatever. ‘ We get an email. I remember it was when we'd been doing it for 10 years and I was thinking maybe I don't know, 10 years, that's a good number to sort end on it. And we'd got an email from… We don't get quite many emails, but we'd got an email from a listener who had said that his dad had passed away. And basically, one of the things that had kept him going. I know what it's like to lose parents and stuff, so I could relate. And what he'd said was he went into his like real pit and it was a really horrible time for him. And he said the one bright spot was listening to the podcast, and he was thanking us for doing the podcast. So, when you get emails like that, you sort of go, ‘Okay, maybe we can go for a little bit longer.' Joanna: Yeah. And here we are all these years later. I feel the same way. Well, look, it's been so lovely to talk to you, Barry. Tell everyone where can people find you and everything you do online. Barry: At the moment, the best place to find me is barrynugent.com. If you want more detailed stuff on ‘Unseen Shadows' stuff, you can go unseenshadows.com. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time. That was great. Barry: Thanks.The post Transmedia And Publishing Comics And Graphic Novels With Barry Nugent first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In this solo episode, I talk about my lessons learned from 11 years as a full-time author entrepreneur, and why I am (finally) taking some time off. In the intro, Soldiers of God short story, The Creator Economy for Authors course (use coupon SUMMER22 for 30% off), Science Fiction Writing online conference, Author Tech Summit; Pilgrimage on Books and Travel. 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 Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. 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 It can take a long time to figure out what you think about a topic — but writing a book can helpPhysical sickness and mental health issues can have a bigger impact than expected Pivoting a business model takes timeIf you can’t take time out for life events and goals after more than a decade running your own business, you’re doing something wrong!  You can follow my pilgrimage on Instagram @jfpennauthor and Facebook @jfpennauthor and Twitter @thecreativepenn Lessons Learned from 11 Years as an Author Entrepreneur (Almost) eleven years ago, in Sept 2011, I left my day job to become a full-time author-entrepreneur. Every year since I have reflected on the journey and what I learn along the way. My challenges change and grow along with the business and you will likely be at a different stage, but I hope that you find my lessons learned useful along your own author path. You can read all my lessons learned from previous years on my timeline so far – and remember, just like everyone else, I started out by writing my first book with no audience! But with time and continued effort, everything is possible. (1) It can take a long time to figure out what you think about a topic — but writing a book can help!  I finally finished and published How to Write a Novel in July 2022 after starting with an initial draft in 2016. It has taken me that long to figure out my thoughts and also to feel confident enough in my craft to publish a book on the topic.  I was only able to write it because I rewrote my first three novels in early 2022 (lessons learned here), and that exercise proved to myself that I know what I am talking about. There is often an emphasis on writing and publishing fast in the indie author community. But some books take time to mature, and are all the better for waiting until you feel the book is ready to emerge. Long-term listeners/readers know I have been talking about ‘the shadow book’ for years now, and that is a similar project. I have 30K words and I even had a cover ready, but I don’t know when it will be ready.  As I discuss in How to Write a Novel, I am a discovery writer. I follow the urging of the Muse. Once I settle on a book, I follow one of Heinlein’s Rules — I finish what I start — so ‘the shadow book’ will arrive at some point, but I still don’t know when. I need to have some patience and give it time to emerge. Perhaps you have a book that's similar? Maybe you also need to let it breathe and emerge when it's ready.  (2) Physical sickness and mental health issues can have a bigger impact than expected  The pandemic has taken its toll on all of us in different ways and of course, COVID19 is still with us. These days we are learning to live with it, but most of us have had it, or know people who have had it, to varying degrees of severity. I had the delta variant back in July 2021 and I talked about how much it impacted me in my 2021 round-up, Not Quite the Year We Hoped For, so I won’t go into too much detail here.  Suffice to say, I was much sicker than I expected — both physically and mentally — and it had a bigger impact on my life and business than I expected. I’ve never really been properly sick, so it was a wake-up call in terms of the impact. Some days I could only do one or two things per day and didn’t have as much time as I used to. I had to rest a lot, and my productivity was way down.  If you have a chronic illness or long-term health issues, check out Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s book, Writing with Chronic Illness. I was still using an Airofit breathing trainer to get my full lung capacity back into February 2022, more than six months later. I think it helped — or maybe I just recovered with time — and I now feel I am back to where I was pre-Covid.  I also found the mental health side of it difficult, in terms of impacting my capacity for work, and also my tolerance for much else other than the basics.  My income dropped as I didn’t write or publish as much. I also stopped doing a lot of the affiliate stuff I was doing, as well as archiving many of my tutorials. I couldn’t find the energy or the will to redo older things.  Plus, I questioned a lot of what I was doing, and decided that I wanted to shift my business model anyway. Life is short, and we all have to choose how to spend our time.  These deeper questions have naturally arisen from the pandemic, but are also to do with my ‘mature’ business. Many of the authors and entrepreneurs I ‘grew up’ with online have pivoted to new directions or changed careers altogether. More than a decade doing anything leads to change.  (3) Pivoting a business model takes time I’ve been researching aspects of web 3 — AI, blockchain, VR and AR — for a few years now. There will never be one specific moment where things shift. It will emerge over time. [More in my future of creativity articles and resources.] Look at how dominant internet business and web 2 companies are in 2022, and compare that to 2005. It’s crept up on us, and the next shift will be the same.  There are also cracks in the web 2 model — problems with pay to play business models, and legal, governmental, and societal issues with big tech companies. There is a cultural shift toward local, sustainable, direct to consumer models that are based more on relationships than paid or algorithmic media. As a result of sensing these changes bubbling up, and my own preference for creative and financial independence, I started my slow pivot to what may well be the next business model — direct to consumer first, and then wide publishing on the other platforms.  I’ve sold direct since starting out online in 2008, but it’s always been a secondary to trying to succeed on the various stores. Now I want to make it my focus. In July 2022, I launched my store, www.CreativePennBooks.com and while I will still publish wide on all the stores, I will develop my store with direct-only and direct-first products, both for books and also for other things related to my various brands. [You can find my recommendations for building a Minimum Viable Store on Shopify here.] I went with Shopify as they are developing an ecosystem with web 3, enabling sale of NFTs as well as cryptocurrency payment methods, so I have confidence they will be a scalable platform for the decade ahead. I have always had the twin business goals of creative freedom and financial freedom, and this slow pivot takes me another step in that direction. (4) If you can’t take time out for life events and goals after more than a decade running your own business, you’re doing something wrong!  This is my last podcast for a few weeks as I am heading off to walk my Camino pilgrimage from Porto to Santiago de Compostela. This has been a personal goal for decades and when I lay in bed really sick with Covid, I listened to audiobooks of people walking it, and promised I would walk it once I recovered. Walking the Camino is the one thing that I would be annoyed about not doing if I died right now, so it’s time to go do it! Walking the Pilgrims' Way, October 2020 I’m also writing about it along with the other two pilgrimages I’ve done over the last two years — the Pilgrim’s Way, and the St Cuthbert’s Way. It turns out I have a lot to say about solo walking pilgrimages in mid-life, especially as a secular pilgrim. Clearly, a book like that has a very niche audience, but I only want to spend time on the projects that are worth my time. The ones that only I can write. The ones that might have an impact on other people, whatever that means! After more than a decade, I still feel that I need to be checking in with the business every day, but that is my own addiction, not a true requirement. No one will die if I don’t respond to an email or a comment, plus I have my wonderful virtual assistant, Alexandra, who will be managing things while I am walking. I want to take more breaks and perhaps even a longer break in the coming year. To recharge and focus on other creative and life goals, and also to think about the bigger topics that impact all of us as technology continues to change and our business models shift. There are many voices in the independent author community now, and I need to keep earning my place as we move forward together.  What do you think? Do you have lessons learned from your years on the author journey?  Please leave a comment, or if you've written about it elsewhere, feel free to share a link.The post Lessons Learned From 11 Years As An Author Entrepreneur first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you make sure your heirs and successors are able to manage your books and copyright licensing after your death? What aspects do you need to think about in terms of your author estate? Michael La Ronn explains this important topic in clear terms. In the intro, more quotes from the DOJ vs PRH hearing [The Hotsheet]; Direct by Kathryn Judge; Chokepoint Capitalism Kickstarter by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin; Soldiers of God, an ARKANE Short Story [Available now from CreativePennBooks.com; or preorder on the other stores for 29 Aug.] Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at draft2digital.com/penn Michael La Ronn is the author of over 80 books across science fiction, fantasy, and self-help books for authors, including The Author Estate Handbook: How to Organize Your Affairs and Leave a Legacy, and The Author Heir Handbook: How to Manage an Author Estate. 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 Coming to terms with our mortalityHow planning your estate is an act of loveThe importance of a living will as well as a last willFiguring out how much time and effort an heir wants to put into the writing businessManaging passwords for your successorShould authors think of selling their IP before they die? You can find Michael La Ronn at AuthorLevelUp.com and on Twitter @MichaelLaRonn Transcript of Interview with Michael La Ronn Joanna: Michael La Ronn is the author of over 80 books across science fiction, fantasy, and self-help books for authors, including The Author Estate Handbook: How to Organize Your Affairs and Leave a Legacy, and The Author Heir Handbook: How to Manage an Author Estate, which we're talking about today. Welcome back to the show, Michael. Michael: Hi, Joanna. Great to be back. Joanna: This is such an interesting topic. You've been on the show several times before, so we're going to just jump straight into it today. Why did you want to write about this topic of estates and heirs — basically death — and how does your professional and personal background play into that? Michael: Yes, I have this morbid fascination with death… Joanna: Me too! Michael: This is something I've been thinking about in the back of my head that has woken me up a few times in the middle of the night. And I didn't know what to do about what would happen if I suffered an untimely death. I think a lot of authors have this problem, and I think a lot of authors react the same way as I do, or I did, which was just to go back to bed and forget about it and continue to bury your head in the sand. I had a wake-up call in 2021. I lost a grandfather to old age. And when he passed away, he passed away like a gangster. I don't know how else to say it, he left such a clean estate. He had a will that had everything cleanly outlined. He told everyone before he passed that he didn't want to be a burden to the family, and he was true to his word. And everything with his estate was settled in like 6 months, which, if you've ever had someone pass away, you know that that is blazing fast to have everything settled. I was in such admiration and awe of how my grandfather did that and, ultimately, how kind he was to be so organized. I started thinking to myself, ‘How could I do the same thing with my own business and my own writing?' Because there's a big difference, my grandfather was born in the Great Depression and he never owned a computer, never had an email account. So, in many respects, things were a lot easier for him. When I look at my own career and my own self and my own things that I have going on in the 21st century, I realized that dying like he did is a phenomenal challenge. And so, I realized that I had to do it. I have a unique background in that I'm an executive at a global insurance company and I've made my living helping businesses prepare for disasters. And I also went to law school. I'm not an attorney but I have a legal education, so, I'm not afraid of the legal side of things. So, I thought, ‘I'm going to go on my journey to figure out how I'm going to do this for myself. And I'm going to write a book and try to help other people through it as well.' Joanna: A couple of things there, when you said your grandfather died like a gangster, I was thinking in like a hail of bullets outside… Michael: Oh, yeah. It’s an American idiom I guess you could say. Joanna: In my mind, that's a hell of a way to go. But you said he died of old age, so, I guess it wasn't so dramatic. And also that he said he didn't want to be a burden, and I think a lot of us feel that way. I definitely feel that way. My mum is so organized in this. My mum is still alive, in fact, she's off gallivanting the world at the moment. But every time she leaves her flat, she tidies everything and cleans everything and puts all her paperwork on her desk in case she never comes back again. She's already pre-paid for her funeral and all this stuff. So, we talk about this, and I know that a lot of people don't have that in their family. Before we get into the details, let's just tackle the emotional side of this. Like you said, you woke up in the middle of the night, you have a daughter, obviously, you have family. If people are feeling like, ‘Oh, this is too emotional, too difficult. My family doesn't talk about death, my partner doesn't talk about death.' How should we approach this topic on the emotional level? Michael: It's tough because you have to come to terms with your mortality. And for a lot of us, I wouldn't say the biggest part but a very important part of our legacy is our books. For me, it's extremely important to me to be a good father and good husband and make sure that I'm leaving behind a world that's a little bit better than I found it. My books are an important part of that because they continue to help people every day, and I know that that will also be an income stream for my family. And I think that, if you are struggling to have that conversation, I think you have to have the conversation, there's never a good time. But the good thing is that it's never too late and it's never too early. Joanna: I was going to say, ‘It is too late if you're dead.' Michael: Yeah, if you're dead. But if you're breathing, if you're fogging up a mirror, it's not too late. I think that's a good thing. Joanna: Absolutely. And, in fact, I think probably the COVID-19 pandemic has given almost an excuse to be able to talk about it because like you mentioned an untimely death. You're younger than me, I'm in my late 40s, but I certainly don't expect to be popping off for a while. But we do plan these things just in case because you never know whether it's a pandemic or an accident or something else that comes out the blue, having this stuff set up early. There's enough to deal with when someone dies, emotionally, to have to bother with a whole load of business stuff. It's an act of love to sort this stuff out, right? Michael: Absolutely, and it's an act of kindness and it's an act of empathy. Because I think a lot of people can relate to what I'm about to say, and that is that you put your heart and soul into your writing, and your spouse, or whoever is going to take over things when you're gone, probably has no idea what you do every day. At least certainly not at the micro level. They might know you write books, they know you publish those books, but when it comes to the day-to-day tactical stuff, they don't know. And just imagine how stressed out an heir would be if…not if but when. If you're a wide author, they're going to have to log into all your dashboards to figure out what's going on. They're going to have to, if you're doing pay-per-click advertising, they're going to have to learn that. There's all sorts of things they have to learn. And so, you have to have some empathy for what you're about to put them through and have the conversation. Because for some heirs, that might be more than they want to bear. Joanna: Absolutely. Right, we'll come back to that. But, obviously, when people are making it in terms of a will, we're not going to go into everything but there's some paperwork that should at least be in place. Obviously, we're not Prince, we're not Aretha Franklin, but there are cases where artists who have valuable intellectual property have not made a will. And like you said, these things can get locked up for a long time and there can be fights over it and family members can fall out over the potential of these things. So, there's lots of things to put in a will, isn't there? And also, what happens in America or where you know about, if you don't have a will. In the UK, for example, sometimes the government can take more than one would like them to. Michael: Yes, in the UK in particular it's kind of crazy. I think sometimes stuff can pass on to the Crown if you don't have a will. I did some research on the UK when I was writing this book. What happens when you don't have a will in the United States is that the state will determine what happens to your property. I think we can all agree that that is a terrible idea. The reason you draft a will is that you get that control over who gets what. And that includes the copyrights to your book. What can end up happening is some unfortunate scenarios where your copyrights could be divided up amongst your heirs in ways that you didn't intend. The most important thing is to make sure you keep your copyrights together so they can be managed together. You can have some really unintended consequences, particularly if you've got an estate attorney or a court that doesn't understand copyright. Joanna: And then I just also wanted to mention, totally practical, if you've got pensions, 401ks. Here they're called…we also have ISAs, you have IRAs. There's this form you have to fill in on all of these different platforms that says who gets your money, basically, if you die. If you do all this stuff privately, like I do, like many of us authors do, then you want to make sure you fill those forms in. Michael: Yes, fill those forms in and keep them up to date, that's critical. And you mentioned a will, Joanna, another thing that is just as important is a living will. So, when people think of wills, they think of your last will, which is what happens to your property and everything when you die. But equally as important, if not more important, is your living will, which is what happens if you were to end up in a vegetative state or you were in a coma or you can't make decisions for yourself. That gives a trusted person the ability to make those decisions on your behalf. We refer to that here, in the United States, as a power of attorney, that's something that you can get, but also what happens if you end up in a state where you're in a coma and the chances of you making it are almost none? What do you want that person to do, do you want them to pull the plug or do you want them to keep you on life support in the off chance that you do make it? These are tough conversations but these are things that can be settled really quickly with an attorney. And once you do them, you don't have to worry about them anymore. Joanna: I care about that very much. We did those, Jonathan and I, and also if we were in an accident together, then who makes the next decision. And, to me, that's almost more important. Because here in the UK, if you don't have a power of attorney, the doctor can override your spouse. This is a really important…and we have two, one is health and one is finance. So, you can give someone health jurisdiction over, say, if you get dementia or something, and then the money one is separate. Again, these are all difficult conversations. But it is far worse for someone, for your partner who loves you, or your children, or whoever, to deal with these questions, if something happens. None of us will expect it to happen, right? Maybe your granddad did because he was late in life… Michael: Yes. No one knows when their time, ultimately, is going to come. And another thing that's important to point out is do this now while you're in good health. Because if you're in poor health, it's going to be a lot harder to make these decisions. You can take a few steps at a time, you don't have to do it all tomorrow. That's the beauty of it. Estate planning is a lifelong journey. And as long as you take those steps at some point, it's important. Joanna: And actually I think it's a bit like learning about publishing or whatever, when you do it, when you're just starting out, if you have a very simple setup, it's much easier to get started with a simple will and then, over time, as it gets more complicated, you can sort that out. I'm looking at maybe doing a trust or something like that at some point. Let's just take a step back and start with this, something simple. An author has a few books up on the stores, not a lot of revenue, so, they might even feel like, ‘What is the point of even putting this in a letter?' or whatever. What should the author with a basic business do? Michael: They should do the same thing that any author would do, which, in my opinion, the first thing is to have that conversation with the heir and figure out at what level and how much resources and time and energy your heir wants to put into the writing business. That will, ultimately, dictate how you plan. Because there are going to be a lot of heirs who just say, ‘I just want the money. I just want to make sure the money is available,' and that's going to guide your decisions. If the heir wants to play a more active role in the business, then that's going to dictate maybe some of the other things that you might want to help them do. Once you've had that conversation, there's just a few things that I would think about. The first thing is making sure that they have access to all your passwords. So, passwords to your email accounts, passwords to your book retailer accounts, and we can talk about passwords here in a little bit. And then also making sure that you call your bank and figure out what happens to your bank account when you die. When you die, your bank will freeze your assets. And depending on how you have your bank account set up, and it could vary depending on which country you live in, there are some steps you can take to make sure that your bank doesn't freeze your account so that your heirs will continue to have access to the money and it won't get hung up, essentially. That's another thing that I would do if I had just a few books and just wanted to make sure that they were available for the heirs and that the heirs could continue getting the money. And then, at that point, really the ball is in the heir's court. The books continue to be available, they continue to be for sale, they continue to make the money. And if the heir wants to do more with that, great, if they want to just ride out the sales until they drop down then that's just how it goes. Ultimately, I'm just trying to really impose on the importance of making sure you understand what the heir wants. Because I think we have a tendency, as authors, to think about what we want and what's best for the book. But if you don't think about your heir, then you have a mismatch, and that can cause issues as well. Joanna: Okay, a few things to come back on. First of all, that bank account. So, you said your bank account will be frozen. Now, I've heard that before as well, like, when my great auntie died, that's what happened. She was a single woman, a private individual. So, I compare that to me, and probably you, where I'm married, so, my husband, we have a joint bank account, a joint personal bank account. So, if I died, then my husband, that's still his bank account too. And then my company bank account is in the name of a UK limited company with directors. So, that's not my personal bank account, that is the company's bank account. I don't imagine that would be frozen either. Again, I'm just a director, that's not my personal account. When you talk about that, is that actually what happens or what would happen in your situation as well? Michael: The way you described it, it was fantastic, Joanna. So, it depends on how, like I said, you set your bank account up. In the case of a married joint bank account, here, in the United States, basically it depends on which state you live in, but there are two different types. There's a joint bank account with rights of survivorship, which means that, if I die, then my wife automatically gets everything in the account. And it says she has full access to it. There's also joint tenancy. What essentially happens there is, when you die, your assets in the bank account get frozen and they get passed on according to how your will is written. You have to know what kind of bank account you have because that can make a big difference. Now, if you've done the right thing and you've opened up a bank account in the name of your business, then it's worth having a conversation with your attorney to figure out what the succession looks like. Because if you've got a proper succession plan, then that will help you get around this issue as well. I hate to be the lawyerly person here and say, ‘It depends,' and, ‘you need to talk to an attorney about it,' but you really do need to talk to an attorney because, depending on where you live, depending on what your financial situation is, it could look a little bit different. I talk about this in The Author Estate Handbook, there are different types of bank accounts and different things that you can do to get around this issue. And it's an important one to solve because all the money that's in your bank account right now is all the money that's in your bank account right now. But if your bank account happens to get closed, then, suddenly, your retailers are not going to have anywhere to deposit your future royalties. So, you have to think about that too. Joanna: That's a good call. And again, if I died separately to Jonathan, everything would be fine. Well, obviously, not but, if we went together, then I see a gap in my business succession plan, as you mentioned there. So, that's a good one. Let's come on to passwords. This is an absolute nightmare, even as a living person. I mean, it really is. A few years ago, we moved on to Dropbox for our file system and we use 1Password. There are lots of different password managers now. What are your thoughts on this? You also have a resource, don't you? Michael: Yes, I highly recommend a password manager. And the reason for that is there are a lot of people who use the same password on all your sites. One, that's a security issue. Because, if you get hacked, they're going to have access to all of your information. But two, the reason I recommend password managers is because they give you secure passwords, you enjoy very good security, but then you can also use them as an estate-managing tool. What I do is I use 1Password too, Joanna, and what I do is I actually have all of my accounts organized by what I want my heir to do with them when I die. So, accounts that get cancelled, they go into one category. Accounts that they need to make sure that they maintain go into another category. That can be a wonderful way to help you get organized. The best tool though, the best feature that they offer is they offer an Emergency Access feature. For example, if you happen to get locked out of your password manager, 1Password, LastPass, they all offer this. Essentially, what they do is you can designate a trusted contact and then that contact will automatically get access into your vault. And they'll have access to all of your passwords. So, imagine an untimely death, your spouse can just basically get into 1Password, get access to all your passwords, and never have to worry about it. Which is critical. The other thing about passwords that I want people to think about — because this is a particularly dangerous thing that can wreck your estate — is two-factor authentication. Joanna: I was going to mention this. The fact that you need a phone… Michael: I bet a lot of people listening to this have gotten that one-time passcode on their phones and never thought once about what would happen if their phone got disconnected. Because if you can't get that passcode, your heirs can't get into your account even if they have your username and password. So, this is a danger that you have to plan for. I have a whole chapter in the book, I talk about two-factor authentication. Because it's a little techy, it's a very technical thing, but be careful. At a minimum, I would just make sure that you let your heirs know under no circumstances should they disconnect your phone line after you die until they've had a chance to change all your phone numbers over. Because that will be a huge huge problem in the future. Joanna: Yes, and you're totally right. Jonathan and I have talked about this as well. Because there's so many things now, there's face recognition. And like you say, the two-factor thing and the numbers have all changed and the devices have all changed. It's hard enough to keep track of when it is your own stuff, isn't it? I do have a letter that I did a while back but I haven't updated it for a while, and a whole load of the things that I use have changed. Even as we speak, as we record this, I've recently put my Shopify store up, creativepennbooks.com, and, so, I've stopped using payhip.com but I haven't yet canceled it because I'm still sort of in a cut over period type of thing. Our businesses change over time, don't they? We take on new tools, we get rid of old tools. It's almost like we need this list for ourselves because the business goes bigger and bigger and bigger, doesn't it, over time? Michael: It does. I mentioned that I have a resource, it's included in The Author Estate Handbook, and it's an organizer, it's basically Excel organizer that you can fill in the blanks. Emergency contacts, listing all your social media accounts, listing all your email addresses, passwords, all the critical things that you can think of helps you just get organized and corral everything. Because that's what this is like, it's like corralling cats who don't want to be corralled. Being organized, that's the hardest part of estate management because you can come up with the will relatively easily, you just gotta hire an attorney and they'll help you with it, but it's the organization part. Your attorney is not going to help you with that. Getting organized, I think, is the hardest part. Being able to have a resource where you and your heirs can find everything in one place, that's something to aspire to and a very critical tool. But yeah, there's a lot. And I would recommend reviewing it at least once a year. Whatever tool you decide to use, but whatever methods you use, review once a year or when you have a major life change. Because as you pointed out, things change all the time in publishing, especially with our businesses. Joanna: A good time might be the end of the tax year. I've just been through my accounts, and you're looking at your profit and loss or you're looking at your bank statements and you're going, ‘What is that monthly payment? Do I still need to make that one?' Because there's so many of these subscription programs now that we use that it's good to sort of review that. This is a great conversation. I'm finding it useful, I think lots of people are finding it useful. But the other thing you mentioned there was, ‘What does your heir want?' I already know; Jonathan worked in my business for a couple of years, my husband worked in the business, and he wasn't interested. He loves reading but he's not interested in running a publishing company, he's gone back to work in pharmaceuticals. Even if it's just me who dies, let alone both of us at the same time, then I know he doesn't want to run the business. And we are happily child-free, but my siblings, I have lots of siblings, they don't want to run a publishing business either. So, what I have on my letter is ‘Try and sell my whole business. Try and sell my copyrights and my website and everything.' Because I don't think anyone's going to run it.' So, that's me really putting myself in their perspective. As much as it pains me, I actually think that's probably the best thing. What do you think about that? Michael: It's tough. And it's especially tough when you don't have someone who is going to continue or who wants to continue the business. In most cases, knowing what I know about copyright, it's hard to recommend selling your copyright. But I think, in certain circumstances like this one, maybe it makes sense. The hard part is that there are no good answers right now. I don't even know, if I passed away, I don't even know who I would sell my copyrights to, if I wanted to do it. I do think that there's a potential, I think the landscape is going to look differently or it's going to look different in the future. I've heard of some people also either like licensing or bequeathing their copyrights to universities and non-profits as well. That's something that I've heard people do too. Joanna: Although that can really be a terrible. James Michener a few years ago. James Michener is a dead historical writer, wrote epics. I love his book The Source and it was not in Kindle edition, it must have been 2014, I was like, ‘Right, I need to get this out in Kindle.' I tried to track down his estate, and it turned out to be his old university, as you say. I thought, ‘I'd be great to get permission to publish this book from James Michener.' Anyway, they said, ‘Oh, whoever it was, a big publisher, ‘we have licensed it to them.' I emailed them back and said, ‘But it's not being published,and I am a fan, and it is not in Kindle.' Michener wrote books that are thousands of pages, super super huge books, door stoppers. And so, I'm like, ‘Then this is not a great management of your estate that is owned by this university.' So, even if you leave it to so-called prestigious whoever, they're not necessarily going to manage it in the way that we would like. It's interesting because, at the moment, we're hearing Bob Dylan, in 2020, sold all of his back lists for an undisclosed sum. Lots of musicians are selling their back lists. Obviously, Dylan's closer to officially getting old than you and I are, but selling it now he has got the money, and also his family, presumably, can make the most of it now, as opposed to fighting over it later. Do you think this is something that could emerge in the indie-author market? We could have this kind of thing where, when an author dies who's well known in the indie arena, we have some kind of process where we could sell or express interest in their IP? Michael: Possibly. But I think it comes with some cautionary words. I think the musicians that are doing it, I think they're doing it for the reasons that make the most sense for them. I do think though that they could be setting a bad example for other creatives and artists in that copyright is best licensed. You have to remember that you can make money from your copyrights for your life plus 70 years, and even beyond that. If you can find somebody in your family that is willing to take that on, that's great. But if you can't, then I understand. I also think that there's some market opportunities here. I think, one, for authors that are fairly successful, I do think that there is a market for being able to hire an estate manager that takes care of the day-to-day operations. You just pay them a percentage of sales and they manage the operations. And then the only thing the heir has to do is just monitor the estate manager. There are some people that are doing that today but I think that it's hard because it's difficult to grant access to your book retailers and stuff without giving access to your bank account info. So, I think, if that problem could get solved, then I do think that there is a market for people who could become estate managers and help families with this particular problem. I also think that, if you pick your favorite dead author, James Michener's side, you're probably able to read their books because a traditional publisher continued distributing them after their death. There is a potential opportunity for a company that could serve kind of like a traditional publisher but for when you die. Their sole purpose would be to work with heirs. Heirs would license the rights to your books to this company, not sell but they would license the rights to this company for distribution, the company would keep the books in print, keep them discoverable, take care of any issues that come up with retailers, take a cut of the sales, and then pass the proceeds onto the heirs. If the company was ethical and they did things correctly, I think that that would be a very elegant way to solve this problem. And I think that there would be a really big opportunity because I don't think enough prominent self-published authors have died yet for this to really be on people's radar. Joanna: Yes, and it is interesting because, of course, this does exist and it's called an agent. This is what agents do. A lot of agencies started when the original agent took on a friend's book, and then the agency grew into a business. And then the original agent died and then the agency continues. And many of the agencies make a lot of money from dead authors. And I actually went to a rights licensing conference once, and I think they were talking about Enid Blyton or one of the dead authors whose books just keeps making money. I think it was Enid Blyton because her signature is trademarked, the actual her handwritten signature is also a trademark. And that still goes on books. Stuff like that was really interesting. And they were actually saying how much easier it is to license dead authors because the author is not around to say what they want out of the situation. So, I think you're right. We need an agency for dead indie authors. Or we need the estate management, or whatever it is. But you and I know, and everyone listening, we know that most indie authors don't make enough money to make it worthwhile to take a cut of, let's say, 15%. Therefore, like you said, it's only big-name indie authors who could kind of get away with that, and then we're back to where we were. But what I was thinking was, if there was almost a brokerage for this kind of thing…and then you see someone, if you can buy up some mistake, you can actually grow into a bigger business rather than each individual sort of focusing on their own stuff. I think there's a lot of opportunity here. But does anyone want to run it? Michael: Yes. Definitely, you have to have a law background because you might be in court a lot because heirs get into fights and those sorts of things. And there's the other piece of it as well, and it's something I think we have a responsibility to educate our heirs on is avoiding scams. Anytime you start selling IP, I think that's a vulture market, you have to be really careful. Especially if you're not a big-name author because you can end up selling your copyrights for pennies on the dollar. And the amount that you sell for could be a pittance, compared to what your heirs could make if they were educated and were able to run just a few basic things themselves. How blockchain could help with estate management. Joanna: This is also why I'm excited about the potential of blockchain technology because I see how it could work where, let's say, there is a registration chain, of which I'm actually interviewing someone after this about, a registration chain, and then a distribution chain. And the great thing about smart contracts on a blockchain is they automatically execute. [More on blockchain in my episodes on the future for authors and creativity.] If you could program into some master smart contract, how things should happen once you're dead, then that could be a way to deal with all of this without having to do all the stuff that we have to do now because in web 2 you have to log into all these things and you have to move things around, bank accounts and stuff. Whereas with blockchain and smart contracts, this could be more easily done. But unfortunately, I think we're probably at least a decade away from that being more of a reality. Michael: Yeah, we're early here. I think in 10 to 15, 20 years, I think the landscape will be much different. I think we'll be having a lot different conversations around estate planning and, hopefully, to your point, smart contracts and different things will allow authors to make this a lot simpler than it is now. Because, ultimately, that's the most important thing we have to do is we have to simplify things for our heirs. And it's not easy to do that right now, in today's environment. But, hopefully, that day is coming. Joanna: In the meantime, everyone, let's at least stay alive another decade. Michael: Yes, stay alive…no, not another decade, let's stay alive forever, then this goes away. Joanna: Well, then we have a whole different conversation about environmental and ethical problems around staying alive forever. But that is a sci-fi, a lot of sci-fi novels in there, and that's another conversation. Tell us where can people find the books and everything you do online. Michael: My home base is authorlevelup.com. If you're interested in grabbing The Author Estate Handbook you can find that at authorlevelup.com/estatehandbook. That book, basically, is I tried to write as nitty-gritty and comprehensive of a book on this topic as I could. It holds your hand, goes through all the different elements of a writing business that you should think about and helping you get organized. I also wrote another book called The Author Heir Handbook. That book is a plain English explanation of author businesses for your heirs. So, you can pick up both books, one for you, one for your heir. They're both available in ebook, paperback, hardcover, large print, and audio wherever you get your books. Joanna: I have them in the ebook, I'm going to go get paperbacks and put a copy with my letter in my drawer. Michael: Oh, thank you. It's an easy thing to do, just slip it in your safe deposit box with the letter, so, easy for your heir to follow. Joanna: There we go, nice one. Excellent. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Michael, that was great. Michael: Thank you, Joanna. Great to be here.The post Estate Planning For Authors With Michael La Ronn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What is auto-narration of audiobooks and how can it benefit authors and rights-holders as well as listeners? What are some of the common objections to auto-narration and how can we keep a positive attitude to embracing change? Ryan Dingler from Google Play Books goes into detail on these questions and more. You can also listen to my recent round-up of AI narration options across multiple platforms in episode 623. Ryan Dingler is a product manager at Google and also writes about the intersection of technology and business. 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 auto-narration? Who can use it and what languages and accents are available? Tackling common objections to auto-narration — “the voices aren't good enough;” and narration should be “kept for humans” Stratification of audio rights and how both human and AI narration fit into the audio ecosystem Multi-cast audiobooks The potential for growth in non-English-speaking markets Pricing an AI narrated audiobook How will the market change in the coming year? You can find Google Play Books at play.google.com/store/books and you can publish at Play.google.com/books/publish/u/0/ g.co/play/autonarrated – Publisher website for auto-narrated audiobooks g.co/play/narrator-library – Narrator library g.co/play/autonarrated-help – Help center Transcript of Interview with Ryan Dingler Joanna: Ryan Dingler is a product manager at Google and also writes about the intersection of technology and business. Welcome back to the show, Ryan. Ryan: Thanks for having me on. Joanna: It's good to talk to you again. You were on the show in April 2021, talking about publishing on Google Play Books in general. And we just mentioned auto-narration for audio, which was in beta at the time, but we're going to go into that in detail today. What is auto-narration for audiobooks? Give us an update on where the program is now. Ryan: We've come a long way since I last spoke with you both in terms of the beta and in terms of what we've done with the product. But just to start off, what are auto-narrated audiobooks, it's very simply, instead of being read by a person, auto-narrated audiobooks are read using Google's text-to-speech technology. We have a whole tool set and framework around building these auto-narrated audiobooks. And this all came about a few years ago, actually, where we noticed just a massive gap between eBooks and audiobooks. 95% of eBooks do not have an accompanying audiobook, which in our book catalog is millions and millions of books. And it's not that we looked into it, some of these eBooks would make sense as an audiobook, it's just that, as most everyone knows, audiobooks are very expensive to create and take a lot of time. So that's when we came up with the idea of auto-narrated audiobooks. We have been progressing it forward since then. Joanna: And It was in beta. Who can get into it now? Has it come out of beta completely? Ryan: Beta can be somewhat of a confusing word; it is still in beta. Google is known for keeping our products in beta for a long time. Available in 8 countries and 2 languages and multiple accents and genders (as of mid-2022) We are just beginning our process, but it is actually available generally in eight countries today. Those countries are the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Spain, and Argentina. If you are a publisher in one of those countries, and you have an account with us in our partner Centre you can go in and try it out. It's in two languages, English and Spanish, as you might be able to guess, by the countries. And all you really need is three things, you need an eBook that's in English or Spanish, and it needs to be an ePub format. And the book does need to be live on Google Play. We have, as I said, before, a whole editor around this process to help walk you through it and make sure that the auto-narrated narrator is actually pronouncing things the way that you want. And that your eBook that is now going to become an audiobook has all the things that an audiobook would have and doesn't have, which of course, it's like the Table of Contents, copyright, and things like that. Joanna: I've got a quite a few questions coming from that then. I have tried this. I have a couple of auto-narrated books. You've got English and Spanish but so just using English because that's what I was doing. You have different accents as well, don't you? Because of course you and I both speak English, but we both have, well, different genders but also different accents. What are the range of accents available in those languages? Ryan: We have, I think about six different accents for English language today. Off the top of my head, I think we have American, we have British, we have Indian, Australian, and a few other ones. We have really tried to provide publishers a full-range of accents. Obviously, we have nowhere near covered the wide variety that there is. Obviously, there's even accents inside of the UK, inside of the American, that would be further. But our goal is to continue adding these accents so that publishers can choose the right narrator for their book, whether they're trying to represent the author or represent a unique character that would be speaking it. So we have seven or so today by language and we also have those accents in Spanish as well. But we're continuing to add more and one word on languages, so we are in English and Spanish only today but we are looking to add German and French and that we're expecting to have those made available by later this year, and in Portuguese as well might be following just after that Joanna: That's brilliant. I narrate my own as me, but I had a American woman, an African American woman that the voice sounded like and it's lovely. I love it. Also what I like is that you can actually speed it up slightly. You can do like I think like a 1.1 if you want the speed to be a bit different. I'm right on that, aren't I? You can change the kind of speed and that kind of thing? Ryan: Yes, exactly. You can change the default narrator speed. I think we have it It can go from roughly 0.5, which is very slow, to 1.5 from the default narrator speed. Each narrator speaks at their own cadence. We try to give a sense of this by telling them the speed, which is really just the amount of words per minute that they would speak normally. Everyone speaks at different paces. If you like a narrator, but they speak a little bit too slowly, you can speed them up or slow them down either way. Joanna: I do like the editor, I think the editor process is brilliant. I think it's much better than a lot of other things that I've seen in the AI space. It's very user-friendly. You mentioned that you can change the pronunciation of things. Explain how that happens. Ryan: This came about as we were looking at our own public domain audiobooks. So public domain books are books that anyone in general society can use and create. So we started creating some of our own books, think of books like ‘Frankenstein', that have been on the market for 50 to 70, I think is the cutoff for public domain, 70 plus years or more. What we found is that just some words, especially words that were from older English, because these books are quite old, were just pronounced in a way that we would have otherwise wanted different. So we have two ways to do it. One is if it's just pronounced wrong, we try to fix that in our system. There's also just personal preference by the publisher or the author. I created this name. I want it spoken this specific way. If that is the case, you can go into the editor, you can click on a word, and click a right click, hit Edit Pronunciation. And this whole panel on the right-hand side opens up to either change the spelling of a pronunciation or try to tweak the way that it's pronounced. We can do that through a few ways. One, if it's like a homograph it can be pronounced in a few different ways. For instance, I always think of tomato/tomato, or if you're British, the way that you pronounce water is very different from an American would pronounce water. So we would have those alternative pronunciations, especially if you do it with a British narrator versus an American narrator. We've also found that sometimes it's just really hard to phonetically type a pronunciation. So we do have a feature that allows you to speak the pronunciation into your mic if you just only speak that specific word. We try to convert that into our own kind of pronunciation language and capture the meaning or the way that you are trying to pronounce the word. I always like to think of when Harry Potter came out, everyone was pronouncing Hermione as Hermon-e, Joanna: Or Ho-mione. Ryan: Or Her-mione. A ton of different variations. And if she wanted, J.K. Rowling could just go in there and say, ‘Oh, no, it's Hermione.' And then it would be fixed throughout the entire audiobook. Joanna: This is kind of magic. I've been narrating audiobooks now for a few years, and also working with narrators. And there's this horrible moment if you're working with a human narrator and you realize you haven't told them how you wanted a name to be pronounced. I have an example, I had a character called Gest, G-E-S-T. And they pronounced it ‘jest,' as if it had a J at the beginning. And I just couldn't see how that would have been…like a hard G rather than a soft G. But with the AI, you could just type it once, right? And then it changes the whole audiobook rather than having to re-record anything, which is frankly, amazing. And we were saying just before we started, we were trying to get the room tone right. Again, as a narrator, I'm like, ‘I have to edit out all these clicks and pops and noises of my jaw.‘ Sometimes if I'm dehydrated, I have to edit those out or lip smacks, or tummy gurgles, and all these things and they just don't happen. So there are a lot of speeds, as you say. And that's humans are humans, they make human noises. But it is interesting how I just love that universal change. I think that that is a killer app, basically. Ryan: One thing that I always like to point out too is if you have a mistake in a traditional audiobook and you realize it post-publishing, you're probably not going to fix it, it takes a lot of time. It depends on the severity of what you would see as the mistake. With an auto-narrated audiobook, all you need to do is go back and change the one word or the same that was pronounced in a way that you would have wanted differently. And you can publish it again, download the files, and it takes a matter of minutes to fix those types of errors. Joanna: But of course, there are some objections to auto-narration. So let's go into some of those. Objection 1: The voices are not good enough. They sound like robots, or they don't sound like humans. They don't express enough emotion. They are just not good enough. What are your thoughts on that one? Ryan: I think first and foremost is we also believe that auto-narration cannot capture the complete nuances that human narrators can. Some titles do require a lot of emotion and a very deep understanding of the books' contexts like emotionally charged dramas or romances. So, if you as a publisher, an author can afford to invest in a full audiobook production with a professional narrator, we would highly encourage you to do so and of course encourage you to sell that audiobook on our platform. But that being said, we do believe that our auto-narration is quite high quality. Many people's experience with text-to-speech comes from the earliest versions of text to speech that they heard, which did sound very robotic and were quite hard to listen to for long periods of time. But text-to-speech quality does vary significantly in terms of quality. It also has improved a lot over the intervening years since it was first introduced. Google has been working on text-to-speech for 15 plus years and seen lots of progress over that time. Google has been particularly invested in text-to-speech because it's in so many of our products with Google Assistant across a wide range of products, You can speak and hear back from the device that you're speaking into. So Google has invested significantly, and we do think that the quality has improved drastically. And Google we do think stands out quite a bit. I think the most important thing is if you're curious is just to listen to it yourself. You can always go to our partner center, we have a ton of samples, sort of different narrators, quality does vary by narrator, but we found it's really a matter of personal preference. Some people prefer one narrator, others prefer another. But just go listen to yourself if you're curious about it. [Here's the narrator library where you can listen to samples.] Joanna: Absolutely. I just had a follow-up question on the voices. Can you use multiple voices within one audiobook? Ryan: That is a good question. Right now it's one. You have a default narrator. But we've been working for a while on adding multiple narrators to an audiobook. It's definitely one of the biggest points of feedback we've had from publishers, if you have either, let's say like a romance book with two points of view, a male and female, you want to be able to have both, one by chapter, you could do that. Once we do this functionality, it actually will go down to the word level. You could have a conversation back and forth between two characters. And it doesn't stop at two, you'll have the ability to have as many characters as we have narrators. I think we have roughly 15 to 20, English narrators. You could have 15 to 20 characters in your book, and you just go through and tag it. And this is something that you could do kind of as I was mentioning before; if you already have it published, you can just go back and say, ‘I want to add characters to improve the quality and improve understanding,' you'll have the ability to do that. And we expect it to come out sometime in the next few months. Joanna: Okay, great. Hopefully within 2022. That multi-cast would be awesome, because I feel like that's also one of the most expensive and complicated audio projects to do as independents who don't have their own studios. If you have to not just hire all the different actors, but also then edit that together, that is a big project. I could see that as a sort of creative. That's something I would love to do. But I definitely could not afford to do that. I would love to play with that within the tool where it's easy enough to change things. So that will be really interesting when that comes out. Let's talk about the one that comes up a lot as well. Objection 2: It is ethically wrong to use AI for narration. We need to keep jobs for narrators. And this has gone so far as in the UK we've got Equity with a campaign to stop AI stealing narrators' jobs basically. What do you think about that one? Ryan: Auto-narration is about affordably creating audiobooks. As I said before, we don't think that auto-narration can really match the nuances that the human voice can. The human voice is still by far and away the superior storyteller, but because of significant costs and time to create a traditional audiobook, that's why we have seen this large gap between eBooks and audiobooks. That gap would continue into the foreseeable future. And for many publishers, the choice really isn't between human narration and auto-narration, it's between auto-narration and no audiobook at all. Publishers can try out for their first time audiobooks through auto-narration, and they can really use it as a tool to assess audiobook demand for their titles before making an investment in human narration. We see them as going hand-in-hand. Both are trying to increase the audiobook catalog, grow the demand for audiobooks in general. And it's really just a testing ground for what you want to do further in audiobooks. It's kind of a first step. Joanna: I'm with you. I don't think the two are the same thing. And in fact, I've been advocating for a change in publishing contracts to allow for stratification of audio rights. At the moment, people just sign away audio rights to publishers, whereas I think there should be more of a stratification of audio rights because many authors will sign away those rights and then it will never happen. It's almost like there needs to be a difference between a human-narrated project and an AI-narrated project. Also, I like having both. For example, my short story trilogy A Thousand Fiendish Angels there's me narrating it, so a British female, and then I actually have a male AI narrating it as well. Some people like listening to a different voice, right? Some people would rather have a different voice. I actually think having multiple editions with multiple different voices is interesting as well. Is that possible? Or is it just a one-on-one link within Google? Ryan: It is a one-on-one link. But it's only that if the publisher chooses it. So when they see a book, that book will only have one narrator, or as we talked about, it could have many narrators as part of it, but it'll only have one default narrator. But a publisher can choose to do many narrators for an auto-narrated audiobook. If you wanted to do one that's different by geography, for instance, you wanted to have an American female for the U.S. market and a British male for the UK market, you can do that. It's really up to you as a publisher. Right now, we don't have the ability for consumers to choose which narrator they want to speak the audiobook. So they'd actually have to be different books. In time, we probably will get to allowing for more consumer choice that way, if you're in the U.S. and you want a different narrator, and you can choose from a handful ones, you'd have the ability to do that. Right now we're constrained a little bit by running these in kind of, not in real-time, so we can get the highest quality. But as text-to-speech quality improves, it'll really come down to we can do these live, and they can choose which narrative they want. Joanna: That's fantastic. I do see, as you said, we're still in early days. What's funny is I've been talking about it for years, you've been talking about it for years. But it feels like it's actually starting to happen now. I guess you mentioned their demand, and what have you seen in terms of the adoption, both by creators, but also by listeners. Are downloads and sales increasing of these auto-narrated books? Or are they just sitting there? Ryan: We've seen significant downloads. It all starts with supply, though. And we've been pretty impressed with the level of adoption that we've seen and how quickly it has happened since we rolled out the beta. Now on our platform, thousands of publishers have not only created but are publishing an auto-narrated audiobook. And for a lot of small publishers that we hear from particularly a lot of self-publishers, being able to produce an audiobook has always felt completely out of reach, and having access to this technology is allowing them to publish their audiobook for the first time. In some ways, we've heard publishers share stories about connecting with readers for the very first time who've never been able to access their content because they only listen to audio format, whether for personal preference, or because they're in the blind and low vision community or they have challenges with reading. So we've seen a lot of publishers try it out, continue to grow adoption. We have been quite impressed on the consumption side as well. People are buying these books, listening to them, engaging with them, leaving reviews. And the reviews are quite good, especially when the publisher spends a lot of time to make sure that the audiobook has all the things that an audiobook would typically have. We've been particularly impressed with our progress with Spanish language. We only introduced it a few months ago and we have a lot of listeners who are very eager to consume the Spanish language auto-narrated audiobooks. We think that's probably because our Spanish language catalog gap between eBooks and audiobooks is even wider than our English gap. If you have either a book that's natively in Spanish or translated to Spanish, we've seen a lot there as well. Joanna: I wonder whether we're going to see the growth in AI narration audiobooks in markets other than English, mainly because of that reason is that this market is hungry for content. Whereas the English audiobook market is so mature that there is some enough content to a point, but there's also a whole network of narrators. Whereas I remember going to Frankfurt Book Fair and heard a lady from Ghana saying that across the whole of Africa, and India, and Asia, people don't have enough content in their own language, or their own dialect. And we just can't replicate audiobooks in every single language and every single dialect without AI. I almost feel like even if in English, it's not adopted so much, although I think it will be. I feel like these other languages might have incredibly rapid growth [because they don't have much existing content]. Ryan: We see the same. That's why we're adding more languages. We are starting with the ones that have a little bit more robust of a audiobook market. But as you said, no language has as robust a market as English. So the gap is always wider in other languages. One thing, just more broadly, is as we do more other languages for auto-narrated audiobooks, we also look at how can we bridge the gap between English books and books in other languages to help with that process there? I do think we'll see significant growth not only in auto-narrated audiobooks, generally, but specifically by language, because there's just much more demand for them because they don't have access to a lot of audiobooks in their language. Joanna: Absolutely. I think that's always my ethical response to people is, well, how can we not have AI audiobooks when 99% of the world pretty much is not able to access them in either an accent, or a voice, or a dialect, or a language, that they want to for an affordable cost? Let's talk about money. How much does it cost (at the moment) to use the Google Play version of the auto-narration? Ryan: Currently, it is entirely free. It is free right now because the product is in our beta program. And during the beta program, we have said that we will always have it free. It's free for creation and publishing for an unlimited number of auto-narrated audiobooks, of course, as long as your eBook is live on Google Play. Once you create it and publish it, you have the ability to download it and to distribute it to any other retailer or distributor that you so choose. We don't have a specific end date in mind for the beta. We've learned a lot through this beta program and are expecting to continue it for a while. With that said, we do, when we end the beta program, expect to have a very modest fee after the beta program. It'll still be significantly, significantly cheaper than a traditional audiobook. But that is not now. And we're still in the beta program. So we'd continue to encourage publishers to try it out as much as they can. Joanna: Yes. So as of mid-2022, it is free. However, I do want to say that obviously Google is a very big company that uses data to train AI. And I feel like we are helping Google train a text-to-speech AI with what we're doing with some of the fine-tuning. I absolutely think it's worth it. But I do think that it is data that we are helping with. It is free financially. But I do feel that Google is getting a benefit as well. What would you say to that? Ryan: We do use the inputs, especially in the pronunciation correction tool, which is our internal name for it, to try to improve it globally for all publishers. If you find a mistake with one of our pronunciations, and we think, ‘Oh, that's actually like a universal mistake. It's not just a personal preference,' we do update it globally, so that not only the other publisher across the way would be able to have that improvement. But you specifically, if you came back and were doing another book a few months later, let's say, you wouldn't have to fix that again. So we are taking the inputs that publishers provide to try to improve it more broadly. And I think that's part of the program for us. We understand that this goes hand-in-hand, benefits go both ways between us and publishers. And that's why we've started off with it free. Even when we do remove the beta program, I think publishers will be very surprised at how modest the fee will likely be. Joanna: In terms of selling the audiobook, what I don't like about general digital stuff is that we're in this race to the bottom, everything should be free on some subscription model, which devalues a lot of the content. But then I hear people saying, ‘AI narration or auto-narration should be free or cheap because it doesn't cost anything to create.' But it's still the creators' intellectual property, it's still an experience for the listener. What is your guidance on pricing an auto-narrated audiobook? Ryan: We don't offer specific guidance for a specific audiobook, but I can say broadly, I really think about what is the additional cost of production for this audiobook when you already have the eBook created. eBooks in of themselves takes a lot of time to write a book, takes a lot of time to write a book that people want to buy, and that should be monetized. That is a lot of effort both to create it, but also to go through the process of publishing it. So what we advise is to think about, okay, I have an eBook for sale at a certain price. I could create a traditional audiobook that'd be quite expensive for me to do so. But if I'd create an auto-narrated audiobook, costs are very minimal. So we would encourage publishers to think a little bit more in terms of their eBook price. We're not advising publishers to do anything to say, like, this should be free, because the cost of creation is still about the eBook. You still needed to write the whole book, and you want to monetize it in the best way possible. We encourage them to think more like your eBook prices, a little bit less like a traditional audiobook, because it doesn't have that huge upfront cost they need to recoup. We do see a lot of success with publishers monetizing these very similar to eBooks. And if you have a series, you maybe would put the first book in the series free, and try it out that way. There really isn't too much differences that we would see in terms of behavior besides that you now have an audiobook that is a little bit cheaper than a typical audio-book. Joanna: I agree. Definitely cheaper than a human-narrated, but still not free, unless it's, as you say, a first in series or something that you are doing a promotion on but just not in general. As part of an increase in the use of AI tools, I've worked with the Alliance of Independent Authors to create an ethical framework for use, which I'll link in the show notes. And that includes labeling of AI narrated audiobooks, or auto-narrated, as you call it. I label my audiobooks, left narrated by me, right digitally narrated I've added on my covers, I've added this round circle, which says digitally narrated, and I put it very clearly in my title as well. But it's not a rule. It's just something that I feel is important. What are your thoughts on this kind of labeling or anything around making sure that customers know an audiobook is auto-narrated? Ryan: First and foremost, I think it's very important to communicate to customers what they're purchasing. If you told someone that your book was a romance novel, and it was actually a horror novel, that would be quite a frustrating experience for your customer. We don't really see any differences for auto-narrated audiobooks, which is why we've embedded two areas where we tell our customers that this is not a narrated audio-book. One is on the book detail page. If you go to an auto-narrated book in any of our surfaces across iOS, Android, or our web experience, we do have a badge on every single book detail page that says, ‘Hey, this is an auto-narrated audiobook. Here's a link to a help center to help you understand what that means You can learn more about it.' So that's the first thing. The second is, for every single auto-narrated audiobook, on our platform, we have a one sentence intro that just says, ‘Hey, this is an auto-narrated audiobook'. And it just is there to inform users that they are playing a sample, they know right away what they're listening to. And it's actually not in the one that gets downloaded. So publishers don't have to worry about that. We only want it for the ones that are on our platform, because it does mention Google in the sentence. But beyond that, it's really up to the publisher, as you said, to figure out how they want a message that this is not an audiobook you can do it with the cover, the description, or the price, as we just talked about. Joanna: I want to encourage people listening, I want to remove any stigma or shame that people seem to be feeling around using AI narration. It's almost like, people think, well, we've got to hide it somehow. And that's not the point. I feel almost this comes back to thinking that the voices aren't good enough. It's like, well, there's lots of problems with humans, breathing noise and, as I said, mouth noises. I call them the ‘voice artifacts' of humans. And then there are the ‘voice artifacts of auto-narration.' I feel like there's something that we can probably embrace as distinctive, and a reason why you know that it's auto-narrated. We're not trying to hide it through making it error-free. We're labeling it. We're embracing the technology and proudly doing this, as you say, to try and bridge the gap between eBooks and audiobooks. I want to change the feeling around the whole thing. Obviously, you're very positive about it. What do you think about that? Ryan: I think that's exactly the way that we're thinking about it as well. You said it earlier. But it's really about a whole new category of audiobooks. You have a traditional human-narrated audiobook and an auto-narrated audiobook and they're just different categories. People should know which category they're looking at, and decide based off that and all the other factors that they have for the book whether they want to purchase it and listen to it. It should be transparent in what's going on. Ultimately, I think it's better for the entire ecosystem to have this new category so that we can really try to bridge that gap and get more and more people listening to audiobooks. Joanna: Absolutely. As an audiobook listener myself, I listen a lot of the time at like 1.5x speed anyway. So even humans sound like a robot. So, okay, you said that we can download those files. And it's really easy, you just download it. And then for example, I'm selling through my Shopify store, which is creativepennbooks.com. And I'm using BookFunnel to deliver those files. People can buy them on Google Play, Google Play Books, they can also buy them direct. But the reality is that some of the biggest companies in the audiobook market do not allow the sale of audiobooks that are not human-narrated, it's the conditions on their site. But I wonder, we've had recently Spotify acquired Findaway and an AI narration company, Sonantic recently, that's still going through. But it feels like mainstream adoption is on its way. And I would say that that would benefit everyone. If Spotify did AI narration, it would benefit Google's AI generation and vice versa. What do you think in terms of how these audiobook incumbents will adopt AI going forward? And that's your opinion, obviously. Ryan: Certainly I can't speak to the specific decisions that a retailer makes. Every retailer makes their own decision. But there are a few factors that I think are going to be poignant when retailers do make those decisions. One is just what we've been talking about this whole time is the quality of the auto-narration, and we believe our narration is high quality, and that they are a valuable contribution to the audiobook catalog. If the quality is high, that's an important factor. Another is just supply. Are there a lot of these auto-narrated audiobooks there? And also looking at languages, as we talked about before. If you have a large gap in your Spanish language content and there's a large supply of auto-narrated, Spanish content, that's, again, something important to consider, as these retailers are making their choices. And of course, the last one really is demand for the book in audio format. If you have a lot of users that are hoping to consume a book through an audiobook or through a listening experience, that is certainly very important to consider, overall. But ultimately, we want our publishers to be able to sell their content in whatever storefront they choose. That's why we don't have any exclusivity requirements and we are supportive of wide distribution across all retailers. I also think that it'll really increase more broadly as it goes outside of just the books industry as well. In podcasting, as we're talking now, a lot of publishers are looking at, ‘I have a lot of blogs and posts that I do every single week, how can I turn those easily into podcasts?' I think that's where we'll also see growth, and that will go hand-in-hand with auto-narrated audiobooks as well. Joanna: Yes, as people are more used to it, I feel like right now, people are quite used to voices through their various devices. And they know that that's not human. You get used to hearing the different voices. As you say, I think the adoption is happening. And I think it's only going to speed up and, yes, the voices are getting better and better. Would Google be looking at any point to help people like me who are narrators to train our own voice clones? Ryan: This is kind of an important thing that we've looked at over the last few years. I think the first important principle that we have is that we always want to make sure that it's very transparent that to the author that they're like signing a contract to create their own text-to-speech voice model. We do see a lot of difficulties with doing that on a scaled basis. So that if we had it on a website, anyone could just submit some audio files of someone speaking and say, ‘Hey, I want to create a text-to-speech version of this.' There's not a lot of proof that we can say that this is the specific individual. So we do have challenges with rolling that out on a scale basis. Every single one of our narrators that we have today, our teams, mainly with Google Assistant, has met in person, they recorded in studio, and they signed a very specific agreement to say, ‘Hey, we can use these samples to record and improve a text-to-speech model.' I don't think we have a good solution to do this on, as I would call like a scaled basis. But we are looking at it and trying to figure out if there's a way that we could do it with select people, but it's quite far away, I would say and I think we really haven't seen the industry move there just because of all the potential bad actor scenarios that we would have to deal with. Joanna: This whole area is a nightmare. But as a narrator myself, I feel like I need to license my voice before someone else does it since I've been podcasting since 2009. There's so much of my voice out there. And as you know, you don't even need that much anymore to train a model with a voice. I feel like anyone can do this stuff. But as you say, we're all responsible people and company, so we need to do it properly. But yes, these are interesting times for sure, but we are out of time. Where can people find Google auto-narration? And where can they get help if they need it? Ryan: We have a dedicated website for auto-narrated audiobooks. We have a link, I can maybe give it to put in the show notes. But if you who are looking for it, all you need to do is type in auto-narrated audiobooks into Google search, and it'll come up. On that page, you'll find information about the entire program, listen to samples. There's also help center articles that tell you exactly how to get started with auto-narrated audiobooks. And there's actually one that provides a full list of all of the narrators that we have in our programs. You don't need to be logged in to our partner center. You can send it over to a friend or a colleague without having to go into our partner center and listen to samples. I think that's always the first step that we tell people to get started with. Just try it out yourself and give it a listen. Joanna: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Ryan. That was great. Ryan: Thank you. It's been great.The post Auto-Narrated Audiobooks With Ryan Dingler From Google Play Books first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you intensify the conflict in your books to hook readers? How can you introduce different types and layers of conflict to improve your story? Becca Puglisi explains why and how to write conflict. In the intro, thoughts on the DOJ vs PRH trial [Twitter @JohnHMaher] and Publishers Weekly round-up; my thoughts on subscription models; D2D and Humble Bundle; Apple Books Promotions page; How to Write a Novel is now available in all formats on all stores; My non-fiction books in Italian; Digital nomad [Books and Travel]. 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 Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach and bestselling author of the “Thesaurus Series for Writers,” including the latest volume of The Conflict Thesaurus. Becca also writes YA and historical fiction, and can be found at writershelpingwriters.net, along with her co-author Angela Ackerman. 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 story conflict and why do we need it?Examples of different kinds of conflicts, from large to smallHow conflict creates reader interest and empathyThe importance of internal conflict as well as externalMistakes to watch out for when writing conflictTips for co-writing a bookIntellectual property licensing and foreign rights You can find Becca Puglisi at WritersHelpingWriters.net and on Twitter @beccapuglisi The Conflict Thesaurus Vol 2 is out on 6 September 2022. Transcript of Interview with Becca Puglisi Joanna: Welcome back to the show, Becca. Becca: Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be back. Joanna: An exciting topic today. Now, you've been on the show twice before, and I will mention those episodes in the introduction. So, we're just going to jump into conflict today. Let's start off with a definition. What is conflict, anyway, and why do we need it in our stories? Becca: I think that conflict is anything that causes difficulty for your character. We tend to think of conflict at the story level; they have this goal and they're trying to achieve this objective, and there's conflict that is standing in the way. Usually, it's a villain, or it's some kind of an antagonist. But conflict happens throughout the story. It happens at the scene level. It happens as they're going about their day. And conflict can be big and really explosive, but it also can be small, and minor. It's anything that causes them difficulty, that makes things more difficult for them as they are trying to get to that end goal. Joanna: You mentioned there that there are big and small ideas of what conflict is. Let's get into some specifics. What are the big, story-level examples of conflict? Becca: We had to figure this out when we were writing The Conflict Thesaurus because there were so many different kinds of conflict, and we thought, ‘How can we make it manageable for people?' So we came up with some categories. So, you have dangers and threats. These are things that are causing a serious, physical threat to your character. Maybe it's a weather event, or somebody who is stalking the character, or a physical attack. Those kinds of things are kind of big and explosive. I call them macro. They're big problems that the character is going to have to face and deal with. You also have increased pressure, and ticking clocks. This is when, of course, you add something that creates a deadline for the character. They have this goal, and they have certain things that they have to achieve, and it's already very difficult if you've set your story up properly. But then you add a conflict that creates a deadline, so now their timeline is shortened. They have to work quickly. They have to work without a lot of planning, maybe without the resources that they have. Those are very often good for the overall story-level kind of conflicts. And then you have relationship friction. This is something that happens in every single story, regardless of the genre. You could have a thriller, a dystopian, a romance. There's going to be relationship problems. There should be relationship problems, because we're all about relationships, right? Our characters are going to have relationships with different members of the cast. They're going to be interacting with people all throughout the story, and so that's really where the meat and potatoes is, in my opinion, for conflict, because it's so natural, and it's something that the reader is totally going to relate to because they have these kind of conflicts. It could be, think big, with a romantic partner, it could be a really annoying barista at the coffee shop. All different levels of conflict can happen at the relationship level. And it's so organic, and common to the human experience, that it can happen all throughout the story, for any kind of story. So, the different kinds of conflict can happen at different levels of the story, whether it's an overarching conflict that's going to be kind of big and seemingly important. The smaller level conflicts are really important, too, because they really offer the setup for those bigger moments, by creating choices for the character, by creating consequences that are then going to have to be dealt with. Joanna: So much to unpack there. And it's funny, because I think the word conflict, I feel like a lot of people think, ‘Oh, well, that's just for big disaster movies. It's Armageddon. It's the big meteor, or it's Jaws, is the big shark.' But you've mentioned relationship friction, other people. Can you give some other examples? For people who aren't writing these thriller books like me, I know conflict, but many people are writing a sort of, I guess, ‘smaller' in inverted commas books. I feel like that's where a lot of people struggle. Can you give a few more examples of smaller conflicts? Becca: Yes — Losing an advantage. There are a lot of conflicts that can come up that remove something advantageous for the character, something as simple as losing your keys. This is a problem because now the character has to look for their keys. Now they're going to be late for the important meeting that they're having with the important person in their life, or that step that they're taking towards achieving that goal. It's now going to be more difficult because they lost their keys. It seems like something so small, or a phone breaking, or just these little things that shouldn't really be a big deal. They have the butterfly effect, that causes the ripples that create these bigger problems in a story. So, things like losing an advantage. Ego-related conflict. Things where the character makes a mistake, maybe, or they are slighted in some way. It could be a very small situation at the grocery store, or at work, but it becomes a thing for the character because their ego has been attacked, and now they are compromised, really, and are very likely to react in a way that is not the best way to respond. A car accident, a fender bender, something that's not a major deal, with life-threatening impacts, but all of these things, they can cause financial difficulties, they can cause relationship problems, they can cause problems in the character being able to get to that overall goal. They can be so small and seemingly inconsequential, but they do have big effects for the story. Joanna: Right. We'll come back to some more of those, but let's just come back to the bigger questions. Why do we even need conflict in our books? If we're writing a heartwarming romance, or just a happy story in general, why do we even need this type of thing? Why do we need conflict? Why can't everyone just have a happy time in a nice story? Becca: That's something Angela and I had a lot of conversations about when we were writing the latest book. Some questions kept coming up for us about that. And really, the answer is tension. Conflict creates tension. If you have a character who, they have a goal, there's something that they really want, they're going to go after it. If nothing ever stands in their way, if they don't ever have any challenges or any difficulties, then there's no tension, because there's no doubt in the reader's mind as to the character's ability to succeed. They know that they're going to get there because every step of the way, it's clear sailing. Conflict creates barriers, and it creates difficult situations that cast doubt in the reader's mind as to are they going to be able to get there? Are they going to be able to get there intact and whole? Is this going to be a really difficult, horrible situation for them, trying to go along this journey to get where they're going? Conflict creates that tension because the reader doesn't know. And they then become invested in the character, because when the reader is worried about the character, they care about the character and what's happening with them. And so then they want to keep reading, because they want to make sure that the character's going to be okay. It creates this interest, because they're not sure. They want to keep reading, to get answers to their questions, and to just see what's going to happen. So, it's really multifaceted. It creates the tension that you need, which is good for garnering reader interest, but it also garners reader empathy, because they start caring about the character and they want to know that they're going to be okay and that everything's going to work out. Joanna: And again, from the reader perspective or thinking of TV shows and the viewer perspective, it's like I don't really want to watch or just read about somebody whose life is all perfect and it's all going to stay perfect. If I watch something or read something, and it starts off where everything is good, then the rules of story dictate that if it starts high, it's going to go low. It might come back to high, but there are kind of things that we expect as readers and viewers, right? We don't expect ‘happy people in happy land.' Becca: Right. And that's the irony for me is that that's what we want in real life. We don't want conflict. We want everything to be great and easy and simple. But if we use that in our stories, it's the kiss of death. This is the way that we want to be in real life, but we can't make it that way for our characters. Joanna: Let's talk about internal conflict, because again, I'm a thriller writer. I find it very easy to come up with external conflict. But I feel like internal conflict, it can layer over that, it can be completely different. What is internal conflict? Tell us a bit more about that. Becca: It's so, so important. I think that this is something that a lot of people underestimate when we talk about conflict, because like you said the obvious conflicts are easier to go with. They're easier to come up with, and we have this idea that big conflict is going to be more engaging, the car crash, the explosion, the unexpected pregnancy in the romance. Lots of these things we think that's what's going to pull people in because it's really traumatic. But really, I think what pulls people in is the journey of a character, and their struggle, and the struggle, for a character, very often the most impactful struggles, are the internal ones. Basically, those are the conflicts that live within the character. They're those character versus self difficulties. A lot of times, they have an element of cognitive dissonance, with the character wanting things that are at odds with each other, like the character might want two things. They can't have both things. They can actually only have one of them, but they really want both of them. Or they may be wanting something that is bad for them. It's going to cause a problem with their human needs. It's going to cause a void in that area if they pursue something that's actually not good for them. Another example is feelings. Situations that are going to cause feelings for the character that they don't necessarily want to experience; indecision, guilt, self-doubt. These kinds of feelings are uncomfortable. They're going to want to avoid that. But what if it's something that they need to do or they need to address, that is going to naturally bring about those feelings? Conflicting duties and responsibilities. We've all been in that situation in real life, where we have things that we need to do and we can't do all of them. Or we have two things that are equally important, and it's that internal struggle of where do I focus my time? How do I prioritize? Lots and lots of different ways that we can create situations for characters that are going to cause that internal conflict, that struggle on the inside. And it's super necessary for any character that is working a change arc. Any character that is going on a journey of internal change throughout the course of the story, they have to have many, many internal conflict opportunities, because that's the only way that they're going to be able to really look at themselves, look past the habits and the personality traits and all the things that they thought were fine and they thought were actually good. They'll realize, ‘Hold on. What is holding me back? Why do I keep tripping over this one thing? It keeps causing me problems over and over again. I don't want to do this thing but I keep doing it. Why is that?' And they start to make changes, in order to embrace more healthy habits, more healthy responses and coping mechanisms. Internal conflict is the only way that the character is going to actually be able to go through that change. It's the only way that they're going to have the opportunity to look at themselves honestly, and start seeing the changes that need to be made, and then be able to take the steps toward making that change. So it's hugely important, I think, in any genre, for any story where the character is on a change arc. Joanna: I feel like these are the things that can be, in a way, harder to do, because, as you say, they're less obvious but can be much more powerful. Coming back to that, the change arc, because, of course, your and Angela's ‘Thesaurus' series, you've got wounds, you've got The Emotion Thesaurus. Obviously, there are character flaws. There are all kinds of different things that we can have in our characters, and this internal conflict, I feel, maybe ties all of those together. But, in one way, it feels very, very complicated, especially if you're not a plotter. I'm not a plotter. I'm a discovery writer. And when we talk about all these things, it just feels overwhelming that I need some kind of checklist for, make sure a character has this and that and the other, and all these different things in order to make the change arc work, as you talk about there. What are your thoughts and your tips for authors who want to incorporate all these rich levels for character, but are discovery writers like me, and don't want to overcomplicate it? Becca: That's tricky, because I do believe that a certain amount of planning really is helpful. I'm not saying that you have to go to the extent that hardcore plotters go to. And that's I think a problem that a lot of writers have is that they kind of see that as a black-and-white thing, that I'm either a plotter or a pantser. But there are so many levels in between, where you can be a discovery writer, but you can have a general idea of the outer journey, what the character's outer goal is, that story objective, and how they're going to get there, and what the main conflict is going to be for them, how they're going to overcome that. You can have the same picture for their inner journey. You can recognize, okay, what are the things that are going to get in the way of my character achieving that story goal? Where might that have come from? What is something that they might have to deal with or change in order to find success, and achieve that story goal? It doesn't have to be this huge amount of planning. It's just, in my mind, a matter of considering it beforehand, so that you can see what the outer journey is, and what the inner journey is. And then, as you go along, you have it in your mind. It's not easy. We know that we have to plot the outer journey and that we have to keep that in mind as we go along, to make sure that we're headed the right direction. But the inner journey is something that we don't think a whole lot about. It's very important, in my mind, to have the vision of that before you start, how it dovetails into the outer journey, because then it's a lot easier to keep it in mind and to remember as you go along. The character is doing this, this, and this, and this, but they also need to be working on internally taking that journey and making the changes that they need to make. Conflict, really, is a really great way of tying the two together, because your character's on this journey, and they have this goal that they're trying to achieve, but things keep getting in their way. While the conflict is going to provide difficulties for them externally, it also can provide, at the same time, opportunities for internal growth. Conflict comes, most of the time, with a choice. There's a choice that the character has to make. They're going to react this way or that way. They're going to face the conflict or they're going to run away from it. And those choices are what really provide the opportunity for internal reflection or growth. The character can recognize the problems that they're having internally, and they can take steps toward them, or they can choose to deny what is really there, and they can fall back on their old dysfunctional habits and stay where they are, and not grow. So, the conflict is what ties the two journeys together, in my opinion. It's really a beautiful, one-stop-fits-all with conflict because you're doing what needs to be done with the external journey, but it also provides the opportunity for internal growth at the same time. Joanna: I'll add that, as a discovery writer, you can also do this stuff in the edit, because I want people to feel like they don't have to have any plan beforehand, because that's how I go about it. As you say, when something happens, so some conflict happens, I'm writing a scene and something happens, and as you say, it's the choice and how the character reacts. And it actually can be at that point when you investigate this stuff. You don't need to go into it, I don't feel, you don't need to go into it with a plan. I feel like the intuitive angle can be just as interesting, actually, and based on how your character might act in the moment, and then, of course, in the edit. I find your books, the ‘Thesaurus', useful for going back later. I never, ever, ever use this stuff in the actual writing process, in the first draft. Only in the editing process. [Note from Joanna: I cover my discovery writing process in How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book.] Becca: Yes. I agree 100%. And again, everybody's process is different. I know a lot of people who use our resources, some of them use them in the planning stage, before they write, and then many of them use them for editing. And, like you said, it's not necessary for everybody to have a plan. I know that a lot of people do use the editing stage, or the drafting stage, as they're writing and the words are flowing, and they realize, ‘This is a good opportunity to explore X.' They'll make notes, and then that way, when they are editing, they can come back and look at it that way, and that's a great way to do it. Joanna: Absolutely. I think that's important. Your ‘Thesaurus' books are super useful, and again, they're pretty jam-packed full of ideas. So, let's role-play a little bit. Either say I'm looking at my edits or I'm writing my first draft, and I'm going, ‘Do you know what? This is a little bit boring. My writing seems quite flat. Is anything actually happening here?' How would someone go and use The Conflict Thesaurus? How would they go and find the right idea to fit their book? Becca: There's I think a couple of different things to consider when you're looking at problems with your story and you suspect that conflict might be the problem. First of all, a common mistake is that people don't vary the kinds of conflict. It's always the same kind of conflict over and over. It's always relationship friction, or it's always conflict that's happening at work, and after a while, it starts to fall flat. So, one way that the books can be useful is that they give you an abundance of conflict options, where you can look through the categories, look through the table of contents, and just see what kind of options do I have? What have I used and what have I not used, and what makes sense for my character in this scene? Varying the kinds of conflict is important, but also the intensity, the level. We've talked about this, about how everything can't be explosive and really monumental. Sometimes you have to have a variety of intensities. That's where I think the book really comes in helpful because each conflict entry, it has some information on minor complications that can come about from that conflict. It also has options for potentially disastrous results. So, you're looking at different conflict ideas and you think, ‘I really like this particular conflict scenario for this scene, but it's maybe the beginning of the scene, I just want a smaller level.' Well, then you can go with a minor complication coming up out of that conflict. Or if you do need something really bad, then you have those options, too. That's the other thing that writers should keep in mind, is that we want to vary the kinds of conflict that we use, but we also want to vary the intensity of the conflict. And that's where I think the book can help on a number of levels with that. I look at our tools, again, like you said, they can be used at different points in the process. For me, the brainstorming aspect of our books is really a big part of the benefit for them, because they give people ideas when they don't know where to go, or when they have so many options that they're overwhelmed and they don't know how to narrow it down. So, that's, in my opinion, one of the biggest ways that it can help. Joanna: How do you research these Thesaurus books? Because they are, seriously, they're huge. Is it that you start somewhere but then you have to mine the existing world of story? Becca: It's interesting. Some of them are a lot more research-heavy than others. The Wound Thesaurus scared the poo out of us, just because it's real. These are things that people are really struggling with. And so the pressure to get the details right, and not misrepresent anything, was enormous. There was a lot of research for that. The Occupation Thesaurus, the same thing, just because you had to get the facts right, or else you have people coming and saying, ‘Hello? I do this for a living, and that is not the way it works.' Some of them are really research-heavy, and then some of them, we find that researching the concept itself kind of clarifies things. The Conflict Thesaurus, we didn't have to do a ton of research for the entries themselves. It was more a matter of, okay, here's the scenario. How does it impact the story? How can we get creative with this conflict, and apply it in a storytelling context, as well as keeping it real life? Some of the times, there's a lot of research, and then sometimes it's more creative license. And that, to me, is a little more fun, when you take something and then apply it to a story and think, ‘Okay, how can I make this different? How can I keep it from being same old, same old? How can I add interest to this complex scenario for writers, and really make this something that they never really considered from that angle before?' So it really depends on the subject matter. Joanna: I know many people are interested in co-writing, and I've co-written a few books, but you and Angela have done a lot now together. So, what are your tips on co-writing? When does it work? How do you get through your own interpersonal conflicts? What are your tips on co-writing? Becca: I always joke with her. It's like Forrest Gump. We're like peas and carrots. We just have always been on the same page. We used to say that we were the Borg when we first started, because we are very, very similar. We're similar in our personality and our values, and in the way that we approach writing. And that has made it very easy for us to work together. I think the biggest thing is mutual respect. That's the biggest thing that we have found, because we do have differences, and there are things that we don't agree on, and you have to just have mutual respect for each other. You have to recognize I am not always right. I have weaknesses. She complements me in certain ways. And when it comes to those kinds of areas, like marketing, she's really, really good at marketing. I have zero idea really what to do there. So, when it comes to marketing, I defer to Angela. We can flip that around in areas where I am strong and she is not as much so. So, that's, I think, the biggest thing when you want to co-write, is recognizing that this is a team effort. You have to set your ego aside, and have mutual respect for the other person. I think it's super important to find people who fill your gaps. If you are working with someone who is exactly like you and who has the same strengths as you, then there's no one to handle the areas where you're weak. So, that has been incredibly beneficial for us. It's a beautiful pairing, where we do get along really well, but also, we have strengths and weaknesses in different areas, so we can complement each other. Joanna: Do you use Google Docs, or Scrivener, or what are you using so you don't overwrite each other's stuff? Because I know that's an issue with many co-writers. What tools do you use for doing the writing? Becca: We do it a little bit differently. When we're writing a new book, we come up with an outline, when we figure out what the content is going to be, and then we split it. Okay, you're going to write these sections, and I'm going to write these sections. It's completely separate in the beginning. So there is no overlap there. Then, when we put it together, we swap, and we edit each other's half. In doing that, we're each able to see, oh, I really touched on this aspect already in my section, so we're going to have to pare some of that down so that we don't have too much echo. And then, also, it helps us to create a blended style. And then we edit it again. We switch again. By the second round of edits, it all pretty much sounds like one person instead of Angela clearly wrote this section and this sounds more like Becca. I think that that's something that we have done pretty well over the years, because I don't think that in reading a book, it's easy to read through it and say, ‘Oh, this was Becca's and this was Angela's.' It all sounds like one person. We just use Word. We each write our stuff ourselves, and when we're finished, we send it to each other. I put it together, and then we swap it back and forth. It's really kind of old school, but it works for us. Joanna: Everyone has their own method, but yeah, your voice does set your voice. I say singularly. It does sound like a voice, because it does sound like one writer, which I think is really interesting. [Note from Joanna: I talk about my co-writing process in Co-Writing a Book, co-written with J. Thorn.] Tell us also about your business model, and your multiple streams of income, because many listeners want to write non-fiction books, and I feel like you guys have really created this business around non-fiction. Tell us about your multiple streams of income and the various businesses you have. Becca: We actually have two businesses. We have Writers Helping Writers. That started when we decided to publish The Emotion Thesaurus. That's where we have our blog. It's where we sell our books, and it's really how we do all of our speaking engagements through that business. That started first. Then we had somebody come to us a couple years later and said, ‘Hey, I really would love to see all of your Thesauruses in one spot, one digital online situation, where we can hyperlink everything, and it'll be searchable, and people can jump back and forth between the Thesauruses.' And we thought, ‘Oh, my gosh. That would be so great.' So we started One Stop for Writers, which has turned into a much bigger offering than what we had originally planned. And that's a separate business, because we were in business with someone from Australia, with Lee Powell, who was the one who did all of the engineering for it. He wrote all the code and set everything up, and worked with us to maintain the site in the beginning. So, we have two different businesses. I like to think of it as Writers Helping Writers is the instructive, informational. This is where you learn. The books tell you all the different aspects of storytelling and how to incorporate them, and how to really write those areas of storytelling well. And then One Stop for Writers is where we are able to apply it a little more easily, because we've created tools and resources containing the content from our books. So that helps you with actually applying information that you've learned. They're very similar, but they really accomplish two different things. And it's been a real journey. We knew nothing about business when we first started. Angela and I were just really good together, and it was very easy. Our partnership agreement that we had, it was one page. I don't know that it would hold up in court. It's crazy simple. Because that's all that we needed. Then we got into business with someone else and we had to educate ourselves on everything about business, about equity, partnerships, and how to make that work, and IP licensing, to protect the content that we had written. That's one of the biggest things that I think writers struggle with once they start… Once they get a little bit farther down the track and they start doing well. There are so many things that you don't know how to do, and as you start succeeding, then you really have to educate yourself. You have to learn how to do things that you're not good at, or that you have never done before. And that's been a huge part of the journey for each of us. I know when I got married, I was engaged to my husband, I said to him, ‘Listen, when we have kids, you basically have two jobs, okay? That's all on you, because I can't do either one of those things.' Well, 25 years later, I'm the person in charge of the books for both of our companies, because we didn't have anybody to do that, and neither one of us had experience with that. And so I said, ‘Okay, I'll take that on.' I figured it out and I'm doing something now in that regard that I never thought that I would be able to do years and years ago. So, part of having a successful business, I think this is true for fiction and non-fiction writers, is that you have to be able to grow and step out of your comfort zone, and educate yourself on the things that you don't know how to do. Some things, you just have to learn enough to get by. You don't have to invest a lot of time, but some things you really have to know what you're doing until you get to the point where you can hire people. That's the second thing that it took us so long to learn, was that we should have hired people a lot sooner. We had the resources to do it, but we didn't have time. We were so busy doing everything. And that's the weird kind of catch-22, is that we don't have time, so we need to hire someone, but, oh, we don't have time to hire someone. Eventually got to the place where we were turning down perfectly good opportunities that would have been really great for the business because we didn't have time, and we said, ‘Okay, stop. We have to do something about this. We have to bring people on.' I think that would be a bit of advice for people who are headed down that track and they're achieving a measure of success and their business is growing, is that you have to be willing to step out and educate yourself about the things that you're not good at. And then the things that you don't want to do or that you can't do, if you're able to hire someone, do it. I mean, that's part of, I think, being a good business person, and that's what you are as a writer. You have a business. My husband, who's been an entrepreneur for years, always said, ‘As the business leader, you should be doing what only you can do.‘ I could do everything. I can do all the little stuff, but really, there are certain things that only Angela and I can do, and we need to outsource as much of the other stuff as we can so that we can focus on the things that make our business great and that make our books really helpful. So, lessons learned. Joanna: I think that's really important, but it's interesting because, of course, there's two of you, and I can hear people going, ‘But there's two of them, so why can't they do everything?' The first person I ever hired was a bookkeeper, and, of course, we need accountants and we need some legal freelance help and things like that. What have you felt were the most important things that you did hire out, or get freelance people for? Becca: The accountant was the first person. My husband, again, he's super great at math, and had his own businesses and was doing his own accounting. And so he did our accounting for the first couple of years, but then when we started working with One Stop for Writers, and we've got three partners, basically, all in different countries, he was like, ‘You know what? It's getting a little too complicated for me.' And I said, ‘Okay, this is silly. We should just hire somebody to do our taxes.' So, that was something that I want to smack myself for not doing earlier. But then we also hired Mindy, who is our blog wizard. She basically does everything at the blog. She schedules all the guest posts. She collects the ideas and vets them. She puts all the posts up at the blog. She handles a lot of the comments, and interacting with people. That created a lot of free time for me and Angela from stuff that we were doing, that now someone else is doing, and so we can dedicate our time somewhere else. The next person is absolutely a marketing person for Angela. She's been doing all of it, and she needs somebody to help her with that, so we're excited to be able to do that pretty soon. Joanna: So, basically, it's the dealing with the finances, and it's interesting. I do think it's important for people. If you are getting to that point, you definitely need professionals to help with your finances. I was out of control even just with my books, which are just the sort of monthly thing. And then, as you say, marketing. I think those are probably, still, for everyone, the two biggest things that we do hire out. That's fantastic, and it's lovely to hear about your business model as well. I did want, actually, just before we finish, we're almost out of time, but one of the things that I noticed, because I think we both got approached by the same company for licensing, maybe it was South Korean or… There was something where I was like, ‘Oh, look. You know, that agency deals with your foreign rights somewhere else.' Tell us about intellectual property licensing, and how foreign rights play into the business now. Becca: That was something that we dismissed for the longest time. Just, again, no time. We had done all of the self-publishing for everything, and so we assumed that that's how eventually when we moved into foreign markets that we would just do it ourselves, because that's what we did. But we had no idea how to do it, didn't have the time, so we just kind of kept putting it off. And then a Korean publisher approached us and said, ‘Hey, are the Korean rights for The Emotion Thesaurus available?' And we thought, ‘Okay, we're just leaving money on the table at this point. This is silly.' We realized we don't have to do it ourselves. This is something that we can outsource. So we found an agent that specializes only in foreign rights deals, which was perfect, because we didn't really need anything domestically. We went to her and said, ‘Here's what we're looking for. Here's this offer that we have,' and she's like, ‘Here's the paperwork,' and 9 years later, our books are in 10 languages. We have contracts coming in seemingly every two or three months for our new books, from the existing publishers that we're working with, or from new markets. We just signed a contract with Greece, and we're working on something with France. So, that was something that really came out of nowhere, seemingly. We haven't done a whole lot of work in terms of we're not marketing in Greece, in Turkey, and all of those things. It's something that we didn't realize how beneficial it was until we got into it. Our foreign rights sales account for a quarter of our sales at this point. It's crazy. Joanna: That's amazing. I'm really glad you said that. I'm glad I asked that at the end because I know that's important, but I didn't realize how big a deal it was. So that is fantastic. Where can people find you and the various Thesauruses and everything you do online? Becca: Our blog is writershelpingwriters.net. That's where the blog is and all of the books. Information on the books can be found there. And then, onestopforwriters.com is our subscription-based website that has a character builder, story mapping tool. It has all of our Thesauruses, the entry portions, in digital form, a huge collection of all of our ‘Thesaurus' information there. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Becca. That was great. Becca: Thank you so much for having me. You're the best.The post Writing Conflict With Becca Puglisi first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In July 2022, I launched my online shop at www.CreativePennBooks.com. It’s built on Shopify’s eCommerce platform, and in this solo episode, I’ll explain why I built the store, my lessons learned, tips if you want to build your own, and how I intend to expand it over time.  This episode is sponsored by my wonderful patrons. If you find the podcast useful, you can support the show at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn and you'll get discounts on my books and products, plus you can ask your questions in my private monthly Q&A. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. 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 selling direct? Why sell direct?Why I switched from Payhip to ShopifyWhy a separate store, www.CreativePennBooks.com instead of WooCommerce within my existing sites?Why Shopify rather than Kickstarter?The Minimum Viable Store approachSoftware and integrations — what else do you need? Options for drop-shipping print-on-demand books — Lulu Direct and Bookvault.app and why I made the choice I did How does the money work? What are the costs? How do I get paid?What about sales tax / VAT?How long does the setup take? What about support issues? How time-consuming is it?What about marketing? How do you get traffic to your store?What are my plans for the store?Are direct sales for you?Free books if you buy direct — and where to find help if you need it You can find my store at www.CreativePennBooks.com and linked in the menu as Shop and also on every book page. Imagine this…  You write what you want, with no concern about how an algorithm will treat your release. You’re in control of the site and your sales pages, with no other ads on your page to distract potential readers. You release your books in multiple formats, direct to your readers and listeners. You don’t have to store and ship books since they are printed on demand and sent straight to the buyer. Customer service for ebooks and audiobooks is even taken care of by the wonderful team at Bookfunnel. The customer receives a fantastic product and you get money in your bank account within a day or two, or even within the hour.  You also get the customer’s name, email, and address as well as details about what they bought and when, so you can foster an ongoing relationship. You can expand your store into different kinds of products through other print-on-demand services — merchandise related to your books, other formats like workbooks, journals, and special editions, online courses, audio extras, coaching, or whatever else you want to sell.  Over time, you build up traffic to your store, and that effort compounds, so you start to make sales every day on a site you control. You still publish on other platforms and third-party stores, but now you’re truly an independent author. That’s the dream — and after more than a decade as a full-time author entrepreneur, I feel like I have taken a giant step closer to it by building my direct store, www.CreativePennBooks.com on the Shopify platform. So, let’s get into the details.  What is selling direct?  Selling direct encompasses many options, but essentially it’s you the author interacting with readers or listeners on your own platform and selling your books and other products in various formats. It usually involves making more profit per sale, getting paid faster, and retaining customer data.  It can be as varied as Kickstarter for a limited edition series of books (as Brandon Sanderson famously did with his $41m campaign); it can be an author selling their hand-bound ‘zine at a local craft fair, or more usually in the indie community, it’s selling ebooks and audiobooks through platforms like Payhip, or developed stores like Shopify, or plugin systems like WooCommerce. It is part of the ethos of publishing wide, which means not being exclusive to any specific retailer, but of course, you can choose different publishing options by book, by series, by author name, and by format. Many wide authors choose different options for different books over time. Selling direct doesn’t mean you ONLY sell on your store (unless you want to.) You can publish wide everywhere else as well as sell on your store, and customers can get your books from their favorite store or from the library or wherever they get books.  However, you might decide to have direct first and/or direct only products to encourage buyers. I sold How to Write a Novel direct for a month, although it’s available from 13 August 2022 on all stores in all the usual formats. My How to Write a Novel Workbook is only available on my store. To be clear, you need to own and control your intellectual property rights in order to sell direct. If you have signed a contract with a publisher for ‘digital rights’ or ebook and/or audiobook rights, you cannot sell your ebooks and audiobooks direct. If you have signed a contract for paperback or hardback or whatever else, you cannot sell your books direct — unless you clear that with your publisher.  Also, if you have opted into KDP Select for ebooks, or signed an exclusive contract with ACX for audio, you cannot sell those ebooks and audiobooks direct. That includes box sets/bundles if you have opted in for the individual books. Some KU authors release ebooks direct first, then withdraw them and put them in KU after the initial sales.  Remember, as an independent author, you are in control. You get to choose what’s right for your book and your author business. Why sell direct?  The main reasons for selling direct are creative and financial freedom.  You have the freedom to create and sell whatever you like, whenever you like, without fear of the platform owner changing the rules, or shifting the algorithm, or covering your sales page with ads for other books, or deciding they don’t want to publish your book. You make more money per sale and faster money per sale. It’s in your bank account immediately, or within a few days, instead of months.  You control the site and the customer experience, and you also retain customer data, with the caveat that you abide by all the relevant anti-spam and data protection laws.  It’s also getting easier.  The pandemic accelerated the adoption of online sales from niche stores, so customers are much happier to buy from authors and creatives, and not just on the big brand websites.  In fact, many customers choose to support their favorite creators directly and understand that buying direct helps the authors they love.  Some customers even seek out alternative ways to buy rather than using big brand stores because they want to support a more diverse creative and publishing ecosystem. I frequently get emails asking me for my links for books and other products because people want to buy from me and make sure I get a bigger share of the revenue than the big brands. Let’s be clear. I love the publishing industry and the companies that enable us to sell our books to as wide an audience as possible. I buy books in multiple formats from multiple places online and off, and I also borrow them from subscription programs. I also appreciate you buying or borrowing my books in any way you choose. It’s not about limiting options. It’s about expanding them. I want the entire industry to thrive — but every company is looking out for their own profits first, and selling direct means I get to look out for mine, before giving the other stores a cut of sales. Why I switched from Payhip to Shopify I’ve been selling ebooks, audiobooks, and online courses since I started online in 2008. I began with simple WordPress password-protected pages with PayPal payments, then I moved to e-Junkie and then SELZ for selling PDFs, videos, and ebooks until the EU Digital Tax law in 2018 made things more complicated. I moved to Payhip once they started to process EU tax on behalf of sellers, and integration with Bookfunnel made things easier in terms of delivery and customer service for digital products.  Until July 2022, I used Payhip for ebooks and audiobooks (tutorial here), Teachable for my courses (www.TheCreativePenn.com/learn ) and society6.com/creativepenn  for merchandise, like my CREATIVE branded mugs. I’ve been making direct sales almost every day for years now, but I have always thought that selling print books direct would be a huge pain, so I focused on digital only. My business principles include freedom of time and location, so I didn’t want to have boxes of books in my house, or be concerned about shipping and all its associated difficulties. Then in March 2022, I heard author Katie Cross on the 6 Figure Authors podcast talking about using Shopify with Print on Demand. It answered a lot of my questions about the process, and Katie kindly answered more questions personally, and also in this interview on my Creative Penn podcast.  Check out her books at www.KatieCrossBooks.com  I also spoke to patrons of the show, Shaw and Morgana Best, who both helped with other technical questions. Morgana also came on The Creative Penn Podcast to talk about her book, Stop Making Others Rich: How Authors Can Make Bank Selling Direct. Check out her store at www.MorganaBest.com  I learned that drop shipping print-on-demand books was not an issue after all. You can use Lulu Direct and/or Bookvault.app to integrate with your Shopify (or WooCommerce) store and they will print and ship books for you. Once I discovered this, I decided to investigate the idea of a store in more detail. To be clear, Payhip is a fantastic solution for selling direct if you want to sell primarily digital products with minimal setup and minimum fuss with EU digital taxes handled for you. I still recommend it, and I have a tutorial for setting it up with Bookfunnel here: https://www.thecreativepenn.com/selldirecttutorial/  But Payhip is limited in its functionality in terms of design and also integrations, so if you want multiple brands, multiple products, and integration with drop-shipping print on demand, then Shopify (or WooCommerce) are the way to go.  The Shopify App Store means you have almost unlimited options. Whatever you want to sell or develop, you will likely be able to find ‘an app for that,’ so you can build out a much bigger ecosystem than the smaller stores like Payhip allow for. Why a separate site, CreativePennBooks.com, and not a WooCommerce plugin or equivalent on my main websites? Some authors use WooCommerce as a plugin on their existing website, which means they can offer sales from their site without clicking over to another store. Much of the same functionality applies, and given the amount of traffic I get on TheCreativePenn.com, it might have made sense to do it that way.  But I have a few reasons for using a separate store website. TheCreativePenn.com is an old website. Home page of TheCreativePenn.com in Dec 2008 from the wayback machine I first built it in 2008 and although I have kept it as streamlined as possible, it has thousands of pages and posts and lots of plugins, and inevitably some old code. I didn’t want to burden it further by using WooCommerce as yet another suite of plugins. I also have multiple websites. The main ones are TheCreativePenn.com for Joanna Penn, JFPenn.com, and BooksAndTravel.page for J.F. Penn, and I also have CurlUpPress.com for the licensing side. If I went with WooCommerce, I would have to build on every site. I want one store across all my author brands, where there is no algorithm to worry about and customers can browse and buy across different facets of my creative world, which, let’s face it, is ever-expanding! Right now at CreativePennBooks.com, you can buy a J.F. Penn thriller, a creative self-help Joanna Penn book, or a mature sweet romance by my mum, Penny Appleton, and it won’t confuse any recommendation algorithm. I will add my pilgrimage memoir, merchandise, and a whole load of new stuff in the coming months (more on that towards the end). I’ve spent years separating all my brands on my various websites, as well as on the Third Party retailers. This absolutely makes sense for those stores, which rely on their AI algorithms to surface books to browsers.  But (you might have noticed) I am a multi-passionate creative!  I write and create in all kinds of different ways and I have felt increasingly hemmed in by the way we have to contort our creative selves to fit what the platforms want. A single store with links to everything I make with my intellectual property assets brings my creative offerings together in one place. Those who are interested in one type of book or product may discover I have much more to offer. I’m now directing traffic from all my other sites and social media platforms to CreativePennBooks.com and customers have the choice to shop for what they want, or since I will continue to publish on the other stores, they can buy or borrow wherever they like. Why Shopify rather than Kickstarter? (although they are not mutually exclusive) I decided to launch my store at the same time as launching my new non-fiction book, How to Write a Novel, which in hindsight was way too much work all at once. Tip: Don’t do that! I originally intended to launch How to Write a Novel as a Kickstarter campaign, and even went as far as creating a project plan and going through preliminary options with White Fox for design. I also interviewed Monica Leonelle and Bryan Cohen about their campaigns.  But I felt uneasy about using Kickstarter, an unease I have felt since the early days of crowdfunding. Although the model works well for many authors, it just doesn’t suit me as a creator. I don’t like ‘launch’ energy. I don’t like hype. I don’t like being boxed in by promising something to people and then feeling like I have too many ‘bosses’ waiting.  I much prefer the long game, and the evergreen availability of products underpinned by content marketing. A Kickstarter campaign is bounded by time and all your energy has to go into making that campaign a success, then after you’ve fulfilled that one, you do it again. Repeated Kickstarters build an audience on their platform and later campaigns can be more successful than earlier ones. It’s a series of ‘spike launches’ that you repeat, sometimes multiple times per year. Building a store is a very different project. It’s a one-off setup, which takes time upfront to get going, and then you incrementally add to it as you release books or expand into other products.  It’s more like a snowball rolling down the hill, getting bigger over time, which fits my preferred model of content marketing and a slow build over years.  So I have nothing against Kickstarter, and perhaps I might still do one in the future — but I decided to launch How to Write a Novel direct on my own store with an evergreen model. The Minimum Viable Store If you look into the possibilities of Shopify or WooCommerce, you quickly realize how powerful they can be — but that is both a blessing and a curse.  Once I decided to build a store, I read some books on Shopify, I listened to podcasts, and I talked to authors already embedded in it who were further down the track. I browsed the Shopify app store and discovered there really is an app for anything you want.  I quickly became overwhelmed.  I’m also not someone who likes to follow online video tutorials for software. I prefer to jump in and play with things. So I started a Shopify account, thinking it would be easy enough since I’ve been doing my own WordPress for years.  But of course, it’s not like WordPress, so I had to learn a new system. In my previous day job, I spent 13 years as a business consultant, implementing the software package SAP into large and small companies across Europe and Asia Pacific. I specialized in Accounts Payable and Banking and spent much of my time implementing and testing software. Those years taught me many things that have proved useful in my author life.  Relevant here are two things that might also help you.  Keep software as standard as possible and future upgrades will be less painful and less expensive. I have done this with my WordPress websites since 2008 and it has served me well and kept costs low. Control your project scope. If you expand the scope of the project, you will be in a lot of pain and may never finish! Bearing these principles in mind, I cut everything back to my initial project scope: Launching a Minimum Viable Store using the most basic aspects of Shopify Products — I only set up ebooks, audiobooks, and paperbacks. No bundles, no Large Print, no Hardbacks, no merch, no courses, no extras. I just wanted to replicate my Payhip store, plus add the print-on-demand option for paperbacks, and of course, launch How to Write a Novel into the world. Setting up Products was the main bulk of my work as I have a huge backlist with a lot of different formats. I set up 134 different products of varying kinds and then I needed to test all the integrations so that once a customer bought an ebook or audiobook, they would get the right files delivered by Bookfunnel and they were tagged in ConvertKit, and the print books were connected to the right files.  I also spent time making consistent product images. It’s important that the buyer knows what they are getting, and for the store to look professional, so I wanted to make images that looked all the same. I used MockUpShots.com to create the raw images, then resized them in canva.com. You can also use BookBrush.com or other image tools. I then had to set up Collections, which are groups of products based on varying criteria. For example,  How to Write a Novel is a collection, featuring the various formats all on one page.  Ebooks for Authors is also a collection by formats, as is Mapwalker Fantasy Audiobooks.  Collections are a key feature and element of the Shopify design. If you take a look at www.CreativePennBooks.com most pages are built using Featured Collections. Theme — I used Dawn, the standard theme provided as part of the Shopify account. Thanks to a patron of the show, Shaw, for helping me with the design side of things. It works differently from what I’m used to, but the standard theme has been fantastic. Payments — I set up the basics, Shopify Payments, and PayPal. Apps — The apps I have at the time of recording are: Bookvault (for POD), ConvertKit (for email integration), Frequently Bought Together (which suggests other products), GDPR/CCPA + Cookie Management, Customer Privacy, and Geolocation. Taxes and Integrations are covered in more detail below.  I also paid a Reedsy freelancer to set up the tracking for Google Analytics and Facebook, so I can possibly use them later for more targeting advertising based on conversions. You can optimize ads for sales and conversions if you control the sales page, which makes paid ads much more effective, and potentially cheaper per conversion. I have no immediate plans to do paid ads, but I want the option to use them later. The goal was to get the store live and launch How to Write a Novel and expand the store later. I achieved my goal, launching the minimum viable store and the book on 13 July 2022.  If you want to take this route, I suggest you follow the same approach. What is the minimum you need to do to get started? Then expand from there.  I’d give the same advice to anyone starting out with any kind of business, or becoming an author, or any new venture. Keep it simple. Otherwise, it’s easy to become confused and overwhelmed by all the options, and you might give up. [Note: If you are a new author working on your first book, then finish the book as your priority. Don’t worry about publishing options, marketing, or anything else other than finishing the book! Everything else is secondary.] Software and integrations: What other services do you need? For delivering ebooks and audiobooks, set up integration with Bookfunnel, which most indie authors and many readers are already familiar with as we use it to deliver our Reader Magnets, do promos, and more. Set up the ebook or audiobook within Bookfunnel.  Set up a Delivery Action.  Use a SKU code on the Shopify Product and link that SKU within Bookfunnel. They have easy setup instructions here. What about print books?  While you can do a special print run, store books at your house or in a warehouse, and then ship them to customers personally, I wanted to do print-on-demand drop shipping, which is basically the same as how Amazon KDP Print and Ingram Spark work. A customer orders and pays for the book + shipping. The book is printed and sent direct to them by the Third Party printer.  You do not pay lots of money upfront for bulk printing.  You do not have to store books or pay warehouse costs.  You do not have to handle packaging, postage, or shipping. The two main POD book drop-shipping services are Lulu Direct and Bookvault.app.  Choose whichever service as an App within your Shopify store.  Set up each book on the service. The ISBN links the Shopify product to the book at the printer, but they also have options for ‘dummy’ ISBNs so you don’t even need your own. It’s just a code linking the product with the printer.  One of the benefits of selling direct is knowing who your customer is and what they bought. I use ConvertKit for my email management and it has easy integration with Shopify.  I have the GDPR/CCPA + Cookie Management, and Customer Privacy apps to adhere to the appropriate data protection rules. Within ConvertKit, I set up a Rule for each product and assigned a Tag to the customer for the Product they bought, as well as sending an automatic email depending on what kind of product it was.  I want to get a lot more granular with this Tagging and email segmentation, but as part of my Minimum Viable Store approach, I went with the basics and will add to this later. For payments, you need to integrate with PayPal and Stripe. Both require anti-money-laundering checks if you’re new on the platforms, so make sure you allow enough time for setup. Why did I use BookVault.app for my print-on-demand books? Both Katie Cross and Morgana Best recommended Lulu Direct, but my entire backlist of paperbacks and many hardbacks are in 5 x 8 format, which Lulu doesn’t (currently) support. I was also aware of Bookvault.app after seeing them at a stand at the London Book Fair back in April. I kept one of their leaflets on my desk. Although the printing company behind it, Printondemand-worldwide has been established for over 25 years, the Shopify and WooCommerce integration is a relatively new service. My choice was to reformat my entire backlist to 5.5 x 8.5 or go with Bookvault.app. I decided on the latter and I’m extremely happy with them. The print quality is excellent, the pricing is great, and their customer service has been fantastic. (Thanks Alex and Curtis!) I’m also thrilled that I can do individual color pages. It means that How to Write a Novel bought direct from me has an interior color title page, and I’ll add other color features to books in the future. All interior pages are black and white if you buy from the other stores, although they do have other color options for higher print prices.  The Bookvault version also has a silken matte cover finish and doesn’t curl up or go wavy like some of the other POD services sometimes do. They have a lot of options for other print-on-demand books, so I’m excited to get more creative with print with future releases. I tested a lot of their functionality as part of my setup and suggested improvements. The support team responded quickly and helped with all my questions.  Bookvault.app has a setup fee per book, but no charge to change those files in the future. If you have a large backlist, ask for a discount for bulk setup. The biggest issue is that they currently only print in the UK (as of August 2022), so if a customer orders from outside the UK, the shipping cost is higher than some services and takes longer than the ‘next day delivery service’ many readers are used to. It can take 10-15 business days for delivery. Thanks to @jimmiekepler – from twitter However, there are ways to deal with this:  Understand that you are NOT competing with the big brand stores for printing and free, fast delivery. None of us can compete with the big stores, so don’t even try to.  My books are available in all the usual places, and customers can buy there if they want, or get the book from the library. Whatever they like.  But to encourage direct sales, I remind buyers that by purchasing direct, they are supporting both an independent author, and also an independent book printer. For How To Write a Novel, the customer also gets a premium special print edition that’s different to those offered on other stores. Isn’t it worth a few more dollars and a little longer to wait for that? Communicate the timeframe for delivery on the product page and on your FAQ page. The paperback edition of How to Write a Novel says, Shipping in the UK, 3-4 days. To US, CA, AU and other countries, it can be 10 business days (2 weeks) for this special edition. Communicate this again in the email that buyers are sent after purchase to avoid support emails.  Thanks to @alyssakckuron on twitter Based on my feedback and that of other authors, Bookvault is currently investigating printers within the USA and that might be something they develop further based on demand. The more authors who ask, the better! You can contact them through www.bookvault.app  You can also split your sales and use both services. Morgana Best added Bookvault because of the cheaper print prices and now sells UK print books through Bookvault and international print books through Lulu Direct. What about signed print books?  If you want to sign the book and dedicate it to someone, you can’t drop-ship those. You need the books physically in your hands to sign them, then you have to ship them.  While you can set up a sale for this within Shopify, or with any other payment platform, you’re still going to need the print books in your house, store them and ship them, which is why I don’t do this at the moment. How does the money work? What are the costs? How do I get paid? There are some upfront setup costs.  Shopify has several plans and these will no doubt change over time, but it ranges from $29 to $299 per month depending on what level of functionality you need. Yes, I am now an affiliate so you can use my link: www.TheCreativePenn.com/shopify or just go to Shopify.com. For my Minimum Viable Store, I used it pretty much straight out of the box with no bells and whistles. You can also try it for free and see if you want to continue.  Many authors, like Morgana Best and Katie Cross now use their Shopify store as their main author website, so this removes hosting costs for another site.  To deliver ebooks and audiobooks, Bookfunnel is $20 – $250 per year depending on the size of your backlist and the functionality you require. Lulu Direct and BookVault.app have minimal setup costs per book, so the total cost will depend on the size of your backlist, number of formats etc. You can buy premium themes, but I used the standard Shopify theme included with the plan.  My other costs are already costs of my business — my accountant and bookkeeper, Xero for accounting software, ConvertKit for email, as well as the usual bank and transaction fees.  For the print books, you also have to keep your account at the printers topped up in advance. Payment for each order printed is taken from your balance. I top mine up in batches of several hundred pounds so it’s not a massive outlay, especially when you are paid so quickly after the sale. In terms of income, one of the brilliant things about selling direct is how fast the money gets to your bank account. Choose the payment methods you want to accept in the settings of your Shopify store. This can include everything from Shopify Payments to PayPal to Amazon Pay, and other options like cryptocurrency. For my Minimum Viable Store, I set up PayPal, where the money appears almost immediately in my account and I can transfer to my bank account immediately as well as I’ve been using it for years.  I also set up Shopify Payments, which are aggregated and paid to my account within 24-72 hours. You can change these settings based on your requirements. Set the price for each Product, factoring in your costs and the profit you want to make. You can set up different country or regional markets with different currencies and you can pay extra to set prices per currency or use their standard exchange rate. The money comes into your bank account in your store currency.  The main cost for ebooks and audiobooks (on top of editing and book cover design, as well as narration) is your Bookfunnel account as above.  So it’s a significant profit for digital products, minus transaction fees (for the basic plan it’s 2.9% + 30c per transaction, and there may also be PayPal and bank fees).  Compare that with 30 – 65% that the third-party stores take from each transaction, or if you’re traditionally published, the cut that the publisher and agent take. For print products, you obviously need to factor in the cost of printing as well as some exchange rate differences which come into play for overseas shipping. The shipping is paid for by the customer on top of the price of the book.  As a worked example, Mary buys How to Write a Novel direct.  £10.99 – Book cost £3.39 – Postage and packaging within the UK Mary pays: £14.38 on CreativePennBooks.com I receive that money almost immediately if it’s on PayPal or within a few days through ShopPay. I have already put some prepaid credit onto Bookvault and they use that credit to offset the printing and shipping. £3.58 – Printing cost £3.39 – Shipping cost Total cost: £6.97  Profit on this sale = £7.41 (around US$9) There are also fees on PayPal and Shopify which will depend on the plans you use. Assume 2.9% + 30c per transaction, so the fee on this would be around 71p.  Total profit after fees: £6.70 (around US$8) My books are also available through Amazon KDP Print and Ingram Spark, where I make around £3.40 profit per book, about half of what I make on my own store. And of course, that money doesn’t arrive in my bank account for at least 60 days.  Traditionally published authors may only see a fraction of that profit, for example, 10-20% of net on paperbacks, depending on the contract.   Yes, I could make the printed books cheaper, but this is a business and the whole point is providing a great product for a reasonable price and making a profit! This way, selling direct is more profitable for print books as well as digital formats. That’s a game-changer, and in the publishing world where profits are being squeezed by subscription programs and ad costs, we need the change the game. What about tax? I am not a financial, legal, or tax advisor, so none of this is financial, tax, or legal advice. Tax settings per product vary by country and, in some places, by state. Your country and the country of the customer will make a difference to the tax situation. The tax situation definitely put me off initially. Payhip handles EU taxes, and all the Third Party stores handle sales taxes/VAT, so using these platforms seemed like the best option. It still is for many people.  But it turned out that I was totally overstating the tax issues. It really is not that big a deal once you figure it out. Spending a few hours in the fine print really does pay off in the long run.  I researched what I needed to do per product. For example, in the UK, ebooks do not have VAT applied, but stationery like workbooks do, and so do audiobooks. The EU VAT taxes have to be applied per country of the customer and the invoice has to include certain info. There are thresholds in certain countries that will determine whether you need to account for tax there, and there are also tax treaties that apply depending on your jurisdiction and where you’re selling. Clearly, all that will vary depending on your situation. I sent a list to my accountant and she adjusted and then approved my settings, which I then set up within the Shopify Tax and Duties area. They have a handy setting for the European Union, which was my biggest concern, but again, it’s not been a big deal. The fear was greater than the actual event. There are premium tax apps on Shopify — TaxJar and Quaderno are two options. But I found that the standard Shopify tax report works just fine for my needs. I send the standard report to my accountant and they deal with the VAT for me, which they already do for my other tax-related transactions.  Given that everyone is in a different situation in terms of company setup, country, tax jurisdiction, and more, you will have to figure this out for yourself. But once I set aside the time and waded through a ton of tax pages, it was not that big of a deal, and now the setup is done, it’s sorted. How long does the setup take?  There is definitely a learning curve as Shopify is essentially a new system, but the time it takes to get to grips with it will depend on your confidence and patience with technology, how many products you have, how much testing you need to do, and how much help you have. It took me 40-50 hours to set up my store, including testing all the integrations. That’s hours spent, not time elapsed. I had a lot to build because of the extent of my backlist, and although I had help from authors with existing stores, I didn’t have a clear blueprint to follow. If you have fewer products, then you could definitely do it quicker, even with less technical experience. Although it was a push to get it all done for the launch, I learned how the Shopify system essentially works, and making changes to the store now is now just as easy as it is for me to change my WordPress sites. You can pay someone to set it up for you, but if you want to keep costs down, and understand how it all works, set aside some time, jump in and have a play. You can password protect the site until you’re ready to set it live.  This can-do attitude has always been my default position. If you think I had an advantage working as an SAP consultant all those years ago, think again! I have a Masters degree in Theology from the University of Oxford and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Psychology.  Although I have invested in many short courses over the years — and gazillions of books — I have no degree in computing, internet marketing, publishing, writing, or essentially anything related to how I make a living.  You can learn as you go. You just need the right attitude. In terms of help, I asked various people questions, but there was limited formal training or help available specifically for authors who want to sell books on Shopify. While there are loads of tutorials for selling other products, there was nothing specifically for us.  But that has now changed. Morgana Best has a great new book, Stop Making Others Rich: How Authors Can Make Bank Selling Direct, and she also has a course on selling direct which includes help with Shopify. I’m an affiliate of the course — https://www.thecreativepenn.com/shopifycourse  So the setup will be much easier if you follow her instructions than it was for me, but I still recommend you question what you need for your store once you have the basics. Every author is different. Start with the minimum viable store. What about support issues? How time-consuming has it been?  Since I’ve already been selling direct for years, and all my sales so far are to my existing audience, most went through with no problems.  A couple of people had issues with Bookfunnel downloads. A couple of people had issues with PayPal Express checkout in the UK, and a couple of people have emailed about how long the print book delivery is to the US. But the vast majority (96%) of orders have been fine with no support. I update my FAQ page and my post-purchase email as the issues come in, and I’m training my virtual assistant, Alexandra, to answer the common ones.  What about marketing? How do you get traffic to your store?  These days you have to drive traffic to your books on every store, so regardless of how you publish, you have to attract readers to your books. Pretty much all marketing tips apply to your own store as much as they do elsewhere. I’ve been using the same primary marketing methods for over a decade — email marketing and content marketing.  I have two main email lists. Get my free Author Blueprint at www.TheCreativePenn.com/blueprint and get a free thriller at www.JFPenn.com/free  There’s a link to sign up in the back of all my books, and links on my website, the podcast, and all over social media. I email every few weeks to the non-fiction audience and every month or so to my fiction audience. I include photos and articles and links to the podcast, affiliate offers — and yes, my books! Direct first or direct only sales will help bring customers over. For the launch of How to Write a Novel, I emailed my list, announced it on the podcast, and directed buyers to the purchase page on CreativePennBooks.com.  It’s been direct only for a month as this goes out, and will be on all the usual stores in the next few days. In terms of direct only, the How to Write a Novel Workbook is only available at my store. I won’t publish that anywhere else, at least for now. some of my workbooks for authors In the future, I intend to launch direct first and direct only for different products, and you can also easily provide Discount codes to encourage purchase. I sent them out to my patrons and also to my email list, and will continue to do direct only discounts over time. In terms of content marketing, I have two podcasts: The Creative Penn Podcast for Writers and Books and Travel, both with transcripts and show notes which many people read separately to the listening audience. This brings traffic to the store as I announce different things over time.  I am also updating my links everywhere — on social media, website pages, email signatures, and at some point, I will work through the backlist of my books.  One good tip (I think Morgana Best gave me this one!) is to have your Reading Order on your shop, and link through to that from your books so customers explore further. Of course, you can also use paid advertising. Most social media platforms have social commerce embedded now and since you can measure conversion, it enables far more optimized ads than just paying for clicks. I haven’t done this yet, but I have the Facebook pixel on the store and also Google Analytics for future use. I have an entire book on marketing, How to Market a Book, 99% of which applies to your own store, as much as any other third-party platform. Morgana Best also includes marketing ideas in Stop Making Others Rich. There are endless ideas for marketing books. You just have to change your mindset about where you send your readers. What are my plans for CreativePennBooks.com ?  While I was in the exhausted phase after the initial build and book launch, I wondered whether it was all worth the effort. This is a common feeling amongst authors who decide to publish wide, let alone sell direct. But my friend and creative mentor, Orna Ross, reminded me, “Think what this store could be in 10 years time.” This long-term attitude can be hard to maintain, but it’s what I have built my existing business on — and it’s what I will build the next decade of my business on. I am beyond excited to have a fledgling eCommerce site that is not dependent on the ever-changing requirements of the online bookstores, where I can deliver interesting and unique aspects of my creativity, and where I own the customer relationship. Plus, where I get paid first, rather than last. I still plan to be primarily wide with my books as ever — available everywhere you buy or borrow books — but I will launch direct first in the future. I will release everything I write and create on my store first, for a few weeks or even a few months before the other stores. I will also offer discounts to my email list and existing audience to buy direct. This is a mindset shift for me because although I have sold direct for over a decade, it has been as a secondary market. I’ve focused on the major stores first and had direct sales as an after-thought. Now I want to switch my effort the other way. So, I have many plans for CreativePennBooks.com to take it beyond the Minimum Viable Store.  In the short term, I need to finish the initial build:  Add the remaining bundles and boxsets Add other formats — Large Print and Hardback where appropriateSort out my social media integrations — Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter Build better email autoresponder flows so they are more than just one basic email per author name Then I want to look into new products:  Merchandise — Replace the CREATIVE range on https://society6.com/creativepenn with POD merch vendors on Shopify. I’d like to revisit the creative journal idea, and I have always wanted to do a ‘creative pen’! I take a LOT of photos on my travels, and I have some beautiful images. I’d like to look at how I can use them in products, e.g. POD cards, or other things, since those are essentially IP I own and control.Travel guides — PDF guides with lots of images for my walks, e.g. St Cuthbert’s Way, and perhaps audio walking tours that go along with my books, e.g. South Bank of LondonAudio programs — I want to take the audio of my video courses and turn them into audio-only products, as I know many of you (like me) prefer audio to videoNFT special editions for my books. Shopify is developing NFT functionality. It’s in beta at the moment, but I think NFTs and blockchain applications will become more user-friendly in 2023, so I will launch NFT digital originals alongside the other formats. I’m also encouraged by how much Shopify is considering web 3 and how tech might change in the next decade, so I am confident that their software will adapt as things shift.I also want to try some of the other creative print options Bookvault.app offers, like foil lamination and different cover materials. It’s time to experiment with more beautiful special print products, that excitingly, we can also do with POD. I also want to look into new payment methods like Amazon Pay and crypto payments, and whatever else might make it easier for people to shop. I also want to make the most of the SEO and reporting that Shopify provides.  As a small example, as I was preparing this, I went to my Home page within my Shopify Admin platform, where it includes recommendations to improve your store.  One section said, “Some of your visitors can’t find what they are looking for. People are searching for these terms on your online store but aren’t getting any results. You might want to add them to your product descriptions to help them out.”  Two customers had searched for ‘Scrivener’ on the store in the last week. I immediately took action and added my Scrivener tutorial to the site and linked to it on my FAQ page. That’s just a tiny example, and Shopify offers tips like this every time you log in customized to your store. I love the idea of improving my store by 1% every day, which will compound over time to a much more significant eCommerce platform, resulting in more of my income through direct sales. I’ll also add new forms of marketing. I need to update the back of all my books with my store link, and will also play with paid ads at some point. Shopify has a vast eCommerce system, so there is a lot more for me to learn. I don’t know what I don’t know right now, but the possibilities are exciting. There is so much potential.  Who knows what CreativePennBooks.com might be in 10 years’ time?  Was the temporary setup pain worth it?  Absolutely.  In the end, this is a mindset shift towards building a truly independent creative business.  It’s about changing the game and focusing on what I want to create and sell rather than trying to keep up with the ever-changing requirements of the third-party stores and ad platforms.  Of course, I will still publish (most of) my books in all the usual places — and I appreciate you buying or borrowing my books from wherever you want to — but in terms of my author business, I will slowly switch my focus to selling direct. I value creative and financial freedom above pretty much all else and I’m thinking about CreativePennBooks.com as the cornerstone of my next decade as an author entrepreneur, the basis of my Creator Economy. Interesting times ahead as ever! Are direct sales for you?  If you ‘just want to write’ and don’t want to run a business as an author, direct sales are not for you. If technology freaks you out in general, this is not for you. If you’re still here and you feel a pull of curiosity, then direct sales might be right for your author business. Start with whatever your Minimum Viable Store is and go from there. Or revisit this idea later once your career is more developed. Try out CreativePennBooks.com with free ebooks and audio  If you’d like to try the store as a customer without spending any money, then you can get the following products for free at www.CreativePennBooks.com :  Stone of Fire, ARKANE Thriller #1 Ebook (2022 edition) Successful Self-Publishing Ebook Blood, Sweat and Flame. A Short Story, written and narrated by me, J.F. Penn  Of course, you’re welcome to buy too! Need help with your Shopify store?  As ever, I will continue to share my journey and lessons learned along the way on the podcast, and if you’re a Patron of the show, you can ask your specific questions in the monthly Q&A. You can become a Patron at www.Patreon.com/thecreativepenn I’ll also include more thoughts in my Creator Economy mini-course, coming soon. For more help, check out Morgana Best’s new book, Stop Making Others Rich: How Authors Can Make Bank Selling Direct. Morgana also has a course, Authors Selling Books on Shopify, coming out in September 2022 which you can pre-order at my affiliate link: www.thecreativepenn.com/shopifycourse  She also has a Facebook group, Authors Selling Direct: https://www.facebook.com/groups/authorssellingdirect/  Let me know what you think in the comments. Is direct sales the future for indie authors? What are your questions about selling direct on Shopify? And if you already have a Shopify store, please share your lessons learned and tips. The post Selling Books Direct With Shopify: The Minimum Viable Store first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Selling your books direct to readers and listeners can bring you more money, faster, and allow you to control your customer's experience and data. Morgana Best explains why selling direct is so important for an author business, and some of her tips for implementing a Shopify store. In the intro, the publishing court case of the DOJ vs PRH and S&S merger [New York Times; Vanity Fair; The Hotsheet]; Publisher Pearson is planning to use NFTs [The Guardian]; More on NFTs and blockchain [Future]; Mark Dawson's Ads for Authors opens this week (affiliate link); my bookbinding project from print on demand to leather-bound original. 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 Morgana Best is the ‘USA Today' Bestselling Author of over 50 cozy mysteries. She has been selling direct from her website for many years, and shares all her tips in her new book, Stop Making Others Rich: How Authors Can Make Bank Selling Direct. 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 Why sell direct? The mindset you need to sell directCost of your own store vs cost of selling through the retailers (and of course, you can do both!)Delivering ebooks, audiobooks, and print-on-demand books when selling direct?Using customer data in an ethical manner, and how to optimize your store by utilizing dataDon't get overwhelmed. Start with a minimum viable storeDirect book marketing — how to drive traffic to a Shopify store You can find Morgana Best at MorganaBest.com and on Twitter @MorganaBest Transcript of Interview with Morgana Best Joanna: Morgana Best is the ‘USA Today' Bestselling Author of over 50 cozy mysteries. She has been selling direct from her website for many years, and shares all her tips in her new book, Stop Making Others Rich: How Authors Can Make Bank Selling Direct. Welcome, Morgana. Morgana: Oh, thanks so much for having me. Joanna: We've talked privately, so I'm excited to have you on the show. But let's take a step back. Why did you decide to start selling direct? And when was that? Morgana: Oh gosh, it was in 1993. Joanna: The beginning of the internet. Morgana: I was five years old at the time. No, I lie, I wasn't. No, what happened, I was interviewed by a large Australian magazine, and the journalist said, ‘Now you're going to be having publishers knock on your door.' But I only had one, but it was Random House. I was so excited. They solicited a popular book based on my doctorate, but unfortunately, it didn't come off. It took months and months of backwards and forwards. I had to send them this, they had to send me that, and it was quite a stressful process. And in the end, it all fell through. So, I was left with this manuscript and I thought, ‘You know what, I'll just sell it direct.‘ This was before the internet really hadn't taken off, and so it was in person. I went to Collins Bookstore and asked them if they'd take it, and he said, ‘We'll try five.' So, I got four friends to go and buy it, and he's like, ‘Oh, this is fantastic.' And so, they got it nationally. I got it selling there, but of course, I had a thousand copies offset run, which was fairly expensive because I didn't know what I was doing. Fast forward almost 10 years later, I did another doctorate, but this was on a bit of an apparently touchy subject. I had an agent and I had a small publishing house, which was headed by quite a famous person, in the public-eye-type famous, not like an academic-type famous that no one had heard of, approach me and try to buy the rights to privish the book. And for listeners who don't know what privish is, it's basically where a publisher buys the rights to a book to shut it down because this was a rather sensitive book. After that, I paid the agent off, got rid of the agent, and I did another print run and I sold this book. Now I had two main separate non-fiction books that I had to sell direct. So, that's actually what got me into selling direct. By the time Kindle came around, I was already used to getting all the money and not giving anyone 30% to 70%. And I was used to having customers, not having retailers own customers. Back then, you couldn't even run ads to the retailers, but I already I was so used to doing it myself and I knew all the benefits to doing it myself, and I wasn't too happy to hand it over to the retailers when that happened, when Kindle happened in 2007. But of course I did it, but I just knew the other side of the fence by then. Joanna: I think that's important is that you've basically taken advantage of all the technology as it's come along, but you started back when it was super difficult. You started before me, but when I started self-publishing there was also no Kindle. And it's so funny because I feel like now people don't remember what it was like before, how easy it is now to get e-books and everything, and audiobooks, when for a long time it was sort of downloadable PDFs from websites and it was really hard. Times have changed, and we are going to get into some of the technology. But I think before we get into that, let's talk about mindset because I really do feel like that is the key. How do authors need to change their mindset in order to sell direct and be successful selling direct? Morgana: I think authors have what I call the ‘author mindset.' I'm making air quotes here. Now, I'm always asked the same questions when authors approach me and say, ‘How should I sell direct?' And they always say, ‘What will happen to my Amazon rank? How will I get people to buy from my store? What's the cheapest way I can sell direct?' And then they're super embarrassed about making money. That has always shocked me because I thought authors liked making money. I mean, who doesn't like making money? But it's almost an embarrassment. You will hear people say, ‘I'm embarrassed about being filthy rich.' Well, I always call it clean rich, but it's interesting that they're embarrassed about having dollars as the objective. Like I say, ‘What's your objective in having a store? Do you want to just be like one of the retailers with a little buy button or do you want to build a business? What's your objective? Is it money?' And they go, ‘Oh, no, no, not money. No, no.' They almost ring their hands and almost say that the objective is world peace. They can't admit to wanting to make money, which is quite strange to me because you've got to pay the mortgage or pay rent, you've got to feed yourself, you've got to feed your pets, you have to wear clothes or you'll be arrested. You need money to survive, so why not let's admit it? Now, selling direct, for a start, you have to have a good relationship with money and admit that money is at least one of your objectives. Also that the cheapest way to sell might not be the way that brings the best profit. It's that old Latin saying, ‘You need money to make money.' Obviously, I've quoted it in English, but yeah, that's an ancient…they knew that 2,000 years ago and it's still the way today, you have to invest in your business. It's also not a get-rich-quick scheme. There are no shortcuts and you're going to have authors whether selling direct or selling on retail, something's always going to cost you either time or money, or both, but usually one or the other. But you can't get out of it either way, you'll have to fork out either time or money. Think of readers as customers and books as products. It's not a dirty word to have customers. You can still like your customers and they can still be readers, it's not mutually exclusive, but to think of things with a business mindset. Joanna: I love all that. It's so brilliant. You said they're clean rich. I like clean rich rather than filthy rich. I like that. Or filthy in a good way! Morgana: Filthy in a good way! Joanna: You talked about lots there and I think you are exactly right. A good relationship with money, a business mindset, investing in order to grow and to sell. But wait, we've got to answer that question, which you brought up at first, which is the first question people ask you. “What will happen to my Amazon rank if I sell direct?” Morgana: Yes. If you are a wide author, you are already used to not having a good Amazon rank because a borrow counts as a sale. It's quite funny, a couple of years ago, to test it, I put my pen name's new release and my wide book on Amazon on the same day. And strangely, their ranking was almost identical. And her book went to, I think it was 500, and mine was like 4,000. And they had the identical sales. It was strange, but that just shows you like as wide authors you're not going to get that good Amazon ranking. Some people on KU are already selling their backlist that's not in Select, direct, they're selling their paperbacks direct, and they're selling their audiobooks direct. I think they're the ones who are more concerned about rank, but that's the question. But that's a retailer type of thinking, not a business person type of thinking, but again, it depends on your objective. Does this author want to build up a business or do they simply want to have a buy button on their store? Now, there's no right or wrong, but it comes down to that. If they want to build up a business, who cares what happens to their Amazon ranking? It doesn't matter. And if they've only got a buy button on a store, they're not going to sell enough books to affect their Amazon ranking, so it becomes a moot point really. Joanna: You've got tons of books, you write very fast and this is an important point, you can do different things with different author names. You can do different things with different formats. As we record this, I'm doing my store-only How to Write a Novel at CreativePennBooks.com and it's not anywhere at all except my store. But then, that store also has my backlist. And some of the books that are in KU like my mum's sweet romances, Penny Appleton, the paperbacks are there, but the e-books are on KU. I think this is an important point. If you go into KU or you sell on Amazon, with e-books, you can put different formats on. You can mix and match depending on what you want. It's not an all-or-nothing thing. Morgana: Absolutely, and that's a very important point. Samantha Price, who writes I think Amish romance, is in KU. She's been in KU for years, and she has all her paperbacks and her large prints and her audio and her backlists that she's taken out of Select, she's got all those on her store. Without even advertising, because I think she's too busy churning out books and she hasn't had a chance, she's doing quite well out of that store. Joanna: Since we're talking about money, let's talk about the income and the cost because you did mention there the cheapest way to sell might not be the best way to make money, which I thought was a good way to put it. So, let's talk about the costs first. What are the costs of selling direct? Morgana: First of all, I'll just quickly run through the costs of selling on the retailers — 30% to 70% of your income, and they take your customers. And if you're doing Amazon ads, who benefits from that? I think I started counting the other day and I got to 38 and there were still books I hadn't counted, and they were not the main book on the product page. So, you run an Amazon ad, you're sending people there. Costs of selling direct Now, when you go to selling direct, again, it depends whether you want a buy button on your website or whether you want a Shopify store or maybe WooCommerce. Shopify starts at $5 a month if you only want to sell on social media. Also there's a $9 plan where you can put buy buttons on your store. But if you actually want a store, the lowest price is $29 U.S. a month. Now, I was paying that, for years I'd been paying that on two websites each, on two websites to have a website. Then I merged them with my Shopify store. I think if someone goes to my Shopify store, they don't know it's a shop, they think it's a website, and you can do that with Shopify. So, using a store as your main website is one way to save costs. But for $29 a month, it doesn't take an established author long to cover that monthly. It really doesn't. And there are so many things you can do with Shopify that it's completely astounding what you can do with that. The big brands have it. Tesla has a Shopify store. A couple of the Kardashians have Shopify stores. For the Aussies out there, JB Hi-Fi has a Shopify store. Sephora. So many stores are Shopify stores, some of the biggest brands in the world. The Oodie is a Shopify store. Do you have an Oodie, Joanna? Joanna: No. I don't know what that is. Morgana: Oh, it's a lovely, big wearable blanket. Joanna: No, we're in a heat wave over here, but I think your point is that a Shopify store is just a website, and WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress. I know many authors like Orna Ross, for example, use WooCommerce, and that it plugs into your existing website. Because I have so many websites, I now have creativepennbooks.com, which is my Shopify store, but because my website's so old, thecreativepenn.com, I decided to have another site. But what you've done is essentially…is it morganabest.com? Morgana: Yes. And it's a Shopify store that looks like a website. I've merged it. I got rid of all my website hosting and I just have a store. Joanna: Any other costs in terms of the setup of the products, the books? Morgana: It depends, you can add apps. I've got Klaviyo app. I used to have something else. And for years and years, I resisted because I thought it's going to be so much work, one more thing on my 50-mile long to-do list that will only take a second, but there's millions of them. I've also got ReConvert. For example, what you can do with the store is just amazing. I get quite excited about this. Now, when you sell something, when someone buys something, they go to the Thank You page. That has a 100% open rate, so you can do things to upsell on that page. Now, because books are typically low-cost, high-volume, it's good to have a high ticket item. I've got a 16-book box set that I sell for goodness knows what, but I've got a 20% discount on that Thank You page with a timer. You can figure out who you show it to quite easily. I only show it to fiction customers because I'm sure people who are buying my book might not want cozy mysteries. And it has a five-minute countdown. But also on that page, I can collect people's birthdays, so I can send them an offer or like a discount or a gift on their birthday. You can also do so many amazing things that it pays back your investment very quickly. You can have an abandoned cart flow or automation flow. Same thing, different companies. You can have an abandoned checkout flow, a win-back flow for people who haven't bought from you in the past, however long you set, three months, six months. You can have a browse abandonment flow, if someone has gone and looked at a certain product of yours and they've looked at it for a while, but they haven't put it in their cart. You can target all these people really easily, and that more than pays back what you pay for the app. But also I would not suggest that anyone migrates their current customers across their current newsletter list. I would say keep them both separate. Joanna: Absolutely. We should say that we both use BookFunnel to deliver our e-books and audiobooks, and people will also need an email hosting service, as you've mentioned, but many authors will already be using services like that. Do you want to talk about how you do print books, print-on-demand books? Morgana: Yes. I use Lulu Direct. I also use BookVAULT.app, which thanks very much, you put me onto them and I'm very happy with them. But before I get into that, I'll explain that Lulu Direct and BookVAULT are third-party suppliers. I can sell print books, or I do sell print books from my site without ever…I don't touch the book. I don't ship the book. I could go to The Bahamas for a month, not that I could because I'm too busy, but I could in theory, and my books would keep getting sent out. It's a fantastic service. How it works, someone comes to my site and buys a print book. The money for the shipping and the money for the book both go into my account. Now, the print supplier then takes the money out of my account for the printing and shipping, and they print and ship the book to the customer. The system sends them tracking. I don't do a thing, all I do is collect the money. Of course, I'd have to upload the book in the first place, it's not a free lunch, but after I set it up, I don't do anything else. What I'm doing at the moment, I've got my books in the UK being printed and shipped from BookVAULT because their prices are incredibly reasonable. Lulu Direct's prices have gone up 20% recently. They also add a $1.50 fulfillment fee. But I use them for the rest of the world because they have printers all over the world and the shipping is very reasonable and the quality is very high. Joanna: I'm using BookVAULT and they are shipping everywhere for me at the moment. And of course, it takes several weeks to some places. I'm hoping the more people who use bookvault.app and tell them that we need printers all over the world, the better. I've basically said to them, ‘If we grow your business, will you organize printing all over the world?!' And of course, we talked about this, Lulu don't do the 5 by 8 sizing, which is why I went to BookVAULT in the first place, because of all my backlist are 5 by 8 size. I don't why Lulu don't do that. They do a 5.5 by 8.5, but I didn't want to redo my backlist. Those are the two main print-on-demand services, aren't they basically, Lulu and BookVAULT? Morgana: Yes. Joanna: That covers quite a lot of the costs. Let's talk about how the income works for getting paid actual money in your bank account. Morgana: Yes, that's great, isn't it? With Shopify, you can set it to pay daily or every two days, weekly or monthly. They'll only pay on a business day. I've got it set to pay weekly, but if someone really needed money, they could set it daily and they'd pay daily. Of course, if a customer has paid with a credit card, depends on the credit card provider, it could take up to 72 hours. PayPal, of course, it goes in instantly. Then you have to go to PayPal and transfer it to your bank account, and that could take a couple of days, but you're not waiting for up to 60 days or 90 days like the retailers. You're getting it that week, sometimes that day. Joanna: Because I've been on PayPal for so long, my transfers are immediate. When I did this launch, the money with PayPal goes in, as you say, immediately it's done, and then I've basically been transferring to my bank account at the end of every day because I don't like leaving money in PayPal for too long. I leave a certain balance, but then I take lots. Then Shopify, I've got set up on daily for this launch period, at least. Basically the money is in my bank account for this launch and I've been super happy about that. It's like you said, ‘Oh, it might take 72 hours,' but I mean, most of the money is taking 60 to 90 days, or if people are traditionally published it can take 6 months, it can take a lot longer, basically. I think that speed of money is pretty exciting I think. So, talk also about the customer data. How are you using customer data in an ethical manner to help the business? Morgana: Businesses have to abide by not just ethics, but legalities. There are so many legalities. Well, basically, what I said before, I use it to target people like you can do amazing things with Facebook ads with a store. Facebook will integrate with several storefronts, but I use Shopify. I use conversion ads, not traffic ads. And you can re-target people. Now, you can also do dynamic product ads, and it's sort of like the same thing as an Amazon ad that's an automatic Amazon ad. This is an automatic thing that Facebook will do, and they'll automatically serve that ad to the right people. If Fred Blogs has gone and looked at, say, a box set and has sat there staring at it in your shop, but hasn't bought it, then Facebook will serve that ad to Fred Blogs. But if Fred Blogs has already bought a different book, Facebook will know not to serve that ad to him because he's already bought that book. It's amazing, like it's almost magical what it can do. And I must tell you, SMS marketing, I'm very excited about that. SMS marketing has got much better open rates and conversion rates than email marketing, and people are so used to it from online shopping. They're just used to it these days. There are much stricter laws for that, like you must have a double opt-in and you can't have a pre-checked box saying, ‘I give permission,' which of course you can't with email marketing in some parts of the world. But with selling direct, obviously, you wouldn't send them a long SMS newsletter, but you'd tell 'em of an offer or a deal or a new release. And it's quite exciting. Authors are used to the welcome flow, they're used to a welcome automation, and authors are used to lead magnets, but with e-commerce, you don't use lead magnets and obviously, signups in the back of your books. You use offers, like you could offer them 10% off. Once you've got them on your list, you can again do the abandoned cart flow, the abandoned checkout flow, the browse abandonment flow, the win-back flow. This is what Amazon does. Amazon does upsells and cross-sells. If you go to Amazon and you buy an e-book, the Thank You page will say, ‘Would you like the audiobook with this?' You can now do that too. Basically, anything that Amazon could do, in a smaller way, of course, you can do with your store. I think I mentioned before, the abandoned cart flow, if someone has put items in their cart, but they haven't gone into the checkout and they've just taken off and left it there, you can send them a flow to say whatever you want to say to get them back. And also the good thing is with abandoned checkout, if they've actually got to the checkout and they've abandoned it, you can send them an email 15 minutes later or even in a shorter time and say, ‘Hey, I saw you abandoned your checkout. Would you like to come back?' Now, the interesting thing with this is there's quite a lot of science behind this because all the big brands are using these things. If I wanted to buy, say, a pair of Louis Vuitton shoes or something like that, and I abandoned my checkout, I would need a lot longer than 15 minutes to decide whether I wanted that. Or maybe I wanted to buy like a retro fridge, a bright pink retro fridge that costs a few thousand dollars, I'm going to need longer than 15 minutes. But with e-books, because they're quite low priced, the conventional wisdom is to send them that email 15 minutes later. And you can also split-test. I split-test 8 minutes later and 15 minutes later. And 15 minutes came out as the winner. So, if someone went to Amazon or any of the retailers and bought your books, and then they stopped buying them six months ago or a year ago, you'd never know in a million years, but with this data, you can send them emails and win them back. It's just amazing what you can do because you've got all that information there in front of you. Joanna: I've got to say that it is the power of the store. The power of Shopify is you can basically do anything that Amazon does, but on the other hand, Amazon is a multibillion-dollar business, and for most people listening and for you and for me, it's just us. What I found was that, oh my goodness, this really can do anything I want it to do, but oh my goodness, I don't have the time to do all of this. So, I got a little bit overwhelmed. I spoke to you, we had a private call, and I spoke to you and you were so helpful. And then I went and started trying to build my store and I just got overwhelmed, and I was like, ‘Do I just ditch this entirely?' I felt very, just overwhelmed by how much I could possibly do. So, I made a decision, which was to implement a minimum-viable store. I'll be talking about this on another episode that goes out after this one where I talk about this idea of minimum-viable store, which is, I just wanted to get it up and running and do my launch. And then a lot of this stuff you can add on later. So, I guess my question to you is, if people feel overwhelmed, what can they do to overcome that challenge, because there are benefits, aren't there? Even if you build it slowly over time. If people feel overwhelmed, what can they do to overcome that challenge? Morgana: The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. None of the big brands have been overnight successes. It's taken them a long time. Everything needs to be built. When you see all the exciting things you can do, the temptation is to do them right now, but just hold off. As long as you're doing something, don't aim for perfection, aim for progress, even if it's uploading a book a day, uploading a book a week. If someone decides to have a store, I would say, rework your writing schedule. If you're a rapid-release-type person, do something that gives you time, otherwise, you will go quite mad, because people who rapidly release are on the edge of madness anyway. So, just do something to give yourself a bit of space or it won't be good. You have to be kind to yourself and try not to be an overachiever. Any progress, no matter how tiny, is good progress. Take your time. You don't have to have it done even in six months or a year, as long as you're making progress. I like to listen to a lot of the people who've built million-dollar brands from nothing for less than $500, and they always say that, they say, ‘Start out slow because if you go too quickly, you'll go down the wrong path. And you need to start out slow and test everything.' And often the people who are the most successful are the people who have gone about it in a very slow manner. Joanna: You said you listen to people, I've been looking at the Shopify podcast and things. Any podcasts you recommend? Morgana: I absolutely love Davie Fogarty. He's only, I think, 27 and he started 7 brands, and he's worth almost half a billion at the moment. He's an Aussie. He's the one who started The Oodie. I listen to him religiously day and night. I fall asleep listening to his channel. Joanna: Is he a YouTuber, or he's got a podcast? Morgana: He's a YouTuber. Davie Fogarty. Joanna: I'm just on Spotify and I can see some of his episodes there. So, that's really interesting. Fantastic. I've been listening to a few of the Shopify shows. And you're right. It's similar to when you listen to a big-name author and you think, ‘Oh, my goodness.' And then you see that they've been doing it for years and years. So, it is just building it a step at a time. And in fact, if people can look at the way back machine and look at what the Amazon website looked like in 1998 or whatever, it was absolutely appalling. So, we all grow, don't we, over time? In fact, this is one of the reasons I went with Shopify is because I can see a future where that is my main website, but also that they change things. They're starting to do NFTs as beta. They allow crypto payments. I could do special editions. I could do signed books. There's so many things we can do, can't we? We can do merchandise. I feel like if you get started with just basic e-books even, and then just think about where you could be over time, that's the way to do it. Morgana: Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. That's what I want to do. I'm going to look at bringing in some sort of related product, which I think is quite an exciting way to go. I'm very excited about Shopify and the NFTs and tokengating as well, which is…as you know, Joanna, but in case someone doesn't know, tokengating is where you basically use an NFT as a token. So, you could offer an NFT on Shopify, and they don't need any crypto, they can pay for it in the normal standard Shopify way. And you could offer them an NFT and a new release that no one else will get or a special edition book or something like that. Shopify's bringing that in as we speak, which is very exciting. Joanna: I really see it as bridging Web 2 and Web 3. And of course, you mentioned it has integration with social media. In fact, even this week, they announced integration with YouTube, which I think is brilliant. I've had a YouTube channel since 2008, so I'm quite interested to do that integration. And Twitter I think doing an integration. So, this is the thing, there are so many things we can do, but as we've said, start with the basics. I did want to ask you, you mentioned another one of the questions that people have to you is, ‘How do I get traffic to my store? How do I do marketing?' So, you have mentioned paid ads, like say, Facebook direct to Shopify. How else are you marketing? Morgana: Influencer marketing. I'm very excited about that. That's something all the big brands do, but authors typically don't think of influencer marketing, which is quite exciting. Now, there are two ways you can do it, or I mean, there are probably hundreds of ways you could contact someone direct, but there's a website called Shoutcart where you can find the right person, and the amount, the payment they want is there on the screen and you just click it and pay. Or you could get the Shopify Dovetale app, but it's more a research tool and you can't directly connect with the influencer there. But also with Shopify, you can get a free Facebook store. You can have free Shoppable Pins on Pinterest. You can have Google Shopping for free. Instagram Pins. You can do an Instagram Shop for free. Shopify has Linkpop, which isn't like the usual link that you see on Instagram. It's where you could put your store, and people can buy direct, and they can buy direct on these social media sites rather than having to leave and go to your store. So, if someone's starting out and they don't have a lot of money or money to invest in their business yet, there are so many things they can do for free, like getting all these free stores on the socials. Joanna: Your book is full of so much. You are a wealth of information. What's lovely about this book is as we record this, it's not quite out, but I know how much you're still adding to it because it's like you're realizing how much you know. I had an earlier copy and it's brilliant. That influencer marketing chapter, I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is amazing.' Tell people where can they find your book and everything else you do online? Morgana: They can find my book on my store, morganabest.com. It's also on the retailers because I'm not saying get rid of the retailers. That's a good way to pick up readers and get them into your store. If you have a series, link the next book in that series to your store. I have a Facebook group called Authors Selling Direct. Joanna: That's brilliant. I have the e-book, I'm also going to buy the paperback because it is like a Bible of information. So, I highly recommend it, Stop Making Others Rich. Thank you so much for your time, Morgana. That was amazing. Morgana: It was lovely to chat to you again.The post Selling Books Direct On Shopify With Morgana Best first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What do you need to consider if you want to go full time as an author entrepreneur? What challenges might you face in your first few years? Sacha Black shared her lessons learned from 3 years full-time. In the intro, PRH and S&S merger heads to trial [Publishers Weekly]; Pilgrimage episodes on my Books and Travel Podcast; plus, Steven Pressfield's new ‘tough love for creatives' book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com Sacha Black is an author, rebel podcaster and professional speaker. She writes educational nonfiction books for writers and sapphic books for young adults. 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 Important things to consider when leaving a day jobBuilding confidence in the first year of full-time authorshipMultiple streams of income — and when to say ‘no' Why self-care matters so much Leaning in to authentic brandingWhat makes writers good publishers? You can find Sacha Black at SachaBlack.co.uk and on Twitter @sacha_black. Her latest book is The Anatomy of a Bestseller. Transcript of Interview with Sacha Black Joanna: Sacha Black is an author, rebel podcaster and professional speaker. She writes educational nonfiction books for writers and sapphic books for young adults. Welcome back to the show, Sacha. Sacha: Thank you for having me. It's always a massive giddy honor, and pleasure to be here. So, thank you. Joanna: Oh, well, it's great to talk to you again. You were last on the show in March 2019, talking about writing heroes and villains. And you left your job a couple of months after that. Take us back to how you made that decision. What were you doing before? And why did you decide to make the jump? Sacha: I think my decision to leave the day job is probably a little bit different to a lot of writers who are very keen on leaving just to purely write books. Whereas I really didn't like my day job, I was very low, and I didn't fit. I was really creative and wanted to do quirky projects, and they just were not interested. So I felt very crushed in the day job, I was doing project management in a conservative environment. So, that was a lot of the reason that I was pushing to leave my job. I'd had a threat of redundancy. At the time, I lived in a property that was owned by my employer. So if I lost my job, I would also lose my house. And it's this being completely beholden to one other organization or one person, and it was terrifying. So I was very, very determined to leave my job. Why did I make the decision, and how did I get there? I had to do a few things before I left; I had to pay off debt. I still had student debt, I had a car loan, and some fertility treatment and stuff. And my whole ethos was that I wanted to need as little money per month as humanly possible. Of course, paying off the debt was the quickest way to do that. And that drastically lowered the amount of money that I needed, which made it easier to leave my job because the less I needed, the less I had to guarantee to come in from writing, or freelance, or whatever. I also left knowing that I had an insatiable appetite for all of the things. I knew that I wanted to write books, and speak, and do teaching, and all the rest of this stuff. So, I left probably a little bit before a lot of writers would leave if they are leaving, just to write books. What got me to that point was that I had paid off all of the debt, and it was a lot less, maybe, I don't know, £1000 less every single month. And then I had built up some freelance work. So, I did virtual assistant work, though I had gotten qualified as a developmental editor. I'd also built a pot of money, a safety net. That also went into the decision that I knew, even if I did have a rubbish month, I would be okay, because I had some money backing me up there. And then I got offered a freelance gig, which was long-term and really made up the gap between what I was earning from sales, and courses, and whatever else I was doing back then, and what I needed to earn. That was what led me there. It was a tough choice, because I did halve my income. Joanna: I think there's a few things that our listeners know. I left my job over a decade ago in 2011. But similar to you downsizing, I think this is such an important thing. We want to emphasize it. You paid off debt, we did the same thing. We sold our house, we also lowered our costs. And we also had a safety net. I know some people don't have a choice because they are made redundant. And then they have to start from nowhere. But if you have the choice like you did, and I did, which is paying off the debt, lowering your monthly costs, and at least having some savings so that if it doesn't turn out exactly as you think, then that's really good. So let's come on to that first year, because I remember emailing you about this. But tell us about that first year — I guess you've already said you took a pay cut, but the emotional side as well. What should people know about the first year, and what might make it easier for others who are thinking about going full-time? Sacha: My first question is, ‘Do you like roller coaster rides, the really, really fast ones?' Because oh, my goodness me, I do. I remember the conversation that we had and I think you said something along the lines of, ‘Oh, you'll be like a duck; on the surface you'll look okay, and then underneath you're like, scrambling and pedalling so fast like…' That is exactly what it was like. [From Joanna: Here are my lessons learned from year 1.] That whole year I felt like being in a boxing ring with Mike Tyson, because the pressure and the constant get up, get to the desk, like, ‘How can we earn money today?' Is both intensely thrilling, and kind of stressful. But I really, really thrive on that. I think if you like pressure, and you like being responsible for what you're delivering, then that first year is a bit of a breeze. But to me, now, when I look back, it's a complete blur. Because it was just like survive the day, survive the day, we can find another way, think of a new idea, do a new thing, experiment here. For me, it was about building confidence, because I had no idea if I could even make it to the end of the year. And also, I was a bit of a shell when I left my old job as well. So that year was a little bit about repairing, and healing, internally. And then the other bit was about building that confidence that I could actually make it to the end of the year. That self-belief, and then it's like a switch, you get to the end of that first year and you're like, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I can actually do this.' Then your decision making changes, I think after the end of that first year. In terms of what do I wish I'd known? I wish that I had focused more on long-term creation. I spent a lot of that first year just trying to make money, I didn't care where it came from. I just had to bring in the cash to pay the bills, to pay whatever it was that I needed. I definitely didn't necessarily focus on the right things. Joanna: But you need to pay the bills. You mentioned, you had freelance work, you had editor work. I feel like this balance between cash flow and building assets it's so important. But equally, when you need the cash flow, you have to do the cash flow. And of course, for some authors, it's keeping a job or like Michaelbrent Collings, who's been on the show talking about rebooting his author career, he said he did pizza delivery for a bit just so he could pay some bills and keep his kids in food, or whatever. I think that's really important is, I totally agree with you that we would all love to just focus on building assets and writing our books. But equally, it's absolutely fine and brilliant to just make some money to pay the bills, and especially like we're talking now going into a difficult financial period for many people with inflation. I think this is something that people do have to do, right? So don't beat yourself up over that. And I think even if you had known, then I still think you would have been just earning money today. How do we earn money today? This is a very good question. Sacha: It is a good question, especially with all the tech changing and all the puzzle, but that's the thing. My mindset completely shifted, because back then I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, I have no idea how to make money, I just need to do all of the things.' Whereas now, I'm much more selective. And I'm like, ‘Well, I could do that. And I could do this.' But actually, what will make me happiest is because I am more willing to risk the lower income for a couple of months in order to focus on a thing that is more me, more my brand, lean into what I'm strongest at, if it's going to give me a longer term return. But I didn't have the confidence to do that back then even with the safety net and the safety part. I do think that that first year was all about building that confidence and learning, because I did so many different things, of just experimenting, from editing, and VA work, and I don't know, all kinds of stuff. But you have to learn the things that both give you joy, and create energy for you, and bring in cash. Because you might find that doing something that brings in slightly less, but actually gives you loads of joy is better for you in the long run. Joanna: I feel like you can only have the luxury of thinking about that once you've at least got some kind of stability and income. But let's talk about that. So you talk there about experimenting. And you mentioned BA, I presume you mean business analysis if people don't know. Sacha: Sorry, VA. Joanna: Oh, VA, virtual assistant. Sacha: Virtual assistant. Yeah. Joanna: Okay, virtual assistant. You still have multiple streams of income as you mentioned. You and I are similar in many ways, but both of us are multi-passionate creators and we can't seem to stop ourselves doing so many different things. Tell us about your multiple streams of income now, because you said that you've become more selective. How does it look now? Sacha: When I left the day job and I went back and I had a look at the numbers because I knew you're going to ask me this, 75% of my income in that first year came from freelance or other stuff. So things as I've mentioned, I had virtual assistant work, editing. I did graphics work. I did editing, did I say editing? I'm losing track here, merchandise, course creation, obviously, books that I did some work for the Alliance of Independent Authors, managing conferences, editing their blog, all kinds of different things. Then over the last three years, I revised and I revised, because through introspection and learning what took the most energy, gave me x money, but actually drained me so much that I then couldn't work on the stuff that I wanted to. I completely agree that it is a privileged position to be able to make those decisions. But you get into a dangerous position where if you do too much of one thing, you then can't work on the thing that you want to, and that just creates a job instead of like a business or a career that you really want. So for me, I had to reduce down the editing. Because my brain, it was just taking from the same creative pot, if I was editing, there was nothing left in order to write my own books. And ultimately, that's what I want to do. So I had to stop doing that stuff. In terms of where I am now, I have only one freelance gig left, which I actually love. I want to continue because it brings me joy. I'm focusing a lot on community building. I have an amazing Patreon community, which grows in fits and starts. It takes forever to begin, and then you bring in a huge quantity of patrons, and then it slows again, and then you have a massive expansion, but it's the community. A lot of the things that I create have actually come from the community themselves. So we have lives and we talk about the things that I'm doing. And one of the things that came from that was that I do a lot of deconstruction of the books that I read, and they wanted to do that. From that came masterclasses, and now I've written a book about how to do that. And then there'll be like a premium course. Some of it comes from the things that I want to do. And some of it comes from the community and the readership that you build and delivering what they want. I'm doing courses, I'm doing Patreon. I'm narrating audiobooks, I'm just about to start another one. Still doing speaking because I love that and that gives me energy. And also you can then iterate the content as well. So just because you've done something once and you've been paid for it doesn't mean you can't reuse it in another way. Any like, speaking gig that I do, I save the content and the slides, and then you can iterate it and turn it into something else later down the line. And of course, writing books, that is a big thing that I still do of course. Joanna: Yes, yes, yes. Tell us about the different types of books that you write. Sacha: I spend a lot of my time writing nonfiction, I focus mostly on the craft. I've written books on characters and prose. And this latest one is on deconstruction and understanding the market and writing to your reader. I don't really like the phrase ‘write to market,' but your readers are who buy your book. So you need to write to reader. And then I had a bit of a…you'll forgive the phrase, but a come-to-Jesus moment last year, where I realized that I was writing in young adult genre, but actually, I'm a queer woman. And the books that I was reading that were giving me the most emotional resonance, and the most joy, were queer fiction. And I was like, ‘Why am I not writing queer fiction?' So, I have gone on a binge-reading exploration of queer fiction. And now I am writing sapphic young adults and maybe I'll do a pen name with some more adult sapphic stuff… Joanna: I think that's really interesting. And I think one of the kind of tips here for listeners is, again, your multiple streams of income. And it's not just from courses versus books, it's also different genres, with the books and while you're writing a novel that because it's touched you in some way. And you don't necessarily know that that's going to work in terms of earning, but you've got the other forms of income that support you. Do you feel you have more freedom to experiment now because you've got some more stability? Sacha: Yes, 100%. I think there's two things. The first thing is I have more stability now. And so I do have that freedom to choose. But the second thing is I'm going in having done an awful lot of market research. I noticed a gap in the market, something that I wanted to read as a reader of that genre, something that was missing. I've spent an awful lot of time researching the market, researching categories, researching tropes, listening to readers, watching things on TikTok to see what is said, looking at reviews, trying to understand exactly what readers of that genre want. So even though it's not the biggest niche, I'm going in with a lot of knowledge about how to tailor the stories that I want to write in the genre that I want to write, but also delivering what the readers want and expect. So yes, it is still a risk. But I feel like it's an educated guess, I suppose. Joanna: That's fantastic. What are the good decisions that you've made in the past few years? And what are some of the mistakes? Sacha: I think that one of the best things that I've ever done was leaning into me. I know that sounds a bit bananas. My business is not the books, my business is me. I brand me. And I think that is the best decision I ever made. Because the more you lean into you, and whatever the most ‘you' thing is. For me, it's about being cheeky, and sarcastic, and rebellious, and breaking the rules, and doing naughty things, the more I have lent into that, the quicker my platform and audience has grown. Yes, it does mean sometimes I get one-star reviews, ‘This book would have been great if it weren't full of swearing'. But also, that's great, because that means that people who do like that kind of thing, are going to click one buy. I remember, I got a review that said, ‘What is this? This is as if Deadpool was a professor teaching you writing?' And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, best review ever.' But it was a one-star review, right. And so I actually shared that. And it got sales. Joanna: That is a great review. Sacha: I genuinely feel like leaning into that, and leaning into me and branding me, and seeding that through both the nonfiction, but also the fiction, which is what I'm doing now. I'm doing fiction that's much more cheeky and on the edge than I have ever done. It bringing people towards me, which means the platform is growing, my followers are growing, my sales are growing. The other thing that I have done, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's self-care, I genuinely feel like looking after myself has produced the best results ever. And the way that I do that, and you talk about this, is more sleep, or more quality of sleep I would say. Exercising, I have struggled for a long time with like, writer's spread. But I couldn't find anything that would fit my business or like, working because I also have a child. Now I go during the day, and I have lost working time. But actually, I'm producing more because mentally I'm better. I'm high off endorphins in the afternoon. So I just like to smash work out. I just head down and worked, worked, worked, thinking, ‘No, you know, the harder I work, the more hours I do, the more I will produce.' That was such a hard thing for me to accept because I like working, but it's not actually true. Though I've looked after myself, and lo and behold, I'm producing way more and way faster than I ever have before. So that is like a tough lesson that I have some internal conflict over. Joanna: I think that's so important. And we all have that realization, too. You literally can't just brute force any career actually. One of the problems in ‘working for yourself' is that you can be your worst boss. I definitely have worked more hours since leaving a job than I ever did in a job, because you can't leave it behind. Especially as a writer, even if we do something that's not technically related, that your brain still kind of doing its thing, and every book we're reading for fun is also something else. It is hard to turn off. That physical health thing, I think we all reach that point. The Healthy Writer, that I co-wrote a few years ago, partly I explored my own health problems in that. If you haven't figured this out by your mid-30s, then you are certainly going to suffer by the time you're 40. Sacha: Absolutely. Joanna: So you have to figure it out basically. Sacha: You do. And the thing that you were saying as well, in terms of that switching off, it's so hard when you work at home, because it's like there's a thread connecting you to the office. It doesn't matter where you are in the house, the office is calling because it's right there, there is no escape, home becomes work. I can see why so many people choose to do an office, or a garden office, or go and work in a co-working space because it does get very difficult to turn off and especially with lockdown as well. There was no turning off, there was no escaping the house either. So what else do you do? You don't. You just work and well, that's what I did for the last two years. Joanna: I want to just come back to something you said earlier because I think people might be interested is that you said, ‘I brand me' which is a great thing. You talked a bit about the sort of hallmarks of that sort of being cheeky or whatever, but how have you done that? Have you done that through branding? You use certain photos, you do great hair and makeup when you're on video and stuff like that. Is that part of your physical branding and color schemes in your book design? How are you doing that ‘brand me' thing? Sacha: I think it's everything. It filters down from how you look online to the voice and tone you use in blog posts, or guest articles, or talking on podcasts. It is, as you said, the colors and the branding. It's things like usually, if I am on camera, I will be wearing branded merch. It's even these subtle things. I went so far as to paint my front door purple. I just live and breathe Sacha Black. That is it. But it's little things as well. I was very uptight about my mailing list for a really long time. I don't know what I was trying to do, over deliver or just even treat it with the importance that it should be treated with. And then I was like, ‘What are you doing? That is not you.' I'm the sort of person that is 100% authentic genuine I speak to everybody exactly the same whether I'm in the pub, or a podcast, or whatever. And that is part of the branding for me. I wasn't writing emails like that. In January, I reread Tammi Labrecque's ‘Newsletter Ninja' and just went, ‘Okay, I'm just going to be me.' And it was an immediate change. So it's like learning to imbue yourself and your voice in everything. Now I write emails with swear words in and I take the mick out of myself an awful lot, even on Instagram. Instagram stories I'm like, cheeky and naughty. And I'll just tell stories that are taking the mick out of my day because that's the kind of humor that I love. So it is everything, including apparently your front door. Joanna: I think that's good. You talked there about learning and you did that this year. So that's a couple of years after you went full-time and even more years since you started writing. So people listening, if you don't know who you are as a brand, like most of us don't, you grow into it. And it's how it feels, right? If it feels right to do it that way, then lean into that. And if it doesn't, then don't do that. Sacha: I hate to bring it up but I'm going to. But CliftonStrengths, oh, my goodness me, has been such a journey of revelation and like falling in love with the bits that I had shame around. For those people that don't know, CliftonStrengths is a little bit like Myers-Briggs. It's a personality profile. And the sort of most well-known person who does it in the writing community is Becca Syme. I learned so very much about who I am, and the language that I use, and learning to accept that I am competitive and I do want to win things. It's not seen as something a leader should want or whatever, I don't know. It's been a journey of learning who I am. And then putting that into everything I say, everything I post, everything I write, and everything I wear, I suppose. Joanna: Absolutely. I think that's so important. And as we said, you can learn this stuff over time, it doesn't need to be immediate, a bit like your author voice. I feel like there's such an emphasis on author voice, but I don't think it emerges until you've written a few books. I think it takes a few books for us to relax as you said, ‘Relax into who you are, and accept those aspects of yourself and just enable them to be real and not to fake it.' Because if you fake it, you actually can't maintain that. If we're talking about long-term business, you cannot fake it for very long before you're like, ‘Oh, I can't do this anymore,' right? Sacha: Absolutely. Part of that, I think, is because we spend so long listening to other people and thinking that their things, for want of a better word, are right. There's a lot of loud voices in our community, and that it's very easy to listen to them. I remember you saying it took you five books before you really understood your writing process. And I was like, ‘No, we can write quite quick.' Well, you don't, it took me five books as well. So basically, you were right, on everything. Everything you say is right! Joanna: Oh yes. Eventually, I'm right. Sometimes it just takes longer than I expect! But no, I think that's really good. Let's just come back to any mistakes you've made. Any big mistakes that you'd like to share, or you could frame it as lessons that you had to learn? Sacha: I think a couple of things; one is saying yes to too many things. Now, I don't think that's a mistake necessarily. But I think I said yes for too long. When you first start out, you have to say yes to a lot of things. Because part of that is about growing your audience, you go and do free things, you say yes, and take on opportunities. And you have to because that does build a platform, it helps to sell books. But I think I said yes for too long, because it took me so long to realize that I was drowning. The other thing that I did too much was spend too much time marketing and dealing with admin before I had built enough books. And that is something I'm still trying to get better at, even though I don't know, I think I've either written 17 or 18 books now. But I'm at the point where I have come to fully accept and realize that I have to write books first. But I'm saying this with a caveat, because there are some people who will pump out books and not do any building and marketing. That is also a mistake, because you can't just pump books out, you do actually have to build the community of readers, and build your mailing list, and build all the other things. But there's a very fine balancing act between prioritizing creation, but also not leaving all the marketing and just doing nothing. I did not get that balance right at the beginning. And some of that was around…because I've been full-time three years and two of those years were in the pandemic. And some of that was about the pandemic because I could get easy wins. And that's really important to me. I would do things for other people. And I would focus on the admin because I knew I could bish bash bosh, tasks out, rather than focusing on words and book creation. But now, I don't do that anymore. That is something I've definitely stopped doing. And it's surprising, increasing my income. Joanna: I think we have to keep learning that lesson. Because I feel like it happens to everyone, we go too hard on the marketing and/or the business side, and then we move back into the creation side. And then it's almost like a seesawing, because something needs doing and something needs focus. And then the next project comes along. I'm at the point now where I'm like, ‘Okay, I took my foot off the marketing too much, because I've been busy doing other things, and I took my foot off, and now I need to put my foot back on again.' But then that's just also the person I am. As we've said, we're quite similar in that we focus on things and get them done. I think that's really important, but I prefer project-style work. Whereas some people can consistently every day do exactly the same thing, where they go into the spreadsheets or whatever, or manage the spreadsheets, or manage the ads, and I just can't do that. I need to almost do it in binge sessions, or let's call it campaigns, because that's a marketing term, doing marketing campaigns, as opposed to consistent everyday marketing. I don't know, I do feel like we go back and forwards. What about you because it's about you? Sacha: I am, for sure, a Phoenix person, I definitely burn hot and hard for periods of time. And then I crash and burn. But what I have gotten better at doing is crashing and burning, but changing tasks. So a little bit about what you were saying in terms of sometimes you're focusing on marketing, and sometimes you're focusing on creation, I definitely do that. And I am now better and more aware at understanding my energy levels, and preventing severe crashes. It does come down to how many museums have I been to? Or whatever, I don't know. How many places have I gone and looked for inspiration? How many books have I read? How much sleep am I getting? How much exercise am I getting? And then scheduling in instead of doing back-to-back editing or instead of doing fiction, fiction, fiction, fiction, and then a nonfiction, it's fiction, nonfiction, fiction, nonfiction, because though that wave means the crash is less, but I had to learn that the hard way like, doing back-to-back things and being like, ‘Why am I so exhausted?' Joanna: You've posted like I do as well, every year, ‘Lessons learned from year x,' and one of your lessons was, ‘Be a better publisher.' What do you mean by ‘being a better publisher'? And what are you going to do to achieve it? Sacha: This is the thing that I enjoy the least about doing my business, but it's also one of the most important things. What do I mean by being a good publisher? I mean making sure that you are making the most out of every single product or asset that you have. What does that look like? That looks like making sure you have all of your books in all of the formats. It means making sure that your reader magnets are up to date. That you have checked your autoresponders and that they are evergreen, and that you don't put a year in there. Joanna: That's a good one. Sacha: I did that, definitely made that mistake. And I got told when it was two years out of date by a reader. It means things like pushing for foreign translations or updating the back matter when you've published some more books and linking to those books in the back of your books and running sales. Are you capitalizing on the fact that you have a growing backlist? Have you experimented? If your books have always been full price, have you run a sale? Have you done on-the-spot sale just for your newsletter? Have you tried building a shop on your website? Have you tried a book set? Have you updated your keywords? Or even things I remember you talked about updating your author photos recently. Or maybe not recently, time is a lie. But it's those things that create a slick running system in the background. Things also like, is it time to outsource? Do you need to set up a system to make things more efficient, to take some of the administrative weight off your plate? Anything that is not creation and that is not advertising and promotion, to me, feels like the publishing side, what are you doing with your books? How often have you checked them for being up to date? Being an indie author is not just writing books, so it's the business side to me. Joanna: I think people are going, ‘Oh my goodness, that's exhausting.' And I was just listening to you going, ‘Oh my goodness.' The thing is, the longer it goes on, the more backlist you have, the bigger deal this is. We were just talking as we record this, I'm still building my Shopify store. But hopefully by the time this goes out, it will be live at CreativePennBooks.com. But basically, it feels like a lot of the admin work sometimes. The question then becomes, why not get a publisher? Why not go back to the day job? Why continue to do this? Why are you still doing this three years later? Sacha: I have been told that I have a problem with authority. That might be part of it. Also, I don't really play well in teams. So that is another part of it. But really, not messing around, one, freedom. I cannot understate the value of freedom, and the enormous empowerment and confidence building that that brings and gives you. The other bit is potential and possibility. When we mentioned at the top of the episode that when I left my job, I halved my income. Well, I have surpassed my old day job income. And that was a huge, huge moment. Before then I wasn't sure I had the capability. I wasn't sure if I was capable of doing that. But having beaten that income, I'm like, ‘Oh, there is no path. There is no stopping me. There is no ceiling I can't smash through.' Whereas my partner, my wife, who is in a day job does have a ceiling, hasn't had a pay rise in a while because she's in the public sector. And anyway, this is not a political show, but you know. That possibility, that potential is addictive. It's like my own personal catnip. I also really enjoy the pressure of having to make money, and that's not easy. That is also something that not everybody would like or enjoy. But I really like knowing that any risk I take is on my shoulders, and I have made mistakes. I've outsourced things that I shouldn't have. I've made mistakes and lost money on advertising. But also I have surpassed my old day job income. For every loss, there is a win and all of them are on my shoulders, and I like that responsibility. That brings me joy, it gives me a sense of achievement. And even though sometimes I have to do things to make money 80% of my time, or even more than that now I would say, I get to work on the things that I choose, and that is priceless. There is no amount of money that could sway me from that. Although I'm slightly restrained by the school term time, it's the ability to travel or going to a museum in the day, and it's research and tax deductible. All the things that I love, I get to do every single day. How amazing is that? Why would anybody give that up even though it's financially tough? Joanna: Absolutely. I think all of these reasons. I do think that being a full-time independent author entrepreneur with these multiple streams of income, I do think there is a personality that enjoys it. And it's so funny because I think back in the day, I would have said, ‘Oh, anyone can be a successful indie.' But I actually think there is a personality type. And as you've said, it is the people who love taking that independent decision who want the power to sort of go up. But look let's face it, there's no ceiling on your income, but there's also no floor. Whereas, your wife can bring home a monthly salary where yes, she can get laid off, but essentially, there's a floor and there's a ceiling. Whereas for us, there's no ceiling, but there's also no floor there. And it goes up and down over time. But I think you're right, I think the personality type of if you enjoy the challenge, and you want that independence, then yeah, and the empowerment, I totally agree with you. I'm still doing this too, right? Sacha: Exactly. Really, there is a lot to be said about how resilient you are. Because I think if you are not a resilient person, and really you do have to have that conversation with yourself before you up and leave your day job, you have to be resilient. It is all about mindset, and you've written a book on mindset. 80% of getting up and keeping going is mindset and sheer stubborn determination to take those wins and those losses and turn those losses into a lesson rather than a woe is me. Because if you woe is me, you're not going to earn any money this month. I love the risk, and the potential, I mean, I love it. Joanna: Brilliant. So we haven't even really talked about your podcast. Tell us where can people find you, and tell us a bit about your podcast, and your books, and where you are online. Sacha: You can find me at sachablack.co.uk. And the podcast is ‘The Rebel Author Podcast' where I talk to creative people and we tell rebel stories. There are jokes, and sarcasm, and naughty words. My books are wide, you can find them anywhere. Just type in Sacha Black and I'm most active on Instagram, which is @sachablackauthor. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time Sacha, that was great. Sacha: Thank you for having me.The post Lessons Learned From 3 Years As A Full-Time Author with Sacha Black first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How will blockchain technology change the way creatives register copyright, as well as monetize their work? Roanie Levy explains how blockchain can solve the attribution problem, and how smart contracts will allow new business models with ownership of digital assets in web 3. This podcast is sponsored by Written Word Media, which makes book marketing a breeze by offering quick, easy and effective ways for authors to promote their books. You can also subscribe to the Written Word Media email newsletter for book marketing tips. This podcast is also sponsored by my wonderful patrons, www.Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Roanie Levy is the CEO of Access Copyright, a collective that distributes licensing royalties to creator and publishing affiliates. She also leads Prescient, Access Copyright's creative-focused innovation lab dedicated to exploring the future of rights management and content monetization through blockchain and other technologies. 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 blockchain technology and how will it change business models for creatives?Smart contracts related to book salesSolving the attribution problem for copyrightThe differences between Web 1, 2 and 3How long will it take for the publishing industry to adopt these new technologies — or will new companies start new businesses first? You can find Roanie Levy at Imprimo.ca and on LinkedIn / RoanieLevy. Transcript of Interview with Roanie Levy Joanna: Roanie Levy is the CEO of Access Copyright, a collective that distributes licensing royalties to creator and publishing affiliates. She also leads Prescient, Access Copyright's creative-focused innovation lab dedicated to exploring the future of rights management and content monetization through blockchain and other technologies. Welcome, Roanie. Roanie: Thank you very much for inviting me. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you today. So, first up, tell us a bit more about your career. How did you become interested in aspects of IP (intellectual property) and copyright? Roanie: Well, actually, one of my first jobs, when I became a lawyer, was to work for the Canadian federal government on copyright policy, way back, I guess, the early days of web 1 when we were talking about the internet as the ‘information superhighway.' So, that's when I started to get interested about copyright, the impact that it has on the creative sector, and how technology interacts with those copyright concepts. Joanna: So, you're actually a copyright lawyer? Roanie: I am a copyright lawyer. Joanna: That's such a good basis of what we're going to get into. So, let's get into blockchain then. What is blockchain technology? Because, I mean, a lot of creatives find the technical stuff difficult. How do you explain what blockchain is? Roanie: I think many people refer to blockchain technology as ‘a distributed open public database,' and I find that that's too amorphous and it's hard for people to wrap their head around. Blockchain technology and blockchain network is, essentially, kind of that new infrastructure that is being built for web 3. What it does is that it tracks all transactional data. Data is everything. Whether I'm buying something, whether I'm liking something, whether I'm creating something, whether I'm owning something, all of that is data. And this massive database of transactional data, so not just the data up here but what happens to the data and how people are interacting with the data, is stored in a network that is protected by cryptography and incentive in order to ensure that nobody tampers with that data. That data is, depending on the blockchain, but what's really interesting is the public blockchain, that data is public for everyone to see and build upon. Joanna: You said ‘infrastructure for web 3,' and this is what I say to people is ‘You don't need to know how the internet works, you don't need to know http protocol, whatever, in order to publish a book on Amazon or use PayPal to get money,' right? And, obviously, we know a bit more about the technology. Creative people don't need to know how blockchain works in order to make use of it. Roanie: You're right, they don't need to know how blockchain works. But what they do need to appreciate is how the concepts that blockchain allow are different from what we're used to under web 2. The concept of ownership, the concept of programmability. Just the idea of tokens, what are they and what can we do with them? That's something that's worth spending time understanding because that's what opens the imagination to all that might be possible in terms of new ways of interacting with your audience, with your fans, and of monetizing your works. Joanna: Absolutely, right, we'll get a touch on all those things. Tell us a bit more about how you got into blockchain. Because you've actually been doing this a long time, and I saw you speak at Frankfurt Book Fair, I want to say four or five years ago now, and I think I was like one of three people in the audience because the publishing industry was just not interested. Tell us how did you get into blockchain and what have you been doing in this space? Roanie: First, I'm happy to report that, when I do talks today, I could easily get hundreds of people on my webinar. So, I think there's been an evolution in the interest of publishers, of authors, of visual artists, of the whole creative sector. As you mentioned in the introduction to who I am, I run a copyright-management organization. We operate in the traditionally printed world, so, textbook, trade books, newspapers, journals. We represent the creators, the writers, the visual artists, and the publishers of those works. And the who we are, kind of the why we exist, what's in our DNA is ensuring that creators get paid when their works are used. Obviously, as we've gone through the ages with the changes in digitization, it's becoming more and more and more difficult for creators to get paid. Piracy is rampant, monetization happens by people other than the rightful owner, platforms are extracting the value. All of these things have been present and at the forefront of our consideration as we look to the future of rights management. About 10 years ago now, no, maybe 8 years ago, we started asking ourselves, ‘Where are these new technologies going to take us? What are the future of rights management per se?' Because that's what we are experts in, as a copyright-management organization, managing transactions around creative content. Blockchain kept coming up as this technology that was going to change the way we interact with content. It was finally going to be able to give creators the ability to control their works and to monetize their work in a way that was not possible or that was broken, if you'd like, through web 2. At the time when we started working on this, we weren't talking about web 1, web 2, web 3, that's kind of lingo that, although not completely new, it's more talked about today than it was when we started looking at this. So, having been, as I mentioned, around when we were talking about the internet, what is web 1 today, as the information super highway and looked and examined the promises that the internet was making about how creators even back then were going to be able to monetize their work better with the internet. Also realizing that that didn't actually materialize that way, I kept asking myself and my team kept asking ourselves, ‘Is it really going to play out that way or are we going to see more of the same as what we saw with web 2 in terms of the harm that it could potentially cause to creators?' I attended conferences, I learned a lot about the technology, looked at projects in the creative space, and that was really not enough to help us answer that question. So we decided to just do a proof of concept. Let's just come up with an idea that today's tech is not able to do but the promises of blockchain seem to make possible. Let's see if we could, like, do a proof of concept, build it very quickly, and just learn from it. It was really just a learning exercise. This is back in 2016. The idea that we came up with was the fan-to-fan sale of an ebook. So, P2P sharing, which was happening in web 2, P2P sharing almost took down the music industry. And let's flip that on its head now. Now, with blockchain, can we do P2P selling, fan-to-fan selling? In our use case, the way it worked is that I'm reading a book…and, Joanna, I've known you for a long time and I know what you like and, so, I know that my recommendation of this book to you is going to generate a sale. So, I recommend this book to you, I, in fact, send you the ebook and you start reading the ebook. The creator or the publisher has predetermined how much of the ebook you could read without having to trigger a payment. Let's say it's two chapters. So, you read the first two chapters, you're hooked, it was a great recommendation, and now you want to continue reading. To unlock the rest of the work, you have to pay. The payment triggers a smart contract, which we could talk about, in terms of what that is, and that smart contract automatically redistributes the payment, or the royalties, X amount to the creator, Y to the publishers, Z to the jacket-cover artist. In the use case that we were building a proof of concept was a percentage of the sale was also going to go back to me because I influenced the sale, kind of like a reward to the fan that stimulated the sale. So, we decided to build it up. We started working with some Solidity developers, and that's the language that is used on the Ethereum blockchain, and we built the smart contract. We went through the whole workflow, how a service like this was going to work. It was a proof of concept, so, it didn't have a very pretty interface, it was held together by the software equivalent of duct tape, but you could see the triggering of the smart contract, you could see the asset, the digital asset being opened up and the movement of the payment into the different wallets. For me, that was the moment where I was sold on the technology. I was like, ‘Totally get it. This is now I understand why people are so excited about blockchain. This is going to revolutionize how we interact online, how we transact online, and it's going to have a really dramatic impact on the creative sector in particular.' What also gave me a lot of concern was that, as we were working through this use case for the fan-to-fan sale of ebooks, so, essentially, an ebook being attached to a smart contract and then being monetized in a distributed ecosystem, kept asking ourselves, ‘Who's going to make sure that the person who's attaching that ebook to that smart contract and has connected this wallet where all the money is going to go is in fact entitled, has the rights to do so, and is the right person to receive the royalty payments? Who's going to make sure of that out of the gate?' Because if we are not sure that it is the right person that is entitled, that has the right to attach this creative work to the smart contract, that is now going to get monetized in this distributed ecosystem, in this web 3 world, then we're just going to make what happened with web 2 even worse with web3. We looked around the creative projects that were taking place back then, in 2017, and we saw the same thing over and over again. And that is what we see in web 2, which is that the service just assumes, blindly trusts, that the person who's uploading a work to the smart contract, connecting the work to the smart contract, and ticks the ‘I own,' the copyright box, is in fact the rightful owner. We know that that's not enough. Surely, that was not going to be enough. It is not going to be enough in web 3. And, in fact, it's even worse in web 3 than in web 2 because of two things. Web 3 is all about ownership, right? Whereas web 2, one of the biggest challenges of web 2 is how to monetize interactions online in web 2. The solution that was found was advertisement. So, that is, if you'd like, the primary monetization model for web 2. Now, web3, it's not about advertisement. Web 3 is about exchanging value, actual payment, because now we could track interactions and we could incentivize interactions with tokens that can now be exchanged for real-world value. In that context, the sense that we were having at Access Copyright and Prescient was that this is going to increase the incentives for bad actors. And not only that, we're in a distributed environment. So, how do you find that neck to choke that you're now going to sue to take this down? How do you stop that smart contract from continuing to circulate once it's been out there? How difficult is it going to be for creators and for rights holders to now deal with bad actors and piracy? That's where we decided that, as an organization that is focused on ensuring that creators get paid when their works are used, that that's what we needed to solve for and that we should look to blockchain technology in order to help solve the attribution problem, this is what we called it, ‘the attribution problem,' out of the gate. This is probably when you saw me in Frankfurt, we started going out there and talking to creators and publishers in all different areas of creative endeavors, ‘Hey, guys, there's this thing called ‘blockchain' coming down that is going to redefine our interactions. As a creative sector, we better be architects of this new infrastructure or we may be harmed by it instead of enabled by it. Joanna: I love that, ‘We better be architects.' I'm always saying we have to be involved in these discussions, otherwise the tech bros are going to design it all for us. And so, I love that you're involved, and that's why I wanted to make it clear that you understand copyright, you understand the law, and you're coming at it this way. So, we're going to come back on a number of different things. I know it's really interesting about this attribution problem. And, of course, anyone can upload a book to Amazon as well and they do some checks against whatever they check and they ask us for proof of copyright. How are you going about solving that attribution problem? What are the things in process? Roanie: In order to solve the attribution problem, we believe that three things need to be immutably connected. And the connection between these three things needs to be open and transparent for everybody to see, because this is the only way that we can actually fix the stuff that is not connected properly. Those three things is a digital representation of the creative work. It's digital representation, so, if you'd like, a fingerprint of the creative work. It needs to be connected with metadata about the work and the rightful owner, the person who's able to say yes or no to a use so that we know what the work is. As computers talk to other computers, they are able to exchange digital files and say, ‘Okay, I know what the work is and I know this file, this digital asset, is the same as this digital asset. And I know what it is because I've got metadata and I know who to contact in order to verify whether this use has been authorized or not.' These three things need to be connected. And there's different technologies in order to connect these three things. A few years ago, as I was out there trying to get people interested, wanting to work with us to solve this attribution problem, we also realized that we probably needed to start building this, start trying to solve for this and maybe even services that use this connection, this, what we were calling at the time, the attribution ledger. Now, I'm calling it more ‘an attribution protocol,' so, a service that uses this attribution protocol in order to generate value for the creators of the works. In fact, just at the end of March of this year, we launched the first service that uses the attribution protocol under the hood. And it's called inprimo. And if anybody wants to check it out, it's imprimo.ca. And what it is is that it looks like a web-2 service, and in many many ways it's a web-2 service, but it's got web-3 technologies under the hood. And that was really key to us when we built it out because we wanted it to be accessible to everybody. Right now, if you're trying to use pure web-3 services it's complicated. If you try to buy an NFT and you need to get cryptocurrency and you need a certain crypto wallet, etc., there's hours of learning that you need to do before you could interact with the service. We wanted people to be able to interact immediately with the service. So, it looks like a web-2 service but it's got web 3 under the hood. It is a LinkedIn for visual artists. This is a service that we decided we were going to build with visual artists. We collaborated, we partnered with visual artists' associations in Canada. And we did hundreds of design interviews to find out what is the challenge that visual artists are having? How can we offer a service that solves some of their challenges and also gets them ready for web 3? It was about building an audience, presenting their journey as an artist and their portfolio of works. This was a perfect problem to solve because in presenting their artwork then we can also start connecting the claims that the artists have to a given artwork, the metadata about the artwork, and the fingerprint of the artwork, and connecting those together and registering them on the blockchain. While also providing them with this ability to present their journey in a very exciting very aesthetically-pleasing digital destination for visual art. Joanna: I love that you said it's web 3 under the hood. Going back to this idea of infrastructure, some people are calling this ‘web 2.5,' which is it looks like a smartphone app, it looks like a website, but it uses blockchain and you wouldn't even know. I feel like that's probably what's going to happen. It's not like we're going to go from one day we all use web 2 and the next day we use web 3, it's going to be these applications that bridge the gap, and you don't even need to know. My husband recently did a course at LSE in London, the University, and his certificate for his course was an NFT. He didn't even really know about it, it just got assigned to him. And then, like you mentioned, LinkedIn, it's actually on his LinkedIn profile. The little thing says ‘access to digital record,' and it's on chain. So, this is a really brilliant thing. For people listening, for authors, the idea in the future is that we will register ourselves as a creator, on whatever chain, and we will register our book on chain and we will be connected to that. That's basically what you're saying, isn't it? For authors. Roanie: That's right. I love the example of the LSE. First of all, I did my master's degree at the LSE, so that's really nice. Joanna: Ah, there you go. Roanie: Great to see that they are at the forefront of using new technologies. And I think that what your husband probably got is a verified credential. Joanna: Yes. Exactly. Roanie: They said there's lots of different technologies that come into play, verified credentials sometimes use blockchain, sometimes they don't, but this whole concept of verified credentials and self-sovereign identity, which is hard, it's another one that's hard to wrap your head around, but I think that is another element that is going to be transformative. When we see the verified credentials and SSI, self-sovereign identity, really taking hold, that's when we're going to see that mass adoption into web 3. I think that's going to be the on-ramp for a lot of people onto web 3 is going to be these verified credentials and self-sovereign identity. It's already happening. A lot of people are saying, ‘Web 3, well, that's the future,' it's actually here already and it's being used. And what's great is that you've got these established players now playing around with these new technologies and thinking differently about how they're going to share the information about who got degrees from their institutions in a way that everybody can trust and know. That is also something that's really important, privacy preserving, so that your husband probably has the choice to put it on his LinkedIn network or not, the verified credential, so that he could selectively declare to people, potential employers, or other institutions where he got his degree. That's going to be really really important, an important promise of web 3. We're going to be able to take back control of our data, of our activities online but also offline, there will be more privacy-preserving systems that are going to be used into the future. I think that's really important. Joanna: Coming back to some of the principles you talked about, and also focusing down on the listeners, so, in the future, we have now registered our copyright, we know that this book belongs to us, and now we want to sell it. And you've mentioned ownership, you've mentioned digital assets, but also you've mentioned ebook. I feel this is a real issue because, at the moment, people are “buying an ebook,” say, on Kindle but they're not actually buying the ebook. They don't own the ebook, they are, essentially, licensing some content to read on a device. But if their account gets deleted, that is deleted. There is no ownership, at the moment, of ebooks and no resale and, as you say, no percentage that goes back to anyone else. How is ownership and how is a digital asset different in this web-3 world? How can we communicate that to people who think they already own digital content? Roanie: I think this is probably the area of how blockchain technology and how people have started using blockchain technology is so exciting, particularly for the creative sector but not just for the creative sector. And this is this whole area of tokenization that people talk about when they talk about web 3, when they talk about blockchain, and when they talk about monetizing creative works. That's another one where it's hard to wrap your head about what is a token, and how is it different, and why is it so special. When people talk about the difference between web 1, web 2, web 3, what they say is that web 1 was reading. Depending on your age, you may remember web 1. I remember web 1 very very well, and we used to call it brochureware. That's all that was online. You would see companies' brochure that you could just read. Not that that was not amazing, it was amazing at the time, but that's all it really was. Web 2 is that social web, and that's when we have more of a two-way sharing interactions where users could upload content as well. And that is the web that people refer to as ‘read and write' right, that two-way interaction where users are also sharing in that whole social web. An explosion of innovation happened around web 2. A lot more monetization also happened around web 2. Now, web 3, the evolution from web 2 to web 3 is read, write, own. That ownership element is where the monetization is going to take a different form. That's where, when we talk about tokens, what's so exciting about a token is because, when something is put in a token, we know who owns it and now we can monetize it completely differently in that ecosystem than we were able to in the web 2 ecosystem, in the ecosystem that we mostly know today. That's something that, when we started the conversation about not needing to understand blockchain but needing to understand the concepts which really change our world, that's one of the important concepts, this concept of ownership and the fact that we can own a digital asset as well. And notwithstanding that you could right-click/copy, it doesn't really diminish from the value of owning something unique that is in digital form, even though it can get reproduced again. And that's another one that takes a while to kind of get used to and get excited about but, once you do, once you see the light, you can't unsee it. Joanna: They're saying this is happening a lot in gaming. So, people who play a lot of games, they understand that you buy a weapon and that weapon is theirs within the game. So, they've bought a digital asset that can help them or they buy some clothing for an avatar. When we think about the future of a metaverse, I guess it's similar, like the clothing of the avatar, it's the same if I go into a shop. I went out today and I bought a dress. Other women will buy that dress but the dress I have is my dress. I can resell that dress and I can make some money from that resale. In that situation, there isn't any money going back to the original creator because there's no smart contract. Let's get into that because, when I learned about programmability and smart contracts, programmable money, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is amazing.' Tell us a bit more about smart contracts and how they fit in. Roanie: Maybe I'll start with one little concept/technology that is helpful in really making this explanation stick for people, and that is in the blockchain ecosystem in a blockchain network, what you've got is that you've got these tokens, which are, essentially, a digital representation of an asset, something that has value. It could actually be just an interaction that you did online but now that interaction has value, so, we're going to put it in this digital envelope called ‘a token.' The thing with this token, which lives on the blockchain, so, that's kind of the transaction, is that this token is connected to a wallet. The person who has the key to that wallet is the owner of that token. Every time the token moves around and changes wallet it does so through smart contracts. Through these small software programs that say, ‘If X happens then Y happens.' So, if a token is going to change from one wallet to another wallet and there is an exchange of value, such as the cryptocurrencies being exchanged, then 10% of that exchange of value is going to go back to the first wallet that owned the token, which is the creator's wallet. This is why blockchain, when we talk about blockchains, ‘They've a distributed database,' and it's like, ‘Yeah, yeah. So what, who cares?' It's because all of these movements and transactions are recorded for everybody to see in a way that you can trust because it's protected or it's cryptographically protected and there are incentives as well on this blockchain network in order to make it impossible, or at least very very difficult, to tamper with that information, that data, about these transactions and these movements of assets. Joanna: I think we need to emphasize as well how much you can do with a smart contract. Because one of the things that stops authors collaborating is that it's so hard to do all of these royalty payments later on in the process. If you and I write a book together, one of us will publish it or we'll get a publisher and then the money eventually gets to us or one of us has to split it. Whereas, with a smart contract, you did mention this earlier but just to reiterate it, there can be a percentage for the fan who's selling it that can be a percentage goes back to the original creator or creators and a percentage could go to a charity, for example. Or the other thing I was thinking about is, in terms of estate management, after my death or something, there's a clause in the contract that will redirect the payments to a different wallet. There are things we'll be able to do with smart contracts that, at the moment, have this massive human overhead in management. Roanie: Absolutely. Not just in management, in trusting as well, what people said would happen actually happens. Whereas in what you've just described, which has a lot of similarity with that proof of concept that we did back in 2017, and we did it using smart contracts, it was instantaneous. That redistribution of the royalties was instantaneous. That's what's so beautiful. It happens between people that don't know each other. This is when people, early in 2015-2016, when I was learning about this technology, we would talk about the middle man, ‘This intermediation, the middleman, is going to disappear.' This is what people were referring to. In that use case that we built a proof of concept on, there was no retailer. The book circulated, the marketing of the book was being done by a fan, by the audience, the redistribution didn't have an accounting office. All of the transactions were online. In fact, even your tax authority would be able to look in and see how much you actually have to pay in taxes. It is actually that transparent. Joanna: I really think we're going to get central bank digital currencies, CBDCs, as they're called. And I think why wouldn't they take the tax as part of that transaction? Why do they have to wait till later? If you're the government and you have central bank digital currencies, you could just take your cut as it passes through on chain. This is why I think that this will go mainstream. I feel like, at the moment, people think this is all to do with Bored Apes and crypto crashes and tech bros but I think that this is going mainstream because of exactly what you said about it, it will get rid of back office. The banks are implementing blockchain because it gets rid of a whole lot of back-office stuff, right? So, on the one hand, we've got decentralized stuff but, on the other hand, we've got a whole lot of centralized blockchains being built because the technology is so powerful. How is this all going to shape out between the ideal and what people are already doing? Roanie: I think that referring to the banks adopting blockchain, they're doing this in permissioned blockchain. And not to say that that's not valuable, absolutely it's valuable, there's efficiencies, saving in time, the data is more accurate, etc. Lots, lots, and lots of reasons to do that. I think the real transformation and explosion of innovation is going to be on the open, public blockchains where the data is more open and transparent. This is something that I think you mentioned and made reference to. We talked about programmability, but another element which is super exciting and where we're going to see so much innovation is the fact that what these tokens allow, what these smart contracts allow is composability. Things can sit on top of each other. I was trying to think of an example that would help people see the beauty in composability. Let's say we have a token that has, of course, embedded in it a smart contract that tracks the ownership of your creative work. Let's say your next book you're actually only going to issue 100 books. So, it's going to be 1 of 100, 2 of 100, etc. So, you're going to issue non-fungible tokens for 100 books. What are you going to do? Every time there's a transfer of ownership of that book you're going to get 10% but you're also going to allow that book to be composed into a lending library. The token is circulating and someone could sell the token to the lending library and to something else. Now, you could also limit where you want your tokens to go by code, but this is what's so exciting. We see a lot of composability happening in distributed finance, what people call DeFi, and also in web-3 gaming where you have play-to-earn structures as well. You see people being able to use a token that was generated on one platform for one activity to be used in another service for something completely different. And startups and businesses can do that without having to ask permission from the person that created the game, for example, to allow that token to now be used in another service as well. That's the composability of what tokens and these open protocols allow. Joanna: This is the thing, there's so many exciting possibilities. And yet, you and I are in the publishing industry and, as I mentioned, I saw you speak four or five years ago. And even though you said there's more people turning up now, and I've spoken on blockchain as well and, obviously, I've done shows on it, but my feeling is the publishing industry is mostly not interested. How long do you think this is going to take? And how can we help things along? Roanie: I think, as is often the case with these new technologies, it is not the incumbents that adopt them first. We're going to see new kinds of publishers come on scene that will use them. We're going to see a lot more kind of independent artists, independent writers use the technology. There's a little bit less kind of risk and they don't have as much of a box in terms of how they do business that they have to stay in. So, it's going to be easier for independent artists to use them. And when they're going to have proved the value, then I think we're going to see the larger publishers join in. I think people are waiting for that killer app as well. There is still a lot of friction if you're going to do something that is a purely crypto web-3 service. Like I said, Imprimo was designed so that anybody can use it, so, the web 3 is really under the hood. Which also means that the artists on Imprimo are not the custodians of their private public keys. Imprimo holds the custody of the private public keys because we felt that the adoption was not there yet, that the artists were not ready yet to have that responsibility of owning their private keys. But we'll get there. And once we get there, then we'll be able to no longer be the owners of the private public keys that the individual artists are given when they join Imprimo. So, it's a journey. But I believe the journey is going to happen far faster than it took for us to get from web 1 to web 2. And it'll happen far faster than the time it took for my parents to use Uber, for example. Joanna: Do you want to put a date on it, do you want to go '25-'26 maybe? Or will it just be that, for example, people still read on Amazon Kindle but they're actually reading an NFT version of an ebook? Roanie: The end-user interface is going to have to work with the existing end-user interfaces. Whether it's a Kindle, so, my case it's a Kobo, or it's your phone, you're going to be using your smartphone. Already we're seeing some smartphones that are coming out that are enabled with these web-3 wallets. That's going to start to facilitate the adoption by people. The new business models, the really revolutionary business models are going to take a little bit more time than that. But the fact that your husband got a verified credential from the LSE is very exciting to me. Joanna: Us too, we were like, ‘Oh my goodness, look at this.' Roanie: It's happening. A colleague was telling me that a friend of theirs bought this high-end purse, I can't remember if it was Louis Vuitton or what was the brand, but she was all excited to show my colleague that it came with a card, with a blockchain registration for the purse. So, it's happening. Right now, within the existing interactions the way we interact is not very very different but, eventually, the interactions themselves are going to be different. Joanna: Exciting times ahead. Where can people find everything you do online? Roanie: Definitely go to imprimo.ca, that's where I recommend everybody go check it out. First of all, it's a beautiful website, you're going to see some beautiful art. It's mostly Canadian art right now but it's amazing. Please go online, check out our artists, and check out the web-3 elements. Take 5-10 minutes and dig a little bit. Look at the blockchain ID, look at the private public key information and instructions to help people kind of understand what's really happening under the hood. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Roanie, that was great. Roanie: It was lovely speaking with you. Thank you.The post Blockchain For Copyright And Intellectual Property With Roanie Levy first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you lean into your strengths as a writer to find the genre — and the business model — that suits you best? A.G. Riddle talks about his writing process, his publishing choices, and how he's planning to pivot into the next phase of his career. In the intro, I talk about my experience at Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Writing festival this week, and how we all have to decide which game we want to play. 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 A.G. Riddle is the bestselling author of 11 books with over 4 million copies sold and translated into 24 languages. His latest novel is Lost in Time, a time travel thriller. 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 Reflecting on success — or lack of it — and assessing a career after a decadeCrafting a bestsellerFocusing on your strengths as a writerResearching a novel, and Gerry's writing processWhy the ‘job' of being an author is different nowMoving from indie to hybrid to traditional publishing — and movie dealsWhat do you want to control — and what are you willing to let go of to achieve what you want? You can find A.G. Riddle at AGRiddle.com and on Twitter @Riddlist Transcript of Interview with A.G. Riddle Joanna: A.G. Riddle is the bestselling author of 11 books with over 4 million copies sold and translated into 24 languages. His latest novel is Lost in Time, a time travel thriller. Welcome to the show, Gerry. Gerry: Thank you for having me. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you. Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing after quite a different original career. Gerry: I'm someone who didn't grow up wanting to be a writer. It's something that is a second career for me that I came to in my late 20s, early 30s. I started an internet company in college, and I did that for 10 years. I really enjoyed it. I like creating software and loved the startup environment. I had had some success in my career, but I didn't really feel that I had found that thing that I felt I was really qualified to do and was meant to do with my life. So I was just at this point in my life where I was reflecting to say, ‘When I leave this earth, what do I want to be proud that I've worked on?' I think if you get 10 years into a career, you learn a lot about yourself and your own strengths and weaknesses. And it's incumbent upon all of us to periodically reflect and say, ‘Why am I not achieving the success I want, or what went well, what didn't?' The thing that I found is that what I loved about my job was creating something — web-based software is what we were creating. But running a company is something that I didn't have much interest in. When I grew up, my dad owned a sign company and my grandfather owned a lumber company. I grew up around business. And I guess via osmosis you inherit some interest from your parents and grandparents or your idols. But I was looking for this career that would be more creative that I could step away from running a business. The thing that I really loved in my life was reading and reading science fiction. I would come home from work every day and read, and I just thought, ‘Well, I'm going to try to write a novel.' And I thought, ‘If this takes off, I'll keep doing it. If it doesn't, just try to figure something else out.' But that was 2011 and it took me two and a half years to write that first book. Joanna: I was trying to think what year we met at Frankfurt. Would it have been like 2015 maybe? Gerry: I think it was '14. Yeah, I think. Joanna: 2014. Joanna (J.F.) Penn and AG Riddle at frankfurt book fair, 2014 Gerry: Or maybe it was '15. I don't know my memory. I have two kids now. My memory's not as good. Joanna: I don't think you had kids at the time. Gerry: I definitely did not have kids at the time. Joanna: When we met, I'd read I think the first book, and I remember that you said to me that you intended to write a bestseller in the vein of Michael Crichton. I love Michael Crichton, I've read all the books. And then when I was researching this, I went to your website, and there's a quote from Publishers Weekly saying, ‘Crichton-esque thrillers don't come much better than this.' And I was like, ‘Oh, that is fantastic,' because I knew that's what you set out to do. But, the biggest question then is…you just said that, ‘I'll try to write a novel, and if it works, I'll carry on.' And, look, many of us try and write a bestseller and it doesn't work. So how did you craft a book? How did you go about this in a way to craft a bestseller? Because it's not luck, is it? Gerry: I think it's a bit of both. To your point, I think that you can be very purposeful about it. And for me, anyway I knew one of the advantages of starting this career a little later in life is that I knew myself really well. I knew that if I wrote a book that didn't really get much traction that I would be discouraged and that I would probably give up on it. So the first stuff I wrote, man, I thought, ‘This is terrible.' Like, I'm never going to be able to do this, and reading my writing, I was like, ‘Man, this is not good.' So, that's what took me two and a half years. I probably wrote that book, I don't know, a dozen times. My wife at the time…you've met Anna, and she thought I was going nuts. She was just like, ‘You're going to have to be institutionalized. There's something very wrong with you to work on something in isolation for many years.' So the decision that I made that I do think launched my career was to basically focus on my strengths and avoid my weaknesses. I knew for my debut novel, I would not be the strongest dialogue writer or the writer of characters and maybe plotting and all the things that I think that every novelist gets better at over time. But I felt that the science and history means I remain a huge geek. I love learning about science and history. That's something that I felt like I could do pretty well. And I felt very confident. I also felt like there was an audience out there, an under-served audience that was hungry for these science and history-based thrillers. What I would say is I chose my genre very well. What I loved reading were those books, and there's not a lot of 'em. But space adventure and stuff like that is what I read, but there was so many people writing it, then I thought doing it pretty well. I chose this genre that I felt like had a big audience, I felt like I could write, and fit with where my skills were. Joanna: I feel like Michael Crichton is science fiction thriller, but not really known as space, obviously. I mean, a couple of them, I guess, but most of them were not. You said that you found a niche and there was a hungry audience in that niche, but I thought you were mainly in the mainstream thriller niche now. Gerry: Yes. The Atlantis Gene, that debut novel, I positioned as a science fiction thriller, but I think it has these aspects of action and adventure and it's a scientific mystery. I do think it crosses genre lines and that helped it. I think there's been tons of readers that didn't appreciate it for one reason or another because it had so many things in it. Crichton, typically, a thriller author, wrote thrillers that are grounded in science. But I think over the course of my career since that debut, one of the things I've been trying to do is figure out what am I really interested in? There's been this shift, at least for me personally, I veer a little more towards the subjects that I'm interested in and maybe less toward what I think is going to sell or analyze in the market. And I think that's just a function of mental health and just trying to grow as a writer. Joanna: Obviously, you talked there that you're a science geek, a history geek. How do you do your research? What does your research process look like? Gerry: My process has evolved a lot. The first book, The Atlantis Gene, I went overboard with the research. I did my research for the most part on the front end, and I wrote my outline, I did my research, and I probably overresearched that novel. One of the things I found is that if there's something I had learned about and researched, I was inclined not to take it out of the novel, even when I needed to, and it was slowing down the pace. My wife was my first reader, and she's like, ‘Gosh, it's just page after page of this stuff. I think it's a good story, but I gotta cut this stuff down.' I typically start with an idea that I'm personally really interested in. And I think if you're going to write something grounded in research, it's got to be something that you're really excited about because it will get laborious. It's time. I also think that your enthusiasm for the subject comes through on the page. I think readers sense this authenticity. So I'll get a subject that I'm interested in and then I'll go to like generally ‘Popular Science' or ‘Popular Mechanics,' and I'll try to find articles that are similar on that subject to try to find what is the broad audience? What aspect of genetic engineering, or AI, or nanotechnology, what are the angles that are popular or interesting? And then I'll deep dive. I will say that YouTube is a huge resource that you can now get videos of conferences and people that you basically couldn't get access to talking about deep diving on subjects. So I would say that my research process is top-level, find that subject, get some popular articles, and then I'll do an outline. Then when I come to the point where the character needs to go deeper, I'll do my research as I'm writing my draft. I think that cuts down on the time. I think it makes it more accurate, and you throw out less as well, I feel like. Joanna: I know what you mean about YouTube. I'm listening to your lovely accent. So I could listen to your voice all day. Gerry: Well, likewise. Joanna: It's funny, isn't it? Not that I'm saying your accent is like this, but when I was on YouTube researching an Appalachian snake-handling church for End of Days, and I was watching all these videos, and the way they spoke. Going deep on YouTube into people's voices can make such a difference. Can't it? It almost takes it into another realm. Gerry: For sure. I do think it gets you into the mode and the mindset of these people who work. In 2015, 2016 when I was writing Pandemic, I was able to find CDC employees that were at conferences. And the stuff they talked about is not something you'd find in a book. The thing that scares them on deployments in Africa when there's an outbreak is driving around; that's the most dangerous thing for them. They have their PPE, they know their job really well. They're scared of getting Ebola, but that their top concern is driving around, getting in a car accident and getting hurt really badly. Anyway. But the Appalachian snake handler… I grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and that's an interesting subject, people speaking in tongues and just crazy stuff. Joanna: That's really fun. You can find all sorts on YouTube. Interesting that you mentioned your book, Pandemic, and you wrote that, you said 2015, 2016. How did that go in the pandemic? Did you sell an absolute ton, or did people not want to read about a pandemic in a pandemic? Gerry: A little of both. At the beginning, I remember this at the beginning of the pandemic because it was apparent to me once you started to see how contagious it was and what the case fatality rate is, this is going to be a big deal, and also the asymptomatic period for carriers. I remember it was February or something, and we were going to launch on a lock screen ad with AMG and for Pandemic. And so they email me back, and they're like, ‘Hey because of this outbreak in China, we're going to have to pause this for two weeks, but the pandemic should be over in two weeks.' I wrote him back and I was like, ‘Let's just indefinitely pause this. In no way is it going to be over in two weeks.' To my surprise, early in the pandemic, that book really took on a new life. It sold a lot of copies and the UK printer just did another printing of it. And then as the pandemic wore on, no one wants to read that, but I don't know what it's selling now. But I know that it's exceedingly less popular than it has been historically. I think we all have this pandemic fatigue. And I think people read it early to try to get a sense of how this thing was going to play out or to, I think we all read to understand the world around us. And I think there was some of that, but now it's just like Pandemic, last book in the world, anyway. Joanna: I remember watching that movie Contagion early on in the pandemic. It's like, ‘Oh, I need to know what's going on.' But what's funny is I actually started a Scrivener project when we started to hear about what was going on out of China, and I was going, ‘Oh, this would be great for a novel.' And literally, it was probably by middle of February, I was like, ‘This is no longer great for a novel.' I just ditched that Scrivener project. I was like, ‘Nope, not happening.' Given you wrote that beforehand, that's awesome. But let's just come back. A bit earlier, you said, 10 years into a career, you need to take a look at what's going on and assess your strengths and weaknesses. And you said you started in 2011. So we are over a decade into this next career. Given what you've done and the books you've written, are you assessing where you are now and are you pivoting again, or what's going on with your assessment there? Gerry: I think it's fair to say that I'm pivoting. Ten years is probably too long to reassess. I think we should probably all be doing it maybe annually or more than that, but I'm behind the curve. But yeah, I think the last couple years have been reflecting. I think that happiness is about trying to figure out what you want from the things that are important in your life. Writing is something I still really enjoy. I love sitting down and stringing words together and trying to tell a story. It makes me happy and I feel fulfilled at the end of the day. I would say that since 2011 or March of 2013 is when the book came out, the first book, things have changed a lot. The job feels different. I think self-publishing is a bigger task than it was in many ways. When I published that first book, it was like, I put it on Amazon. My wife went on Facebook, and it's like, ‘My husband's written this book. Go get it.' It's pretty much all we did. Right? And the market was different then. There were fewer books and it was a 99-cent 500-page book that had value for money. So now, I'm trying to figure out where do I fit into this new, this changing landscape? I'm someone who likes to write, and that's what I really like about this. So the other things, I think if you want to do a job, you can't just pick and choose, ‘All right, I'm going to only do these tasks.' It's like, ‘What is the job?' And that's what I'm trying to figure out. I considered starting a publishing company, but I just felt like that ultimately would take me further away from writing, which is what I was trying to do. And also my business career, one of the things I learned is I'm not a really great manager. And so it's like, ‘Do I really want to go try to manage a company?' I don't think so. So, that's what's led me to traditional publishing and trying to focus more on writing. Joanna: Interesting. I'm not a great manager either. I'm barely a good manager of myself let alone anyone else! Gerry: Same here. That's it. Joanna: One of my decisions is I do not want to grow a company. And I think it's good… Like you said, you have to know yourself and know what you like, and the universe will keep teaching you these things until you learn it. And luckily, you learnt that the first time around. So you haven't done that. Let's talk about your publishing journey then. You mentioned there, you uploaded that first book, 2013, you said, and your wife said, ‘Oh, it's on Facebook,' or said on Facebook, it's available, and things started to happen. How do you go from being just an indie author with one book to you've got several different publishing deals now, I think. So how did that happen? Did you pitch for these things, or how did your development in the publishing world go? Gerry: I would say that as far as my career, I've been a bit more reactive than proactive. When I started out, I knew nothing about the publishing industry. I've been an avid reader my whole life, and I've read on Kindle, and I started reading self-published books, and that's when I was so aware of it. But I knew a great deal about selling things on the internet, having run startup companies that did it. Self-publishing on Amazon really wasn't much of a decision. That's something I knew. I also wanted to get the book out there to figure out, ‘Is there an audience? Should I be doing this?' Writing a query letter and trying to get traditionally published is…I don't know, that was never really in the realm of possibility for me. Since then agents started contacting me. The movie deals came about that way. And then my fourth book, Departure, which I think I was actually writing, or just finished that up when I met you in Frankfurt, HarperCollins bought the rights to it. I'll say that I've only ever self-published ebooks in English, and then in print in the U.S., we have a warehouse and books on pallets. But Head of Zeus has always published my print-only deal in UK and Commonwealth. So what's happening now is that Head of Zeus, which has been publishing me for, I don't know, nine years now, is taking over the ebook. They're expanding from print-only in the UK Commonwealth to the North American print and then worldwide ebook English rights. Joanna: With new books, but not the old books? Gerry: With new books. Right. The old books is something that I think is on the table, and we're thinking about right now. Joanna: That's so interesting because I know a lot of very successful indies like yourself, originally indie, who have sold backlist in order to almost like you are saying, get it off your…not off your chest, but move it over to someone else's responsibility. Even though, you must know that you will make less of a cut after that. Gerry: Definitely. I don't know, but my sense is it will probably make less money. But I do think I'll be able to spend more time writing. I think I'll be happier. So the question is, ‘Are you able to write more, and thus, do you get back to even just from greater production?' I don't know. Joanna: But as you said, you are making choices around lifestyle at this point… Gerry: That's it. Joanna: It's not like, ‘Oh, I could make more money that way.' But as you say, you might well end up doing that anyway. But you mentioned some movie deals and everyone's like, ‘Oh, movie deals.' Everyone wants a movie deal. How did that come to pass? Gerry: When CBS Films optioned Atlantis, I didn't have a film and TV agent. I was living in Florida, and one of my neighbors was this entertainment attorney and he negotiated the deal. But since then, my literary agent in New York has gotten me a film and TV agent. And so the film and TV agent did the Departure deal. But, I mean, the film and TV stuff, I don't know. I try not to get my hopes up. It's something that I hope it happens in my lifetime. It looks like some of my newer stuff will get made before my older books. But I don't know. For me always a bridesmaid, never a bride on the movie stuff. So maybe someday. Joanna: As long as they keep paying for options. Gerry: That's it. Joanna: That's what will happen. If people listening don't know the reality is that most things never get made. Right? Gerry: Yes. It's a long road. I think the thing I told my agent the other day, I was like, ‘I don't care about this option money. I really just want to find somebody that will actually make this happen.' And he's like, ‘No, we need the option.' They're the experts on this stuff, so I just let them run with it and I just try to be patient. I think there are so many things that can drive you crazy in this business, it's like the only hope for sanity is just focus on the things you can control, and writing the books is what I can control and that's what I try to focus on. Joanna: That's interesting, though, because as an independent author, you control a hell of a lot more than what you are now controlling. And actually, you're talking about giving away more control, licensing more of your rights and controlling less. How does that work? Gerry: I think it's a balance. It's like, ‘In return for controlling this, you then have the responsibility for this, and you get the work too.' With control comes work and the responsibility, and it's like, ‘Are those things that I care about? Maybe, maybe not.' I do think the world benefits from specialization. If I'm in this business and my part of the business is writing the books, and to a certain extent, promoting the books to my audience and to readers, well, gosh, that's something I love. I want to focus on that. A publisher's focus is, ‘How do we get the metadata right? How do we get the right cover or the right description? How do we distribute this to as many bookstores as we can and get those bookstores excited about the book and promoting the book?' Those are things that as I went down the road of starting a publishing company, I felt like, ‘Gosh, this is a completely new animal that I don't really…' It's like I just want to carve out the piece that I care about and the piece that I think I can do really well. That's where I am. Joanna: I don't whether it's just the accent, but you are so relaxed. You're like a relaxed guy. I do remember when I met you, I was like, ‘Yeah, Gerry's pretty relaxed dude.' I think that your character says a lot for that, but it's interesting. Before as well, you talked about focusing on strengths. Obviously, writing is a strength, and you basically said ignoring your weaknesses rather than trying to, I guess, get better at your weaknesses. Is that what you feel? Gerry: I think there's two things. I think that one of the things I learned early in my life is that you've got to focus on your strengths if you ever want to get anywhere in life. And I think your weaknesses are things that you can work around and you can get better, but it's like we're all given a certain amount of talent. If you're not a great dialogue writer, a writer of dialogue, you can get better, but you're never going to be the greatest in the world. You're going to top out at some point, just limited by the way your brain is wired. When I began writing, there were things that I was like, ‘I think I can get better at this, but I know I'm never going to write one of these literary novels with these deep characters, I don't think.' But I think that knowing your weaknesses and trying to work around them is the wind at your back. If you can do that, great, because you don't have to be good at everything, right? You just need to be good at the stuff that you do and what you make a living at. Joanna: I agree with you. You said earlier the job feels different obviously, having been in this since 2007, 2008, the job of being an author. And I feel like you do have to do everything if you want to be successful, independent. But what you are doing, which is licensing some of those rights or maybe all of those rights I think is really interesting. It is the trade-off between what you want to do and what you could learn to do, but you are acknowledging that might be a weakness. So why do it essentially? It's a strong message. Gerry: Yes. I think it's like when you're in a job, when you started self-publishing long before I did, but it's like when we first got into it a lot of it was about getting your cover right, how do we get the description, and then the book, right? But I think ads is this whole other thing. And it's like, ‘I know I'm not a great manager and it's like ads or something. I haven't even looked at my ads in months.' I go down that rabbit hole and it's like, ‘Man, well, I've now spent six hours on this today and it's like I could have been writing another book.' I think we're all realizing that the cost of things in our career are not always financial. There is a cost to your mental health, there's a cost to your time that you could be doing something else. And then it's like, for me, I only have so many good writing hours in a day, but I do want to use those to write, and that's what I want to be focused on. I've felt like, ‘All right, well, if the job changes a little, now we need to do ads and now we need to do TikTok or whatever it is that comes up.' But it's like, at some point you're just like, ‘I know that this would benefit my career, but I also know that I suck at it. I don't want to do it. And I'm just going to keep doing the things I'm doing.' Joanna: Wait, are you doing TikTok? Gerry: I'm not doing TikTok. That would be an example of something that… like, I'm such an introvert and I've seen all the details and the just like, ‘Here's what you can…you know, the page flip and you do a quote and all this.' Joanna: I'm glad you said that because I'm also not doing TikTok. I've been like, ‘No, I don't do video.' We are on audio-only right now. I just don't want to do video. So I don't want to do TikTok, and I don't want to even look at it, literally. The only ones I see are the ones that people put on Twitter. Gerry: Oh, right. Yeah. Joanna: Let's come back to the craft because that's clearly important. One of the things I've noticed about your books because I'm in the UK and I see your books in bookstores, so Head of Zeus are obviously doing a good job, is that they're really long, they're super long books. They're doorstop books. I feel like in the thriller niche, that's actually less of a thing. Did you intend to write long? And do you think that's helped your books stand out? Gerry: I do. I would call the books epic science fiction. They're a little different in that they don't really fit. If you say, ‘All right, this is what is the norm for the genre,' certainly the plot and what's the content in the book is a little outside of it. I personally think that a longer book it can go really bad. If the reader is hating it on page 150 and they've got 400 more to go, that's not a good setup. But if I'm reading something I love, I don't want it to end. I think that longer books give readers an opportunity to bond more with the characters. I think they care more about books that they've spent more time with and have more of an emotional connection to it. So I think it helps you in reviews in terms of the number you're getting. You probably get some bad ones just because of the length. But I think if you can write a good book that has some length to it and people spend more time with, I think it helps you. Joanna: I definitely did notice that about your books being different in that way and that it does stand out. I know you say they're epic science fiction, but I still feel like they're in thriller. I actually think they get shelved in thriller here in the UK. Gerry: Oh, really. Interesting. Joanna: Yeah, and covered as thrillers more than science fiction. I feel like I don't particularly read science fiction, but I've read almost all your books, I think. You're definitely a crossover audience. Gerry: Crossover. That's Head of Zeus. They're shelving in the right place. Joanna: Our bookshops are smaller than you have them in the U.S. But I did want to ask about this too and what maybe it's the length, but you have 11 books as we record this. And, I mean, that's a lot for a lot of people, but it is a lot less than a lot of other authors. There is a bit of a thing in the indie author community that the more books you have, the better. And if you don't have more books, then you'll never make tons of money. But you've sold over 4 million copies, and obviously, with the movie deals and everything, you're doing really well. What do you think is the truth around the size of your backlist and how that impacts a career? Gerry: It's a good question, and I think it's a good debate. My sense is that maybe it varies by genre. The science fiction thrillers are the ones that do take some research and that have a lot of plot twists. I do think they maybe take a little more work than, say, a contemporary romance or something that you're just writing a lot based on your own experience or an urban fantasy, or something that where there's not that extra overhead. So I think maybe some of the work takes longer. Obviously, every author has their own pace. I think I've gotten faster as an author over time just from getting more comfortable and refining my own process. But I don't know, what I've always tried to do is write the best book I can every time. I think some years I'm better than I am other years, I'm just what's going on in my life, or how focused I am. But if you're getting better, you're writing the best books. You can just write as many as you can while doing that. I think that's the key. And then I think there is some genre impact there. Joanna: So you said your process has improved. What does your writing process look like? Now, you said you outlined. Do you just type or do you dictate or what's your writing process? Gerry: Good question. The big change for me has been how detailed the outlines are. For The Atlantis Gene the outline was really almost like a first draft, had the whole theme. I had the trilogy planned out. It was just like the Invasion of Normandy, the whole thing. Then I got 30,000 words in, and the whole thing just completely changed because the characters when you're writing an outline, it's like, ‘Do you really know these characters that well?' And so you get to a point you're like, ‘Ah, that character wouldn't do that. This doesn't really seem natural anymore.' So you have to adjust your outline, or I do have to adjust my outline. Maybe others have better outlines, but I would say that my process has changed and that my outlines are a lot looser. They're more broad. So my process, I've started dictating my outlines, and that helps me just get the outline out, use Dragon Dictate, Naturally Speaking, or whatever it is. If you read it in Scrivener, it looks horrendous. Some of the stuff is phonetic, and I was like, ‘What am I even saying there?' .But it helps you get the outline down, or it helps me get the outline down. And then I typically type my drafts on a Neo Writer. It's that little electronic…you can find 'em on eBay; Neo writer. There's no internet. There's no spellcheck. I'm an atrocious speller and drives me crazy in Word. And it's just like, ‘You just screwed that up. All right. Yep. You missed another one.' But yeah, I write my drafts on a Neo and then import it and see all the literary or grammatical transgressions, and then I edit in Scrivener and go to Word. Joanna: It's interesting you dictate the outline. I feel like a lot of people are hybrid dictators like that because it is very hard to dictate the finished words. Gerry: It is for me. I can't get my voice right. I guess I type different than I speak, or I don't know, maybe because of my Southern accent, the software can't understand what I'm saying. Dictating the novel hasn't…I've tried it. It didn't work for me, or I didn't like the way it turned out. Joanna: I go in fits and starts. Well, we are almost out of time. Tell us about the next book, your latest book, Lost in Time, out September 2022, I think. Gerry: Yes, September 1st. Lost in Time I would call it a time travel, murder mystery. It's about a widowed father whose girlfriend is murdered, and he and his daughter are accused of the crime. The evidence is ironclad, and they'll be convicted. And this takes place in the near future in which murderers aren't sent to prison. They're sent to the past, 200 million years into the past, to the time of the dinosaurs. The main character, Sam Anderson, makes the decision to confess to the crime to save his daughter. And so he's sent to the past. His daughter stays in the present and her mission becomes to clear her father's name and figure out how to get him back and to figure out who really committed the crime. So she has this murder mystery to unravel. And then Sam in the past has this survival situation. Also, there's some secrets waiting for him back there. So it's a time travel, science fiction, thriller that I'm pretty excited about Joanna: With an edge of‘Jurassic Park then. Gerry: It has dinosaurs. That's the first thing I told my agent. He was like, ‘What is this book about?' I was like, ‘Danny, it's got dinosaurs,' and things went from there. Joanna: I love it. That is a great premise. I'm certainly going to read it. It's funny. I think I looked at it and went, ‘Oh, not really into time travel.' Now you've told me that, I'm like, ‘Okay, I'm totally getting that one.' I love a time travel with dinosaurs. Gotta love dinosaurs. Again, Michael Crichton just got me, whenever that year was, when Jurassic Park came out. Goodness, must have been '90-something. '93? Gerry: '92, '93. Yeah. Joanna: Over around there. Oh, no, that's awesome. Right. Where can people find you and your books online? Gerry: It's agriddle.com and then links to all the retailers are there. Joanna: Fantastic. Thanks so much, Gerry. That was great. Gerry: Thanks for having me.The post Writing A Bestseller With A.G. Riddle first appeared on The Creative Penn.