The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

Tools and tactics may change, but the principles of book marketing remain the same whatever the situation. Becky Robinson gives advice on how to reach readers and market your books for the long term. In the intro, The Things You Think Matter — Don’t [Ryan Holiday]; Boost Your Backlist [ALLi]; Craving Independence [The Bookseller]; 21st Century Creative [Mark McGuinness]; My Shopify store is live [CreativePennBooks.com]; Thoughts from the Pilgrim's Way [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.  Becky Robinson is the author of Reach: Create the Biggest Possible Audience for Your Message, Book, or Cause. She is also the founder and CEO of the digital marketing agency, Weaving Influence. 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 Reframing marketing Providing value to your audience Generosity and social karma Curated authenticity Figuring out your author brand Keeping ambition alive while building for the long-term What has changed, and what has stayed the same in book marketing You can find Becky Robinson at BeckyRobinson.com and on Twitter @beckyrbnsn Transcript of Interview with Becky Robinson Joanna: Becky Robinson is the author of Reach: Create the Biggest Possible Audience for Your Message, Book, or Cause. She is also the founder and CEO of the digital marketing agency, Weaving Influence. Welcome to the show, Becky. Becky: Thank you so much, Joanna. It's great to be with you. Joanna: This is such a great topic, and many authors need this. But let's start with an attitude question, because many authors actually hate the idea of marketing. How can authors reframe marketing as valuable and important for reaching readers? Becky: I think one thing is to really focus on the reason why you wrote the book in the first place. Most people who write nonfiction write it because they have a valuable message to add to the world, they have an idea or a cause that they want to promote through their nonfiction book. If someone's writing fiction, then they likely have a story that they want to tell that compelled them to write and publish a book. So I think staying connected to the reason why you wrote the book in the first place can help you have, perhaps, a different attitude toward marketing, because I think what authors quickly find out is that without marketing, they are unlikely to reach the audience that they have intended for their book. So in terms of another reframe, I also try to help authors overcome this idea that when they're promoting their book, they're promoting themselves. No one really wants to feel like they're a self-promoter, or very few of us do. Instead, I encourage people to reframe and look at it that when you have a book to promote, book promotion is not self-promotion, its message or story promotion. Those two tweaks of really viewing marketing your book as bringing value to others either through learning, or education, or inspiration, or entertainment, and then realizing that apart from sharing your book, likely, your audience won't discover it. Joanna: That's so important because I feel that there is a overarching message, which I think is being done by the traditional industry, which is if your book is good enough, people will find you. Is that true at all? Becky: I don't think so, Joanna, except that it's the early efforts to get our book into audience's hands that potentially could propel you beyond those early audiences, and in a way, then people would find you. But I think those chances are quite rare. Instead, if you write a book, and it's out there, and you don't promote it, chances are, it will just get lost. There are millions of books on Amazon, there are hundreds or thousands of new books released every day. Every book needs to find an initial audience. The hope would be that once you find an initial audience, if that audience finds value, they'll expand awareness and share the book with others. But there are no guarantees. In order to ensure that we create the reach that we want for our work, we really do need to have a focused and diligent approach and an approach that goes over months and years, not only just over the days when the book comes out. Joanna: You mentioned value there. I love that your book talks about value, it's definitely something that I focus on as well for my nonfiction. What do you mean by delivering value? And how can we do that in our marketing, not just in our books? Becky: The first thing I would say is that we want to be very clear about the audience that we're creating content for. It's the audience who determines the value. So you mentioned to me, Joanna, before we started to record that your audience is authors, so, of course, authors find value in what you're creating. I think the mistake that some authors make is they think their book is for everyone. And when you try to serve everyone, in some ways, you may never serve anyone. If you have clarity about who your audience is, you'll be more likely to predict what they will find valuable. So the value is really determined by the person who's receiving the content. As it relates to how you can share value through your marketing and not only through your book, the way that you can do that is by using the content in the book and other related content in your online presence. So you want to think about, ‘What's the content that I can regularly create and share that will meet the felt needs of my audience, that will be a value to my audience, and what are the various ways I can bring that to them so that as I'm showing up in online spaces, it's not just with the message of, buy my book, buy my book, buy my book, but, instead, it's actually sharing the content from within the book in a way that will attract awareness and interest?' Joanna: I just want to follow up on a couple of things here. You talked about the clarity around who the audience is, and I feel this is actually a really difficult thing for people because even if they don't say my audience is everyone. Because I feel like people often just think about themselves. I'm a woman, I'm in my late 40s, I'm British, I'm happily childfree, I'm married. There are things about my demographics. But what I found with my own audience, particularly with my fiction, is it's more about interests than demographics. I feel like sometimes the traditional ways of thinking about a market can underestimate the more global reach around, I guess they call it psychographics, which is people who are interested in certain topics or certain genres of fiction. How can we both broaden and narrow our idea of who our audience is and find out who they might be? Becky: I've always thought about audience and the discovery of audience as somewhat being a discovery-driven process. And what I mean by that is, we might start out with a certain demographic, as you mentioned, in mind, and along the way, we might discover that there are people outside of that demographic who are finding value in, or who are interested in our work. And sometimes I like to actually work backwards. So, your audience really is those people who start to show up and engage with you. If you're having trouble getting clarity about who your audience is, it can be helpful to really distill down to, who are the people who are engaging with the content that you're creating? Now, obviously, you want that to expand over time. For example, with email marketing, I will often get an idea of the audience that I'm sending my email marketing to based on who responds to me and what I can learn about them. And so as I send out my email newsletter on Fridays, I'm asking a lot of questions in hopes that people will write me back so I can really learn who they are. I think it can be helpful to think about your audience almost in that one-on-one way. And if you're crafting content, whether it's a blog post, or a podcast interview, or a webinar, or an eBook, really, it can help to just identify one person. Of the people who have been engaging with your online content, is there one person that this particular piece of content is meant to serve? One of the ways you can do that is if you receive a lot of questions from people. I have a young woman who has followed me and we're connected, we're friends. And sometimes when I craft content, I do it exactly with Nikki in mind. And I'll think, ‘Okay. Well, Nikki, who's a first-time self-published author has this set of questions, I want to create some content to answer her, and in doing so, I'm going to attract others like her.' Does that make sense? Joanna: Absolutely. You did mention something there that I know will freak some people out. And it's something I think about, is those who show up and engage are our audience, and asking questions to learn who they are. I'm an introvert, and I love creating, I've written over 30 books. Many people who are listening, we love writing books. That's what we want to do, we're authors. And so the thought of spending so long doing email or engaging on social media when our words could be, perhaps, better put into writing more books. What would you say to them? Becky: For any creator, you need to learn how to balance the creating of your new books with showing up with value in online spaces. It may mean that you need to get some support if you can afford to hire a team member who can engage with or for you, or it may mean that you need to really think about what it is that has driven the success of your work. And it's not one-size-fits-all. I met a fiction author earlier this year at an event, his name is Steven James. And he's a really great bestselling fiction author. Well, one of the things about fiction is, the more books you publish, the more you can grow an audience almost organically, because as people discover and love one of your books, they'll buy and read others, and then your backlist can get stronger. So, in some ways, there is a case to be made on the fiction side to keep writing maybe even beyond prioritizing an audience all the time because the more books you have, the more books people will be able to find. I would also say that there has to be a way that you show up in online spaces to build awareness for your work. So just figuring out what works for you as an author. Joanna: I think that's really important. It is about choosing what works for you. And audio is one of the formats I choose. But what I like about this format with podcasting is there are many thousands of people who will listen to this interview, and we don't know who they are. I feel like this is actually one way of providing value to an audience, but it's more of a push thing. Now, some people will email, some people will tweet, and some people will leave a comment, but nowhere near the number of people who consume the content. What do you think about this type of push or broadcast media compared to asking people to respond to an email or on social, which, to me, is much more intense? Becky: The choice to do a podcast and deliver content of value in an audio format is a completely valid way to grow an audience. And what I would say about it is that it's important on the other side to just have clarity about the metrics of your podcast so that you can decide whether or not you need to promote it in other ways to continue to expand your audience. In the book, I define reach as not only lasting impact, which we can have as people choose to read our books or listen to our podcasts, but also expanding audience. So as a creator, and, Joanna, you may know that I also have a podcast, I want to know how many people are listening, I want to get as much information about them as I can so I can continue to create and share content that will be of value to them. Joanna: Absolutely. Let's come back to the book. You include generosity in your list of important principles, which, again, I really love, because I feel this is something I've focused on since the beginning. What are some of the ways we can be more generous in practical ways with our marketing? Becky: I'll start with the simplest one. What I've noticed in serving authors over the past decade is that the more books you give away, the more you expand the audience for your book. Now, I understand that not everyone has the capacity or financial margin to give away books, but whenever possible, I recommend making your book available in different ways to people who might benefit from it. One author I've served has said that for every book that he wants to sell, he needs to give away 10%. So if you want to sell 10,000 books, he thinks, along the way, you need to give away at least 1,000. I don't have any scientific data about that, but I've definitely noticed on my own journey that by giving away the book, I help people discover its value, and that compels them to share it with others. So the first way that you can be generous is just giving your book away if you have the means to do so. The second thing I would say is giving away the ideas in the book. So if you're a nonfiction author and you can share in various ways, whether it's audio, if that's what's comfortable, whether it's through free webinars, whether it's through your social media presence, sharing the message of the book freely with others. I would say also sharing of yourself to promote others. I've noticed on my journey, when I've been able to promote others' books or others' work, quite often, that can create a world in which then they become interested in my book. And I've noticed this among fiction authors. The good thing about fiction is that most people who read fiction are always looking for the next read. And so if you're a fiction author and you can promote other authors who have written books that are similar to yours, then there's this amazing synchronicity that happens where people can move from one author to the next and really enjoy the work of many authors. I have a fiction author, I've been supporting Stephanie Landsem, and she writes historical fiction. I just see consistently her pointing people to other historical fiction books that she loves. That generosity of spirit, I think, then helps her to be seen as not only someone who can recommend great books, but then people might be interested to read hers. Joanna: I totally agree. I call that social karma, which is you share without the expectation of return. But it does return eventually from another source or somewhere else. But the more generous you can be, I feel like, and also, it's just a positive way to live, right? It just makes you happy to be generous. And then I feel like it does come back in some way. Becky: Yes, I think so. There's definitely joy to be shared if you love books and you are attracting other people who love books to just be able to say, ‘Hey, here's what I'm reading, and I loved it.' As an author, it's so great to be on the receiving end of that as well. Joanna: All of us are readers. I'm always sharing the books I'm reading. But I love that you mentioned giving away the ideas in your book. You were talking about nonfiction here. Because as a podcast host, one of the most annoying things is when someone comes on the show and they'll go, ‘Oh, well, I can't share that because that's in my book, and I want people to buy the book.' What would you say to people who use podcasting to promote their book? Is it the same, to give all the ideas away? Becky: Of course, you want to give all the ideas away, because how can people know that they want to buy your book if they're not sure what you're writing about? And I've personally found that it's not really possible to give away too much. I try to give away as much as I can. Obviously, I run a business, and so I do need to attract customers to my business. But when I show up to a call with someone, I can never be sure if they're going to hire me or not. But I want to give, absolutely, as much value in that first time of meeting someone as I can because what that shows them is that they can expect that I'll continue to give value to them if they happen to hire me. I feel like it's the same way with a book. I don't think you can give away too many of the ideas in your book, all you're doing really is demonstrating to someone that the content is something that would benefit them. And if not, then your book probably isn't for them. Joanna: Absolutely. And they will have turned off by now. Which is what I also like about podcasting, people can really choose whether to stick around and listen. To get back into the book, so we know we have to have an author brand. And in the book, you say, ‘Branding doesn't have to be complicated or confusing. In fact, it's super simple.' And again, I know all the listeners are going, ‘What? What is she talking about?' Tell us more about branding. Becky: I think that people will often overthink branding. And, honestly, your brand already exists. The brand is you. And the way that you can get clear about your brand is really to articulate the value that you hope to bring to audiences. Then there's also the set of choices that we can make about our brand. So your brand can be visually how people envision you in terms of what you look like, but it's also the personal qualities that you bring to your work. One of the ways that we can figure out what our brand is by asking people. I can call up my three best clients and say, ‘Hey, what do you think I'm good at? What do you think of when you think of me?' It doesn't have to be this overwrought analysis, but it's really like, who are you, and what's the best of who you are, and what's the best of what you want to bring to others? Joanna: It's so interesting you say that because at the beginning, you said, ‘It's not about self-promotion, it's about message and story promotion.' How do we say that the brand is us while not promoting ourselves? Becky: That's a really, really good question, Joanna. How I would differentiate those two thoughts is that people connect to people. Particularly with nonfiction, I think that people who are reading nonfiction want to know who the thought leader behind the book is. While promoting our book is about promoting the value that we're bringing to others, I think we do that by connecting in personal relationship with others. Now, you mentioned being an introvert and feeling a little bit uncomfortable with this idea of engaging. I don't necessarily think it has to be one-on-one, because, of course, one-on-one relating to the readers of our book doesn't scale. But I think that part of generosity is just being generous about sharing of ourselves and the more authentic we can be in sharing the content that we've created with the world, that more easily, people will feel like they're connected to us. I'm not sure if that makes sense. The idea is the brand is you because people connect to people. And as you share your book, you're sharing content that's of value, but the way that people connect with that content is often personal. Joanna: I didn't mean it to be a trick question. I try and ask things that challenge people and then they think differently. But I think it's important because, I mean, we're in this interesting world where, on the one hand, we're encouraged to be open and transparent, and authentic, and real, and all this stuff, but people also are worried and they're afraid of being too transparent, too authentic, and perhaps giving too much away, or privacy falls apart. I think about it as ‘curated authenticity,' which is you and I have brands, and this is our honest conversation, but it's also our curated selves. And we're talking about a particular topic. I feel like that's an important distinction. It's like, yes, be yourself, but this particular part of yourself that you're willing to share with an audience, but still protect a part of yourself and keep it private. Becky: Yes. A wholehearted yes to that, Joanna. I appreciate you highlighting that because I know that there are times on my journey where I feel that pull of, ‘Am I really authentic if there are parts of me that I choose to keep private?' Yes, of course, you can both have boundaries and privacy and curate an authentic self through your online presence. I think it's good to just remember that your online presence isn't necessarily all of the real you, it's part of the real you. There are parts along the journey that, of course, I choose to keep private and there are times that I choose to be vulnerable or transparent if it can serve my audience more effectively. Can I share an example of that with you, Joanna? Joanna: Yes, of course. Becky: One of the things I talk about in the book is the importance of closing what I call the influence gap, which is the gap between who you are in terms of your expertise and in-person spaces and who you are online. What I say is that when you choose to show up online in the same powerful way that you show up in person, then you can create the biggest possible impact for your work. What I realized when I had a book signing at a bookstore about a month after my book came out is that I've likely invested more time in online spaces than in offline spaces. I had all these beautiful photos from the book signing, but they didn't tell the whole story, because the truth is, I didn't do a good job with my in-person networks. And the only person who showed up to that particular book signing was my husband's cousin and his wife. To me, part of having a real and authentic brand is not curating to make the book signing look better than it was, but trying to navigate, how do I share about this in a way that might add value to my audience so that authors know, hey, if you're going to have an in-person book signing, you have to do the hard work of inviting personally your in-person network, or you may have this disappointment like I had. Joanna: I've never done one. My whole thing is global online scalable marketing. I just barely do anything in-person. And, in fact, if I ever do a book launch event, it will just be more of a party, I guess. I have thought about it for maybe my 50th birthday or something, eventually doing a book launch or a book signing. I feel like in-person, you definitely have to organize that a lot more. Whereas I feel like this, like our interview now, people could be listening to this in years to come and it will still provide value. Whereas the physical book signing to me is not really marketing, almost. Becky: I agree with you. I think it's more of a reflection, again, of the time invested in a particular place. For those of us who are mostly building online presence and attracting a worldwide audience, then who shows up in one room at one point in time may not be an accurate representation of the impact that we're having in the world. Joanna: Super important point. Let's talk about longevity. Because, again, a quote from the book, ‘Authors may expect to achieve success at the outset that others accumulate over decades.' I really feel that, especially as first-time authors, I remember feeling this too, it's like, ‘Oh, my book's coming out, I'm going to change all these lives, I'm going to make a million dollars, I can retire,' all this stuff. How do we keep that ambition and that hope alive while still building for the long-term? Becky: I do think it's important to have a reality check for a first-time author to realize, ‘this is just the first book, it is just the beginning.' And to have insight. If you think about nonfiction thought leaders who are making an impact over time, I'll share two with you. Brené Brown, everyone thinks that her viral TEDx talk that came out around 2013 was when she became big and better-known. Well, actually, she was writing and publishing for a decade before that, and she's been writing and publishing for a decade since then. It's not fair to look at someone like Brené and think, ‘As a first-time author, I can achieve that kind of success.' It really is the accumulation of adding value to spaces over time that helps a person become more well-known. I think, for me, in partnering with authors over time, it's been really obvious. One of my heroes, if you will, is Whitney Johnson, and Whitney Johnson is listed on the Thinkers50, she's number eight, she's the number-eight recognized thought leader around the world by the Thinkers organization. I worked with Whitney back in 2012 when she marketed and launched her first book. And more than 10 years later, when she launched Smart Growth, which is her latest book, I think it's her fifth book, she did make ‘The Wall Street Journal' bestseller list, the ‘USA Today' bestseller list, but it's only because of the hard work that she's done across the decades to build her thought leadership brand, and to build audiences, and to add value to others. She's done hundreds of podcasts in that time and hundreds of LinkedIn live interviews with people. She's really built this amazing network and audience. A reality check for any first-time author is just to know that it's not likely that you're going to achieve that kind of success of someone who's been out there for a decade when your first book comes out. So really just seeing that every bit of content that we create or every book that we write will likely result in a growing audience and just to be patient with ourselves. Joanna: Yes. And I've never heard of Whitney Johnson. I've heard of Brené, obviously, and I've read some of her books, but I feel like if there are people we've heard of, and we kind of expect that ‘Well, okay, so it took her a decade, well, then it should take me a decade.' But then a lot of people don't become Brené Brown in a decade. And I feel like this almost highlights the importance of finding a tiny niche. I'm tiny bit of internet-famous in my tiny, tiny corner of the internet. And I make a multi-six-figure business as an author. I'll never be as big as Brené Brown. We can still carve out our niche without hitting any lists or making it big on YouTube or whatever, right? Becky: Well, of course, and can I just share with you a moment, Joanna, like, if you can see me, I have my hand on my heart right now because the original title that I had for my book was actually not Reach. the original title was Famous to a Few. Joanna: Oh, great. Becky: And the reason why I had that as my working title is because it is true that most of us will never be famous like Brené Brown. But if we choose to show up with value to the audiences who know us, we can become famous to those few who are choosing to follow us. And from those few, we can expand the impact that we have larger beyond just a few. When you say, ‘I'm famous in my little corner,' I want to say, ‘Yes,' and that's what it really means, if we want to make a difference in the world, we can choose to be famous to the people who are listening to us. We can choose to be famous to the people who are reading us. If we're fortunate, those people will choose to share our work with others and our impacts can expand. But I think that we'll all do much better if we focus on the difference we want to make in the world and not focus on fame and not focus on fortune. Joanna: This is the thing. I'm so glad. I prefer that title, actually. I think that's great. I think it sounds more like the Kevin Kelly's ‘1000 True Fans' model, which I feel is truer than ever, which is if you have 1,000 true fans, you can make a living as a creator, basically. And that can be enough, although I don't think 1,000 book sales at 99 cents or even 9.99 is enough. But it is interesting that we can niche down in that way. And obviously, you're a marketing professional, but I feel like some marketing is focused on, ‘Well, you need to get on this TV show, or you need to do this thing.' And that people associate marketing, ‘good marketing,' with getting famous. Whereas, personally, I don't want to be famous. I don't want to be on TV. I actually don't want to attract attention. And I think many people feel that way, but yet we have to attract attention to sell books. It feels like that dichotomy. Becky: That is a difficult and tricky thing. I don't necessarily think that being on TV will make you famous. And I would like to differentiate between kind of this viral effect where maybe if you go on TV, suddenly, you have tens of thousands more eyeballs on your work. But that's not necessarily going to translate into that longer-term difference that you want to make. For someone who wants to make a difference, wants to make a living, I think it's the consistent value that you're offering to those audiences who need to hear from you that will achieve more for you in the long run than being famous and being on TV. Joanna: Absolutely. I've never had anything viral happen. I've hit bestseller lists, but it hasn't made that much difference. I feel like the slow growth has been very sustainable. And my sanity has been sustainable as well as my bank account, and yet, it's been slow growth year-on-year for almost 15 years now. Becky: It sounds like you've discovered something magical that most of us would love to recreate. Joanna: Well, it's just what you say. That's why I was happy to talk to you, because I feel like delivering value, generosity, long-term thinking, this is literally what I've been talking about on my show, which is why I was so happy that you talked about it in your book. Becky: I think maybe I just put together these thoughts in a way, potentially, that's easy to remember, easy to understand, and describes the experience of people like you who are out there really living it out day-by-day. Joanna: Let's talk about the long-term thing, because you mentioned earlier, you've been marketing for the past decade. And I've been doing this since 2008, and I feel like there are things that have changed and there are things that have stayed the same. So I'm interested in your thoughts. What has stayed the same and what has changed since you started in book marketing? Becky: That's a great question. I think that one thing that has stayed the same is that building a true network of connections and adding value to others still works. So when I started back in 2000… Well, I started my business in 2012, but I showed up in online spaces in 2009. If I go back to 2009, which is a little bit longer ago, that was when people were really starting to use Facebook and Twitter primarily for online marketing. And it may be now that the channels in terms of the popularity of them has shifted. I no longer use Twitter in quite the same way that I did back in 2009. And there are more of these newer channels that are emerging. What we're seeing right now is that, especially fiction authors, are getting a lot of traction on TikTok. Of course, TikTok didn't exist in 2009. So while the channels may change, I think the need to show up with consistency to share value in whatever channels you choose, that's the part that hasn't changed. If I think about advice that I would have given myself in 2009 that would stay the same now, it's that your online presence really needs to have a core that you own and control. An author's own website really is the most valuable asset. I believe that from there, once you have your own website, you also want to build a permission-based email list because I think similar to back in 2009, or 2012, or whatever, email marketing is a great way to convert people to whatever offers you have. That hasn't changed, really, in my mind, from then to now. What has changed is the various channels that people choose to invest in that are owned by others. I think about Google Plus. So in about 2012, '13, that was when… Joanna: Oh, I remember that. Yeah. Becky: People got obsessed over growing their Google Plus. And, of course, now that's not even a channel. The channels that we choose to share content on, they come and go, but what doesn't really go is the need to really carve out your own space online and share value with others. Joanna: Of course, you'll remember Myspace as well, which was the thing before Facebook and YouTube. I think it might still be around, but it kind of was the big thing and then, suddenly, it wasn't the big thing anymore. Becky: Exactly. You could say the same thing about blogging or podcasting. Back in 2009, of course, blogging was more popular. Now podcasting is all the rage. What hasn't changed is we need to show up in spaces with valuable content. What has changed is the popularity of various types of content. And, of course, now, as I mentioned, TikTok, those shorter video reels are quite popular. I can't say I'm ready to jump into that game myself. And based on what you said about preferring audio, I'm betting you're not ready to jump into that space either? Joanna: No, definitely not. You mentioned podcasting, it's interesting, I actually feel like I have been doing the same thing since 2008-2009. And you said it, which is I've always owned and controlled my website, my email list, and I've driven people to my list from everything else. What's so funny about podcasting is, because I started this podcast in 2009, nobody listened for…well, barely anyone listened for years. But because I was trying to give value, I stayed the course. And then, of course, when podcasting really took off, I was well-positioned to be in the right place at the right time and take advantage of audio, SEO, and all those things. So I feel like sometimes, if you find the channel really that you love, and you stick around, then it can work. And, of course, the channels for audio have changed. So like Spotify, a lot of people will be listening to this on Spotify, which wasn't around in 2009. But because I own and control this audio feed, I can put it wherever I want. So, again, as you say, it comes down to owning and controlling your marketing assets. Becky: Yes, indeed. And that speaks again to the value of generosity, the fact that you started your podcast long ago allows you to continue to have a growing audience and bigger impact with it because you have chosen to stick around. Joanna: We're almost out of time, but in terms of you as an author, so you spend most of your time helping authors market their books, but now, of course, you have this book to market. What kinds of marketing have you found most effective in selling your own book? Becky: I would say the thing that I did that I'm the most proud of is the generous distribution of my book pre-publication to over 400 people to drive early interest in Amazon reviews. So I feel like that's one of the most important things that we did, is look to mobilize those people around me by getting the book to them in advance of launch so that they could read and review it. I would say also, we have done a lot of podcast interviews which has been really fun to reach new audiences for the book, because, obviously, my own podcast or my own email list is a limited group. Partnering with others like you who are willing to share my content with your audiences has been a great way to expand people finding out about the book. So I would say those are two of the key things that we've done. But I think, also, there's just kind of this everyday decision that you have to make of, ‘In what way can I show up with value on my core topics today? In what way can I serve authors, and thought leaders, and nonprofit leaders today? What can I create that would be of value to them?' It's that consistent presence to show up with value. And we're about two months past my book launch as you and I are talking. And it's really just the beginning. I'm having to remind myself again also of the importance of having that long-term view. And while it's possible that the content in my book may not always be as relevant as it is today, I feel like I wrote it in a way that even though the channels may change, the basic concepts that I share should have a long life. Joanna: I totally agree with you. I'm glad you said that too, because so many people think book marketing is about launch week or launch month, which, again, is a very traditional publishing focus, because generally you get a publicist for a month and the book is in the bookstores for a couple of months. For most of us, book marketing just goes on and on, doesn't it? And certainly, I think your book, I think, most of it is entirely long-term. And the same, I have a book on marketing. The principles, as we talked about, remain the same over time. Becky: Yes, of course. I used to always say, Joanna, that book marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. I've really changed my tune since my own book came out. And the reason is because when you say book marketing is a marathon and not a sprint, you still imply that there's a finish line to reach. Whereas what I'm thinking about now is that book marketing is more like having a lifelong commitment to fitness and choosing to continue to be fit across your life, because there's no finish line to that. I feel like to continue to add value through a book, there really isn't a finish line that we're striving toward. It's that ongoing, long-term willingness to show up and add value generously to people through our ideas. Joanna: Brilliant. Where can people find you and your book online? Becky: My book is available in all your favorite online retailers. But if you want to find the links to find the book, you can go to beckyrobinson.com/book. When you get there, you'll have the chance to listen to an audio sample, read a free chapter of the book if you'd like. And then all the links to buy the book are there at beckyrobinson.com/book. If you want to find out more about my company, you can find us at weavinginfluence.com. And my podcast is called ‘The Book Marketing Action Podcast.' One quick note for your readers, when they do choose to buy my book, one of the things that they'll do is unlock a free course that I built full of additional resources that wouldn't fit in the book. So I don't know if you noticed this, Joanna, but at the end of every chapter of my book, there's a QR code. And when you scan the QR code, you get prompted with a quick survey. Once you've done the quick survey, you can sign up with a login and you can access the course and all the free resources. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Becky. That was great. Becky: I loved being with you. Thank you, Joanna.The post Reach: Create The Biggest Audience For Your Book With Becky Robinson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How To Write a Novel: From Idea to Book is out now if you buy direct from my store, www.CreativePennBooks.com for ebook, audiobook, paperback, or workbook editions. It will be out everywhere on your favorite store in your preferred format from 13 August 2022. More details and links here. In today's special inbetweenisode, I share the Introduction from the audiobook edition of How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book, written and narrated by me, Joanna Penn. Introduction to How to Write a Novel Writing a novel will change your life. It might not be in the way that you expect, but when you hold your book in your hand and say, “I made this,” something will shift. The process of getting to that point will light a spark in your creative soul and help you discover unexpected aspects of yourself. It will be one of the things you are most proud of in your life. It will be worth the effort. My goal with this book is to help you get there. But How to Write a Novel is not an exhaustive tome of everything you could ever learn about writing. I have deliberately cut it down as much as possible. The writing craft is like an iceberg. You can write a novel with the basic knowledge that you can see above the surface. The hidden depths of the writing craft, like the iceberg, go much deeper than you can imagine. Learning it all cannot be achieved in a single lifetime, and that is part of the joy of being a writer. You learn something new with every story you write and every book that emerges into the world. But you don’t need to know it all in order to get started. In fact, if you wait until you know everything about the writing craft before you start your novel, you will be overwhelmed with too much information and, most likely, never finish. This book will help those writing their first novel and also those who want to revisit the creative process. It covers the basic knowledge above the surface of the iceberg and hints at the depths beneath. What sets this book apart is that I’m an intuitive discovery writer. I don’t plot or outline. Most craft books are written by plotters, outliners, and linear thinkers, so hopefully, I can also provide a different perspective. You can certainly write and finish a novel with the information in this book, but there’s always more to learn. The writing craft is the journey of a lifetime. Let’s take the first step together. You can learn how to write a novel I used to think that authors sat at their desks, and perfect words flowed effortlessly from their fingertips. I thought that the sentences in the pages of a finished book emerged from the author’s mind fully formed. That writers entered a state of flow and wrote without effort. In fact, if it was difficult, and they struggled, perhaps they weren’t a ‘real’ writer after all. Perhaps they didn’t have talent or a gift for writing and, of course, that meant I could never write a novel because I, too, had neither. But that is not the reality of the writing life. The words you read in a finished novel result from hard work, occasional moments of flow and flashes of insight, and an editorial process that transforms the first draft into a finished book. Too many new writers give up because they don’t know the next step to take, or they find that writing a novel is harder than they expect. But it’s worth the effort, I promise you, and this book will help you through the journey. Who am I? Like you, I’m a reader and I love books. I read every day — for escape, fun, and solace, as well as for entertainment, education, and inspiration. I spend way too much money on books! When I was a little girl, I would toddle into my mum’s bedroom at night. Instead of a teddy, I would drag my favorite books in with me and curl up at the end of the bed with them in my arms. I remember little about what happened at school or even university, but I remember so many of the books I read along the way. The written word has always been my happy place. Perhaps that’s also true for you. I never thought I could be a fiction writer. Such a rarefied breed of miraculous creatures surely lived in ivory towers somewhere inaccessible to mere mortals. Those who could turn their thoughts into words were so far away from my experience, there was no way I could ever talk to them, let alone become one. But if writing is the way you express yourself, if writing is the way you figure out the world, if writing is your art and your joy and the thing you do that makes life make sense — then you must write. Eventually, I discovered this truth and gave myself permission to write more than just my journals. I started writing nonfiction for publication in 2006 and wrote the first five thousand words of my first novel in 2009. Since then, I’ve written eighteen novels and novellas, in addition to many short stories, as J.F. Penn, and co-written several others. I’m an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestseller, and I’ve sold nearly a million books in over one hundred countries and multiple languages. I certainly don’t know everything about the writing craft, but I hope my insights from the author journey will be useful for you. How to read the book It’s been a challenge to structure the material in this book because, for me, writing a novel is about wrangling chaos. I’ve never had a linear process — either for learning how to write, or for crafting my own novels. Some authors are structured and organized, and others are more intuitive. But most writers do not progress from story idea to characters to plot to theme in an organized fashion every time. Most do not write the first line of the first paragraph and then proceed all the way to The End in order. Creation is not a linear process. It’s more like a whirlwind — at least it is for me. A tornado of ideas and characters and plot points and deeper themes and images and so much more, all whirling around in no particular order. My job as an author is to wrangle that chaos. To capture the whirlwind and channel it into a linear story for the reader to experience, while still retaining the kinetic energy of the original spark. When you’re starting out, the chaos can seem overwhelming, but when you’ve written a few books, you discover the wrangling process is part of the joy of creation. I have wrangled the material of this book in the same way. You can read in order or jump to a particular section depending on how you prefer to learn. Part 1 covers mindset issues, helping you better understand why you want to write, what may have stopped you in the past, and the five principles that will help you make progress now.  Part 2 delves into how to generate ideas, conduct research, and find a writing process that works for you—whether you are an outliner or a discovery writer, or something in between.  Part 3 guides you through the major aspects of the craft of writing a novel, from story structure to author voice.  Part 4 will help you start and finish your first draft, including tips on both mindset and writing tools.  Part 5 focuses on the editing process, with advice on self-editing and working with a professional editor. There are lots of tips and ideas and processes that might help — but please discard those that don’t work for you. Ultimately, there are no rules, only suggestions from authors who have written the path before you. We all have to find our own way through wrangling the chaos to a finished novel. You will find your own path, but you might take a few wrong turns and go down some blind alleys before you make it to the finish line. There are questions at the end of every chapter that might help. You might know the answers right away, you might discover them later, or you might never know — and that’s okay, too. Writing a novel will change your life — so let’s get started. You can click here to buy How to Write a Novel direct from me right now on my store: www.CreativePennBooks.com. Available from mid-August on all the usual stores in all the usual formats. Links here. The post Writing A Novel Will Change Your Life. Audiobook Introduction Of How To Write A Novel. first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you write a series which keeps your readers engaged, while still keeping your creative spark alive? How can you sustain a writing career for the long term? With Tess Gerritsen. In the intro, The Creator Economy report [The Tilt]; Publisher Rocket tutorial. Today's show is sponsored by IngramSpark, who I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 39,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries and more. It's your content—do more with it through IngramSpark.com. Tess Gerritsen is the multi-award-winning and internationally bestselling author of the ‘Rizzoli & Isles' series adapted for TV and other medical thrillers and suspense novels with over 40 million copies sold. She's also a filmmaker, director, and screenwriter, and her latest novel is Listen to Me. 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 Tips for discovery writingKeeping readers engaged over a long seriesStaying creatively engaged and making time for writing ideas that might not fit anywhereThe differences between writing books and writing for TVTapping into creative darkness without being overwhelmed by itChanges in the publishing industry and increased responsibility for marketingTips for a long-term writing career You can find Tess Gerritsen at TessGerritsen.com and on Twitter @tessgerritsen Transcript of Interview with Tess Gerritsen Joanna: Tess Gerritsen is the multi-award-winning and internationally bestselling author of the ‘Rizzoli & Isles' series adapted for TV and other medical thrillers and suspense novels with over 40 million copies sold. She's also a filmmaker, director, and screenwriter, and her latest novel is Listen to Me. Welcome to the show, Tess. Tess: Thank you for inviting me. I'm happy to be here. Joanna: I'm so excited to talk to you. So let's wind the clock back. You were a medical doctor before you started writing. How do you incorporate that medical background into your novels even many years after you stopped practicing? Tess: The funny thing is, when I first started writing books, I didn't incorporate any medicine into it because I was writing romantic suspense, and I thought, ‘Oh, nobody cares about medicine. It's a day job for me,' and I think that most of us who have day jobs think of them as humdrum. It wasn't until I wrote a book called Harvest and that was published in 1996 where the medicine came into play. And I found out, hey, audiences do like these details. So I incorporate my memories of what it's like to be a doctor, also how doctors think. I think that's what makes this special, is we know how doctors would approach a particular problem. And that's mainly how I incorporate it. When it comes to medical details, I either know it or I have a bunch of textbooks that I can consult or I have colleagues I can ask if it's a specialty I'm not fully aware of. Joanna: Well, you said, ‘how doctors think.' How do doctors think compared to how novelists think? Is it all about solving problems? Tess: It is. You have a patient who comes in with an unusual symptom. So you're going to go down your checklist of which systems in the body should we be looking at. And it's a fairly methodical system. And, in fact, you can go online probably and have some computer do it for you. But it is a way of approaching a problem, a mystery. I don't think it has any effect on how I write, actually. I think the medical background is more what I draw from for informational purposes and for character purposes. But when I write, I am completely disorganized. I think it probably surprises people who assume that I must be an organized writer. I don't do outlines. I've tried. I don't have my plot planned out ahead of time. It's very much for me just taking the path, starting down the dark road, and seeing where it takes me. Joanna: I love that. I'm also a discovery writer, I call it discovery writer. And I actually read that you didn't plot, and that was very encouraging. So you mentioned the dark road. Where do you start in the writing process? How do you follow a disorganized process? Tess: I like to start with an emotional springboard, and it has to do with what is the scene that plunges me or my character into the story. I think that the best premises are those that affect your emotions, that you may evoke something like fear or shock, something that makes you want to ask what happens next. I start with the premise, and I have to know something about my characters beforehand. And that is one thing I do know, is who are these people and what kind of a voice do they have. I like to listen to a voice in my head. I like to hear this voice in my head, and that will really guide me down this path. When I started writing that book, Harvest, for instance, the voice that I first heard was that of a 12-year-old boy. He directed a lot of the action, and that told me where my story was going, which is this 12-year-old boy is going to be one of the main characters and he's going to help solve the crime. So if you can hear the voice, you know who this person is, you know whether they're male or female, young or old, you can tell by their language whether they're educated or uneducated. And I think that really defines which way the story is going. Joanna: It's funny you mentioned listening to the voice there. Your latest novel is Listen to Me. Where did the premise for that book come from, and tell people about the premise since that's your most recent book? Tess: This was really inspired by a voice. And that was the voice of Angela Rizzoli, Jane's mother. I heard her talking, and she's a warm, funny, somewhat annoying woman, but you want to hang around and see what she says. So that book was started by the thought of Angela Rizzoli as an older woman. She's had a lot of things going on in her life in the course of these last 12 books. She was introduced very early on, and things have happened to her. She was a happily married woman who had raised her children. She just devoted her life to her husband and her children. And then about halfway through the series, her husband left her for another woman. So now Angela is single. She's on the verge of divorce. She has to find her new life. She's been living in the same suburban house for 30 years. She knows the street, she knows her neighborhood, and she sees something that bothers her. And that was the first thing she said to me in my head, ‘If you see something, say something.' Angela clearly says things. She bothers her daughter about this. And we get to follow Angela's investigation as something of an amateur sleuth who is a nosy neighbor. We also get to follow Jane and Maura, of course. They're doing their own real murder investigation of a nurse who has been bludgeoned in her own home. So we have simultaneous investigations, one that's an amateur, one that's a professional. And they will in some ways affect each other's investigations. Joanna: You mentioned that there have been 12 other books. This is book 13 in the ‘Rizzoli & Isles' series. How do you keep readers engaged in a long-running series? What are some tips for people who want to write these longer series? Tess: That is a real challenge because I don't like a series where the characters never change. I want to see them evolve. And that is, I think, one of the things that has kept the series alive, is that Jane and Maura are constantly growing. They're evolving. Jane, when you first saw her in The Surgeon was not a very likable person. But then she fell in love, she got married, she had a baby. So she's matured in many ways, mellowed a lot of ways. So she now, I think, is a lot more likable. You also saw her struggle to become respected. That would get really old if that struggle was still going on at book number 12. Now, it's book number 13. The cops know who she is, and they respect her. So we've seen that journey for Jane. We've also seen Maura have a similar journey, although it's been more of a depressing journey because Maura is searching for love. She's finally found it, but there were a lot of romantic misadventures. The other thing I would recommend is you have a large universe of characters. There are people like Barry Frost who's Jane's partner in the homicide unit. We've seen his life have ups and downs. We've seen Angela's ups and downs. I think that it's a little bit like a real-life situation where you know your relatives are going through crises, various crises, and you want to follow those. Joanna: It's interesting because a lot of detective series and especially those that get adapted for TV are these sort of more episodic where there isn't such a change because you want to keep having the stuff go on forever. Do you see an end because, of course, your characters are moving forward in their lives? And you mentioned Angela there. Do you see ends for these characters? Because, of course, that can be very difficult for readers, very difficult for writers. Or do you just see this series going on forever? Tess: I don't know. When I finished book 12, I didn't think I was going to write another book. I leave my characters where they are, and, eventually, maybe I'll come back to them. I don't know. I don't think I will ever write what I would call a finale because I think of them as real people. I don't want to kill them. I just think that when they become fully happy and everybody settle down, the series is really over. Joanna: Now, that's interesting. And you said that, ‘I didn't think I'd write another book.' And this sort of feeling of, ‘I am really done with the series,' it seems to me like some writers with the longest series do need to write other things. As a creative, how do you keep yourself engaged in all your different worlds? Tess: I do write other books. It's been a 5-year gap between book number 12 and book number 13. It's because I did other things. I wrote two other books that had nothing to do with the series. I made a film with my son, and I took some time to creatively recharge the batteries. I think it's interesting that, as I get older, I feel that time is running out, and all these crazy ideas I had for books, well, this is the time to write them while I still can. So I am kind of trying to rush through inspirations that I have been harboring for a long time, and now is the time I'm writing them. Joanna: That sounds fascinating. Which of these books should we look for to see these fascinations? Tess: One of them, probably my readers are going, ‘Why did she write this particular book?' I wrote a ghost story. I live in the state of Maine, up in New England, and we are rumored to be one of the most haunted states in the country. Years and years ago, back when I was probably in my 20s, I had this idea for a book about a ghost and a single woman who comes to live in this house, and she falls in love with a ghost, sort of like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. That's a very old book and also a very old movie. But in this case, the ghost may be dangerous. So she doesn't know whether she's fallen in love with the perfect lover or whether she's fallen in love with a sadistic spirit. And because the house comes with a history of women who've died in this house, it becomes more of a thriller. That book was The Shape of Night. It was fun to write. I loved writing it. I think my readers were puzzled. But that's where your creativity takes you. Joanna: Well, that's really interesting. Obviously, at this point in your career, you can experiment, and your name is very well known. Do you think publishers try and box authors into a certain genre? They probably would have preferred that you'd just written another couple in your ‘Rizzoli and Isles' series? Tess: Yes, publishers will definitely try to box you in because they know how to sell your previous book, they know which books sell the best, and, clearly, series novels sell better because people are waiting for the same characters. When you have a book that is out of the box, what do you do with it, if your publisher will take it, that's great. But now we have options. Writers can self-publish, they can independently publish, or they can change publishers for their out-of-the-box books. So I think we have a lot more freedom, and I'm not as afraid to be writing the unexpected book as I might have been before. Joanna: That's good. I'm going to have to get The Shape of Night. I prefer the darker stories. You said that you took some time to creatively recharge. What kind of things do you do to creatively recharge? Tess: I wrote some television scripts, which sold. I got paid, but it hasn't gone into production. I made a film with my son, a documentary film, which was a great deal of fun. We were hunting for the ancient reasons behind the pork taboo. It sounds like a crazy idea, but I come from a family of restaurant tours. I like to eat just about everything. And it always puzzled me that any culture or religion would forbid a source of protein. So my son and I, we went around the world interviewing archeologists. We were just sort of looking for the ancient history of why pork was ever outlawed. Joanna: I actually went and watched the trailer for that because I was googling you looking for things, and I saw this review on the ‘Jewish Tribune' or something, a Jewish magazine or something, and my husband's Jewish, and I write sort of religious books, and I'm very in touch with all that stuff. That's why I was like, ‘This is weird.' I did not expect to see you being reviewed in these places. It just seemed completely out of left field. Was this just a completely different world for you in terms of the nonfiction, documentary side? Tess: It was. But in a way, it is similar because it's a mystery. My son and I were trying to solve the mystery which just happens to be a nonfiction mystery with roots that are thousands of years old. We were like little detectives going from archeologists to pig farmers to pig behavioral experts looking for why the pig holds such a position in human attitudes. People either think pigs are darling and cute, they're like Babe or they think they're disgusting and dirty. Pigs evoke a lot of emotions. And that's what I was trying to get out of the people we interviewed, that sense of, wow, you know, you either love them or you hate them and why. Joanna: How was it collaborating with your son? Because, I've co-written some books with my mom, and we decided to stop doing these things because it was quite stressful. So how was that? How is co-writing and coworking with family? Tess: My son and I have a lot of similarities in tastes and how we approach things. So we had a great time. I really enjoyed working with him. He's more on the technical side. He was very good with dealing with all the cameras and all the technical equipment and the editing room, whereas I think I handled more of the scholarly side. My college degree was in anthropology, so it was in my wheelhouse, and I was the one responsible for trying to contact all these scholars that we dealt with. So we split the work that way, and it worked very well. I think we both had similar ideas for how we wanted the final edit to look. Joanna: As you mentioned, you've written some scripts, and, of course, now you're a filmmaker, and ‘Rizzoli & Isles' is a TV show. What are some of the differences between writing novels and also the world of TV and film? Tess: The great thing about writing novels, you are in control. You don't have people asking you for this rewrite or that rewrite unless it's your editor. I love being in charge of my universe. I think the downside of writing certainly for TV scripts is that you have a whole bunch of people who are telling you, ‘Oh, could you do this, could you do that?' And sometimes you don't agree with what they're saying, but you do it anyway. I think that is the real stress for working in television and film unless it's a documentary where you are working with a committee. And as you've discovered, collaboration is not always easy. Joanna: Absolutely. And then, I guess, with the TV show, with your characters, which is so close to you, how has that been? Because, of course, as authors, those of us who are not adapted hear that basically they just want the author not to be there. They don't want to have the author anywhere near anything because we're just a pain in the neck. How's that been? Tess: The ‘Rizzoli & Isles' TV series, they invited me to join them in the writers' room and help them with what they call break story. But I was under a contract as a novelist, so I really could never participate. But they were always very welcoming, I have to say. And then they had their own team of writers, so they wrote all the episodes. I had nothing to do with it. I got a consultant's fee, but I didn't have to do anything for it. So it's like the best job of the world. You get paid for not having to work. They made some creative changes when they adapted it to television. This always happens. The main one being that suddenly my very ordinary-looking characters became glamorous. They're such beautiful women, both these actors who played Jane and Maura. The other thing was I was told very early on that neither character would get married in the course of the series because they wanted the focus to be on the female friendship, and they felt that having men around would be a little distraction. So that was the ground rules for ‘Rizzoli & Isles,' this television series. And sure enough, neither Jane nor Maura got married over seven years. Joanna: I think that has to happen, too, because when they get married, either it's going to be the end of a series or they're going to have to have some kind of disaster because happy people can't be happy for long in these dramas. Tess: That's right. You hit the nail on the head. That is really the key about drama or series is when everybody is happy, it's a happily ever after. Where do you go from there? There's just nowhere to go. So you have to keep a little drama going. Joanna: On your website, you have this great quote from the ‘Chicago Tribune' which says, ‘She has an imagination that allows her to conjure up depths of human behavior so dark and frightening that she makes Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft seem like goody-two-shoes.' I just thought that was perfect. So this is something I think about a lot. How do you tap into that creative darkness without being overcome by it? Tess: First of all, where does it come from? Because I'm not a very dark person. I'm actually a very happy person. I think that maybe I tend towards looking at the dark side because when I was a child, my mother dragged me to every horror film that was played by Hollywood. I grew up on a steady diet of horror, and this was back in the Hollywood golden age of horror films. It wasn't bloody. It was more psychological. It was more a sense of unease as opposed to slasher films. I loved those old movies, so that's probably been part of the inspiration for me. I'm writing these horrifying scenes, but it doesn't scare me so much. I think the reason for it is it's the same reason you can't tickle yourself. You know what you're doing. You're in control. You could stick your fingers in your armpit, and you're not going to get tickled because you know what you're doing. I feel that way about writing. I can be writing a horrifying scene, but I'm in control and I know when I'm going to pull out the knife. So, I'm pretty good about keeping the dark side away from my real life. It's just all fiction. Joanna: I'm a very happy person, too. I actually think a lot of the horror writers I know are the happiest people because they put all their darkness on the page and their life is quite happy. Tess: Yes, I know. And it's really funny because I don't think I've ever been depressed in my life. I inherited the happy gene from my dad, and that is a real blessing. Joanna: That's really interesting. Then I see that quote on the front page of your website, and then there's these quite serious photos of you, the author looking as if you're very serious and dark. How have you had to curate your brand in that way? Tess: The brand kind of came about on its own. I never was consciously branding myself. It's just that the books I write kind of branded me. And people make assumptions based on the books we write. If you write a spy novel, they assume you must be a whizz with a gun, and they want you on a desert island because you'll keep them safe. I don't think that's true at all. I think we just have active imaginations and we put ourselves in the shoes of heroes. We write about people we'd like to be. We write about the perfect version of ourselves when, in truth, we may be totally unlike these people. Joanna: I'm glad you say that because, of course, we have to have diverse characters when we're writing about different things. But as you say, imagination. I think imagination and good research is obviously very important. But we're not just writing about our lives. If we were, it'd be very, very boring. Tess: Yes, I got up and drank coffee. That's about it. Joanna: I want to ask, you were first published in 1987. What do you think has changed in the publishing industry and what is different for authors starting out now? Tess: So much has changed. In 1987, we didn't have the Internet, the fax machine had just come in, and we didn't have to do social media. So back then, you wrote your book, you turned it in, you mailed it in, and sometimes you got a phone call back from a publisher saying, ‘We love your book. We're going to publish it.' We just wrote. Writers just wrote. We didn't have all these other responsibilities. Now, when you write, you're expected to get on social media and tweet and do Facebook and go on tour. There's a lot more on the shoulders of writers. The good part, however, is that if you can't get published, if you can't find a publisher who likes your little out-of-the-box book, you can go it alone. And I think that's what's happened, is the democratization of writers now. Anybody can get published, and now the vast majority probably shouldn't be published, but anyone can get published, and you can put your work out there and see what the public thinks. So I like that aspect of it. Joanna: You mentioned that the job of the writer has really changed. And I get comments, sometimes people say, ‘Well, you're not a real writer because you didn't spend 100% of your time writing.' Tess: Oh, gosh. Joanna: Exactly. How do you balance it? What percentage of your time is writing, and what is the rest of what the job of a writer is? Tess: I think probably 50% of my time is writing because a lot of the rest of it is, especially when your book comes out, you have a lot of promotional stuff you have to do, whether it's climbing onto an airplane and going to a bookstore or doing social media or working on your webpage. Everybody has a webpage now. I wish I could go back to the days when I didn't have to worry about it. I don't do Facebook and Twitter very much unless I have to. And I pretty much use Twitter just to keep up with the international news, and I think would help a lot of writers if they turned off their Internet and just got to work on their books. Joanna: I think we all dream of that. But it was your PR person who reached out for this podcast in which I really appreciate you doing it. But it's funny because when I heard from her, I was like, ‘How does such a famous author like Tess Gerritsen still need to go on podcasts?' Because it feels like you said, I mean, ‘Why is this necessary?' So even for big-name authors now, this seems to be an important thing. Or do you feel like it's just because that's what the publishers want? Tess: It is a good thing. It's a great thing that I can be on your podcast or I could do Zoom sessions. And the reason that it's so much better now is that we don't have to travel the way we used to. It takes a lot of energy, and it takes years off your life when you have to travel across time zones. So in that regard, I think podcasts and Zoom are fantastic. I've actually kind of liked the last couple of years of not having to leave my house for a while. We all have to do it now. You'll see John Grisham and James Patterson are doing interviews, and they have to promote their books. It's part of what is expected of us by the publishers. Joanna: Yes, and, of course, a lot of independent authors, we have to do that because we don't have a publisher. But, equally, that's what's so interesting, is that it's expected for every author. Did you have media training? Did you have to learn all this stuff or you just sort of make it up as you go along? Tess: I make it up as I go along. The first media really was for Harvest in '96. And I didn't have any media training. I guess they just threw me on the road, and that was it. You learn a lot as you go further into your career. I've learned, for instance, on Zoom to try and always keep your mouth in a smiley position, that you can't let your negative emotions show up on Zoom. And I've learned to do my own makeup and all these things that, well, of course, most women do, but it's a different kind of a makeup when you know you're going to be on a screen somewhere. Joanna: Yes. That's why I do audio-only! Tess: Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Because I'm sitting here in shorts right now. Joanna: Exactly. I haven't done my hair or my makeup. But one thing that's interesting is when you've been in public a lot since, I guess, the '80s or, like you said, '96 when you first were on the media. But it feels like now there's a need for authenticity but also a difficulty in protecting your privacy. How do you share in these authentic ways but also protect your privacy? Tess: Where I do share is when I feel emotionally connected to some new story. That's the only time I really talk about myself very much. I don't like to share photos of my family. I will very rarely share a photo if it's really cute of my granddaughters. I try not to engage too much on Facebook because I'd rather people not know where I am or where I'm traveling or that I'm on holiday. I like keeping that aspect of my life separate. Now, if you want to find out what kind of a person I am, you probably should look at the character Maura Isles because that's me. I put so much of myself into her personality, and that's probably as intimate a look at me as you're going to get, is through Maura. Joanna: That's interesting you say that because I feel the same way. If you want to get to know me, then read some of my fiction, which is odd because people think, ‘Oh, well, then you should write a memoir or something like that.' You really feel like you're in your fiction. Tess: I do. There's so much that we writers put of ourselves into our stories, not always being aware of it. I'm writing a book now about a retired spy who's in her 60s, and I thought, wow, there's a lot about her that's like me, just the way she looks at the world and the fact she loves being with her chickens and the fact that she'd rather not engage with people at certain times, and that feels like, in some ways an aspect of Tess Gerritsen. Joanna: Does that book have a title? Tess: No, I have a title in my head right now. I'm not sure that's going to be the actual title, but it's based on the fact that I live in a small town in Maine where we have, I don't know why, a lot of retired spies living up here, a lot of retired CIA. I thought, ‘Would it be fun to do a story about older spies who are no longer active?' And then one of them, a woman, finds a dead body in her driveway and doesn't know if it's related to work that she did when she was younger. That idea of older people who have been cast aside, who have been put out to pasture, but who really have a lot of valuable information and talents going back to work for other reasons, that fascinated me. Joanna: That's good. So you've seen that movie, ‘RED: Retired, Extremely Dangerous.' Tess: I did. That's the thing. I love this old guy, these creaky people with bad joints, and maybe they can't run as fast, but, boy, they still have the smarts. Joanna: Helen Mirren in that, she's just fantastic, too. Tess: Yes. Joanna: Talking of more maturity, I guess, longevity in the writing business seems like a rarity. And people who've sort of been publishing for 30-plus years and are still going, that is amazing. What are your tips for people who want to forge this kind of successful long-term writing career? Tess: I think it's really a matter of productivity. A lot of beginning writers think they'll write a book, it'll be a bestseller, and they can relax on their laurels. Well, you really can't. You have to be constantly churning out another story. The other secret to longevity, I think, is taking the time to write the book that you want to write. Eventually, if you're successful in your first series, that's all your publisher's going to want, is that series. And you have to keep your creativity recharged. So if a story comes to you that's out of the box, indulge yourself and go ahead and write that. But I think the main thing is that you should always be productive. As soon as you finish one book, you should already be playing with the idea for the next book. There's a saying in publishing, ‘The frontlist sells the backlist.' So your most recent book is going to pull readers in, and they're going to go, ‘I want to read what she wrote before,' and they'll go and read earlier books of yours. My first romantic suspense novel was published in '87, they're still selling. They're still turning in some nice royalty checks. Longevity is just a matter of refusing to give up, I think. Joanna: You must have seen writers who've left the industry over that time. I've only been in a decade and I've seen a lot of writers leave. What have you noticed from those who've left so we can maybe avoid those pitfalls? Tess: I think a lot of people leave because they lose their publisher. They just can't find a traditional publisher to work with them. What I would say to them is if you still want to write, if you still have stories, for heaven's sakes, become an indie publisher. Put it out yourself. Don't stop. That discouragement of being turned down by maybe a publisher you've been with for a decade, that's really got to hurt. But if you're a real writer, you still got those ideas percolating in your head. You still want to tell that story. Don't stop and find another way to get it out to the public. Joanna: So, you are an indie filmmaker, right? Tess: Yeah. Joanna: Are you interested in the indie author route? Tess: I think it's really kind of an interesting idea because I often think that there are stories that I write that are so far out there I should write them under a pseudonym that nobody knows. I played with that idea once or twice, but so far I have been able to sell all the books to traditional publishers. But if I get an idea that's completely off the wall and turned down, yes, I would definitely do that. Joanna: Sure. That's good to hear. Where can people find you and your books online? Tess: You can find my website at tessgerritsen.com. I am on Twitter @tessgerritsen, and I'm on Facebook if you just do a search for me. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Tess. That was great. Tess: Thank you.The post Writing For The Long-Term With Tess Gerritsen first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Print on demand makes it easy to sell print books without the hassle of storage and shipping — but it's limited to what the established POD printers allow. What if you want to do a special print run, either for a crowdfunding project, or because you want higher quality print production with extras? White Fox help authors with special print design and publishing, as well as other aspects of the author business. In this episode, we talk about some of the options available to authors. WhiteFox also have a great free resource on crowdfunding your book. John Bond is the CEO of White Fox, a premium publishing and book marketing partner based in the UK and U.S. Chris Wold is the sales and business development director at White Fox. 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 are print books still so important even as digital continues to rise? When might an author consider a special print run? Slow, artisanal printing vs fast POD Design options for special print runs — and how they might impact price How timelines compare to POD — and why that might not matter for a crowdfunding project, as long as you communicate timings to backers. You can find White Fox at WeAreWhiteFox.com and on Twitter @wearewhitefox. Check out the free crowdfunding resource here. Transcript of Interview with John Bond and Chris Wold Joanna: John Bond is the CEO of White Fox, a premium publishing and book marketing partner based in the UK and U.S. Chris Wold is the sales and business development director at White Fox. Welcome back to the show, John, and hello, Chris. John: Thank you very, very much for having us. Chris: Thank you. Joanna: It's good to talk about this today. I think this question's important. It's crazy really, but: Why are print books still so important and beloved in a world that also feels increasingly digital? John: That's such a good question. When we started in 2012 in London so we just had our 10th anniversary and when we got going, we imagined a world where every project would include an app or an enhanced ebook. And we have done some of those things, but nothing like the amount that I imagined was going to happen. What's just been astonishing is how many people are still in love with this format that's been around for centuries and which still seems to resonate with people as something which has authority and gravitas and which is the opposite of ephemera. You can't delete it. It's a rather extraordinary thing. What seems to have happened actually is the opposite. Maybe of what we thought was going to happen, which is that more and more people want to put more effort into creating more beautiful objects with higher specification and better paper. And it's almost like the two go hand in hand. As we become more digital, some things have ended up becoming almost iconic objects, which you can still gift, you can still own. So, no one was more surprised than me that has been where we've ended up. Chris: I have to say that sitting here in my front room, which seems to be, once you start noticing it, it's dominated by bookshelves in our home. And it is, I think the book as a printed object also is seen as a kind of a reflection of yourself and especially in the home or mine anyway. They're treasured for that reason, but also it is a little bit of a trophy case side of things. The books that I've held onto for a long time are precious for lots of reasons. But the ones that really stick around are the nicer ones, I have to say. And there's something to be said for something that sticks with you for your move four or five times just for the sake of moving it and putting it back on another shelf in another house, another part of the world Joanna: I know what you mean. I moved from the UK to New Zealand, then New Zealand, Australia, and then back here to the UK, and there are some books that have come with me all over the world and I've paid for shipping by weight.It's amazing how much I would've paid in shipping. Both of you mentioned interesting things there and it's funny because actually one of my mottos at the moment — One of my overarching themes is more digital, more physical. And that's both work practices. So, actually getting out in the physical world more but also more online, and it's also for books. It's like you say, John, it's surprising in a way. My question for you is what do we see then in terms of buying behavior? Are people buying just one or the other or both, or even just what we do as individuals? How is the choice of print and digital affecting book sales across all the different formats? John: We are not anti-ebook. We love ebooks. Everything we produce, we produce an ebook for, but it's just been fascinating that certainly in the last two years, we've seen what the market has seen, which is a kind of uplift in physical sales. It was almost as if the pandemic, which for a while, obviously stopped people actually physically going into bookshops and browsing seemed to reinforce this idea of both I guess. The people that were in love with E continue to buy E, and the people that were stuck at home or not traveling were buying physical and that. So, I think it's, as you say, the two have seemed to go hand in hand, and obviously, there are sorts of books which lend themselves to those respective formats at children's books, or, as I said, gifting and cookery, highly illustrated books. It's very difficult to replicate those as well digitally. But that's our experience. Chris: Just to jump in there. I would say that I think early days, a lot of the fear was that people were going to be completely agnostic about a format that there was fear of the ebook overtaking the print book because they thought, ‘Oh, everyone's just going to buy ebooks now. And what would happen to him?' And quite the contrary, as you've mentioned, John, the opposite happened. People are buying books and ebooks and audiobooks of the same book often. I found myself last weekend, I heard a great interview on a radio program, loved it. He was entertaining, bought the audiobook first, loved that so much but realized it probably wasn't going to work for me on a commute. And the next day, I searched it out of the bookshop. So, he got me twice and I've loved both. Same content. Joanna: I've done it. I do exactly the same. Very often I'll get an audiobook because I want to listen while I'm doing cooking or whatever. And then I often buy the hardback. So, the more expensive print edition of those audiobooks that I particularly want to look at again, but of course, I don't need to read the whole thing. I just know, right. I want to go back into that chapter and take some notes on that. And the same, I'll often get the ebook with the audiobook. Like you're saying, I buy multiple and I think that's important for people to remember. You're not going to necessarily cannibalize sales. We have to offer all these things. We're talking about print today. Most independent authors, myself included primarily use print-on-demand and that's something we're very used to doing. When might an author consider a special print run? When is it worth the money, and what kinds of projects have you seen at White Fox? John: Maybe I should start with the last question about the actual projects because they will illustrate the sorts of things that we've done because they've been quite varied. We worked with a rather extraordinary teacher called David Hargreaves, who co-wrote a 780,000-word, four-volume 100-pound box set of an oral history of the first world war. And he decided that he would like to try and cover the cost of the production of that particularly kind of quirky idiosyncratic project, which he could engage with us. It was much more difficult for him to engage either himself or directly with a traditional publisher because the project was so out of the box and he managed to actually privately crowdfund that book. He had a mailing list of around 500 people, but he managed to persuade 300 of those 500 people to pre-order a copy of this book, which enabled him to invest in the production, the marketing. We helped him with that. We produced some assets. There were some videos that actually Chris was part of, to tell people what they were buying into. And he was very successful in that. He then managed subsequently to sell many thousand copies of that once it actually became available and was in discussions with university presses and things like that. So, that was one example. Click here to get White Fox's free resource on crowdfunding your book. A completely different one was a book we did with James Hoffman. He's a coffee nerd and he's an expert in all things to do with coffee, has traditionally published a book, decided he wanted very, very engaged with his community, very engaged with his readers, of his blog. What he wanted to do was to create a deluxe version of the blog content he kept which was illustrated at very, very minute intricate niche details about coffee, and set up with a more traditional crowdfunding platform, managed to pre-sale again, 800 plus copies, which enabled him to fund the production of a beautiful line inbound hardback 25-pound book, which was really for collectors, really for engagement with his super fans. Those are two examples of the things where in both cases the writer felt this was something they wanted to do with existing content and wanted to reach a market that was a gateway potentially to a bigger market. Chris: I think it's worth noting too, that with both of those projects, one was that they felt that the POD has limitations for certain things you can do with it. And it's an amazing system for the right types of books and we encourage many of our clients to take it up. But for these projects, it just was outside of scope and that's okay. Also, for their markets, their market was looking for something that was as much object as content on it. An interesting side note is that David Hargreaves did his massive four-volume, 2300-page Opus as an ebook, kind of as a, well, let's give it a try. He called up one day and he said, ‘I've just had a company send me a check of some thousands of pounds for ebook sales. And he had thought he would maybe sell 10.' And it still works into many other formats. You can use both channels very effectively together. John: And James Hoffman's book was an ebook as well. So it's, as we were saying before, I think these are not just always having to be one particular format. There are multiple opportunities for them. And just to clarify, we also think this model works for fiction fantastically well, and we have a number of discussions ongoing with projects which are in their early stages of people that want to appeal to a core group of fans, having engaged with a network and created a platform for themselves. We definitely think this isn't just something that can work for non-fiction. Joanna: Absolutely. And in fact, one of the famous Kickstarters is Brandon Sanderson's Kickstarter for his fantasy novels of over 40 million US dollars, which, of course, pretty much let's say none of us are expecting to make that money! As you mentioned, you had a couple of examples there with a few hundred. It's even worth doing the few hundred pre-orders, but one of the issues, and we've all talked about this with a project that I had been proposing is that we just don't know the costs. It's really hard to budget the costs. What are some of the design decisions that impact the costs of production for these special print runs? Chris: Actually, the book production side of special runs is probably one of your easier areas to estimate because they're fairly established and it's really about having a good partner, either a printer or somebody who's print knowledgeable to assist you and lay out the options for you. The harder aspect of that, especially in considering crowdfunding scenario is things beyond the book. So your extra pledges and importantly, the really the time and the cost for fulfilling that, that's where often a lot of these projects can stumble a little bit and maybe sour, even if they've been successful in raising the money. It almost points to the more successful campaigns being from people who are a little bit further down the road in their career crowdfunding is often not the best route for first-time authors, it's for somebody to perhaps build on an audience that they have started to gain trust with and establish relationships with. Joanna: I've done a number of different shows on crowdfunding and with different authors who are doing it. I've covered the marketing side, the promotion side. We're really just trying to cover the print side really in this episode, I completely acknowledge the problems there. [Check out the interviews with Monica Leonelle and Bryan Cohen on Kickstarter and crowdfunding.] Coming back, you amusingly, and this is because of your expertise. Chris, as you said, it was easy to estimate these costs, but I want to just dig deeper on this because when I came to you guys, it was, ‘I literally don't know anything. I don't know about choosing paper, I don't know how the size of the cover might impact the cost, I don't know about how I should format things with page count to impact the cost.' All these different things that I don't usually have to think about because I just go with a standard thing that I do with print on demand. Can we get into a bit more detail about the design decisions around the print edition that impact cost, and what we need to think about? Chris: Sure. The dangers of assumed knowledge, right?! Joanna: Absolutely. But it's nice to know that you think it's easy. Chris: When I say it's easy, I mean that there are costs and processes that are quite established, and coming back to your position on it, looking at it from that one is that if it's a new area for you, especially for an independent self-publishing author, if you are going to make the leap from maybe print-on-demand or really straightforward traditional printing, we would highly, highly recommend that you work closely with a print expert to guide you through what the options might be, what are the reasonable costs? There are lots of printers, big and small who can help or houses like White Fox. And that's not just a show for us, it's just that we would bring a level of expertise about what the options are. But the things that you need to be considering are bindings. Options for bindings With the POD option, it's pretty binary for the most part, hardback, paperback. But when you're going to a higher spec, perhaps a hardcover might be cloth, but you could have the option of leather or faux leather or all these extras like embossing and debossing foils, edge dipping. There's a whole world out there and it truly the sky is the limit for options. But of course, budget is going to reign supreme there. What we also see is that if you are putting together a deluxe package like that, you may want to add some illustration into your books and that might be plates that are spaced out throughout the various chapters in your book and papers, that sort of thing. So, there are avenues from which you can find the cost for the artists that are available out there, but also that would have an implication into the print process itself. That's where a good printer should be able to help and guide you and give you the options of what's the cost with it, what's the cost without it. You can make a comparison on that and then you could keep going, do you want to sign them and number them? Do you want to put in a personal dedication? That's more about your own time on that. What about housing for a book if you have a series? Maybe you want to put it in a slipcase, a good printer would be able to give you clear options there, but maybe it might be more of a clamshell, something that's sort of a box that you open up and they would give you the option on that side. You really can't give a standard cost for any of these things. That's where the expertise of a printer comes in. John: Also, there are additions that you can add which cost nothing, which is your time in creating extra content for a limited edition, that there are things that you can add to special print run, which is not just the specification of a book, which is, as I said, additional content or notes around something, reader's notes. Or just to give that feeling that you have something which is special and of limited availability. Joanna: I love that there is this almost other language. Chris, you mentioned the edge dipping, you said clamshell, slip case. In my head, it's like a box set for a physical box set. And I feel like this is part of it. We all have these special languages in the indie community. We use acronyms and we use all these names that we know in our community. And you have the same words in this print sense, which is, again, why you need someone to talk about it. I do have a couple of specific questions. So, for example, memoir, I know a lot of people listening will be doing memoirs or I'm doing travel memoirs in particular. So, photos are something I was thinking about or you mentioned illustrations, but photos of a kind of particular thing, and also the impact of color interior, whether it's a children's book or whether it is these photos or extra color in the ink or other things like that. Any comments on photos and illustrations? Chris: I would say that it's a fun little experiment on IngramSpark, the price calculator and playing around with different interior processes and they do have a black and white versus the color option there. But that's a curious one to see what the POD impact is like cost-wise. With traditional printing, you might have some other options that aren't available to print on demand, which would be, say color plate sections that were probably very familiar with from biographies and memoirs wherein you have a normal black and white book. And then there'll be a section of photographs that are either black and white or color that references part of the story on that. As far as I know, that's not an option that's available on POD yet, but I can imagine that's the technology that might come down the road pretty quickly. It's been advancing quickly. But at the moment, POD seems to be quite binary. You have to either choose to do color or black and white, and that might not be appropriate for all books because of the limited amount of color. Even a little color can cost a lot of money. John: The issue on color and on the quality of the reproduction of photos when they're not in place sections when they're actually integrated within the text of the book, which can look absolutely beautiful, then leads to the discussion about the quality of the paper, the printers that do that, the weight of the paper and that takes you in a different direction. For some books, that is absolutely beautiful and differentiates them usually because it's something that you associate more with a kind of art book publishing area, but it's definitely possible. There's been some beautiful memoirs and autobiographies and biographies that have been incorporated those photos throughout to illustrate something. But again, to get the maximum amount of those, it needs to be on paper that doesn't suck the color or the clarity out of the image. Joanna: What is the quality and weight? What would you say to a printer? What are the words we use for quality and weight of paper? Chris: Sure. So, in the UK, we being sensible people, we deal in metric system, but in America, it's Imperial and as an American, I can say that. So, most options on IngramSpark give you a standard 55-pound…I don't what that is in GSM equivalent, but a 55-pound paper. I think that's just a couple of steps up from sort of a newsprint weight on that. When we say weight, we mean the thickness and density of the paper. You can really feel the difference in some books. With color books, you probably are getting up into the 80, 115 pound range even, and that becomes quite noticeably different to your hand when you're touching it. But more importantly, it's about, as John has mentioned, it's about how the page reacts to ink than the process that is used to apply it. Joanna: That's fantastic. And then just a couple of things because I really think about bling. You did mention foil briefly, but what are the kind of cool things that we could do on a cover? I also like ribbons. So, these are my two blingy things. Any comments on foil and ribbons? Chris: Oh, gosh. John, what's the coolest cover you've ever seen? I think for me, one has been, I saw and this is really hard to pull off. There was an amazing hardback that had what we call a die-cut, so a hole in it, and that made a shape in the front cover. And on that cover, it was printed. So, there was an image and then you could see through to the interior paper page and there was another image and it all worked together. Then when you opened the book up, it became an entirely different-looking scene that was a real contrast. It looked quite peaceable on the inside and then when you open it up, it was on the outside, opened it up. It was quite an active illustrated picture. That's one that that's really stood out for me. John: And talking about the U.S. has Joanna. We talked about it before deckel edges. So, that's the hardbacks, which where the paper has been cut and it looks sort of, it's not been kind of guillotine, very smoothly. I love that. Then there's the actual binding. A cookbook called ‘Popo,' which was based on Venetian cooking where they actually took the casing of the spine off. So, you saw the binding of the pages, which was absolutely beautiful but a slight danger in terms of the book falling apart. So, it's sometimes what looks amazing kind of come with some health warnings. Joanna: I guess all of these things are possible. Like, you said, Everything is possible, but you have to think about your budget. Would you suggest that authors, when they're thinking about these things take pictures of things they like or find examples like that cut edge you mentioned? I've got the book on it somewhere, again, looking at my bookshelf, but I found examples of books, so, I'm like, ‘oh, I really like that. So, I'm going to keep that as a reference type of physical book that I like, and we'll maybe we can figure out what that's called later on.' Should authors make notes of the things they really like and bring those ideas to work with book designers? John: I think that's a really great idea. I think there's nothing that sends a signal than that this is what I like, this is what my community likes, this is what I think my network will like, this is something I want to replicate, not exactly, but in a style of, and all of those things represent a shorthand for us to be able to say, ‘Okay. This printer, this country, this kind of run, this occasion that we can build into the whole thing.' I think that's an incredibly useful way of helping, as you say, define the language around it as to what your objective is. Joanna: Anything else on the design aspect that either of you wanted to mention? John: I wanted to mention, in preparation for this, Joanna, we've done a bit of work in creating a free downloadable resource, which you can find on our website, which is wearewhitefox.com/crowdfunding. We've really tried to think about lots of the questions that people will ask and want to have access to before they make a kind of informed decision. And that includes aspects of design and specification and things like that. So, that would be one thing I would suggest. Joanna: I know that's super useful and I really appreciate that. And of course, I will have explained it up front, but I really wanted to have you guys on the show because in our discussions about this, it was like, ‘Oh my goodness, there's so many things to think about.' So, having a resource is super useful. I appreciate that. One of the things I wanted also to talk about is with print-on-demand. So, basically, I get the files back from my designer. I upload them to KDP Print and IngramSpark. And I can literally order a book within a couple of hours and it could even arrive tomorrow. So, I can just do that right now, and that's amazing. I think most indie authors and people listening, they're like, ‘Yeah. If I want to print book, I just upload files, and here they are.' How does timing differ with a special print run like this? And what timings do we need to take into consideration, especially in these times of supply chain issues? John: Well, you are completely right. And just as we've been talking, I've been thinking about exactly that and the speed and efficiency of POD, which is incredible. I think we have to think about something that one might be charging quite a lot of money for. You're going to have to think of it slightly more in a sort of deferred gratification way, which is that once you've defined what it is you want to achieve, then it's a job for somebody like us to say, ‘Okay. Well, we think this is the place where you will get the best replication of the quality that you want in as timely a fashion as you possibly can.' You are completely right to say that the print supply chain issues that have been going on all over the world is something that… I think we would just say we have a myriad of different options of people that are in the UK, in the U.S., in Europe, in the far East, and that there are lots of places. Chris, I know, saw a printer this week who was fantastic. And I think it's in one way, the market is challenged, in another, it's just making people up their game. And we've never been as approached by as many printers who want to work with us because the traditional supply chains have been challenged. As I say, I mean, Chris, you might want to add in something on that. Chris: Yeah. I don't think that the POD is necessarily immune from those challenges either. It does happen on both sides, but with something that really pops up for me in this discussion, and we were talking about the speed to market aspect of POD, which is, frankly, phenomenal and the right thing for the right type of publishing. But a lot of what we've been talking about during the discussion is very old school and quite artisanal in many ways. And for a lot of authors, that process of being able to slow down, look, consider, plan, is really appreciated and enjoyable as much as it is work. A lot of people like that considered aspect for certain types of product. It's oftentimes, we're working with parts of the world where old school machines still exist. We are doing a lot of color work out of the Baltics where they have these just monsters of print, almost feel like Soviet-era printing presses who can do things that new digital mechanical presses just can't do anymore. Speaking to timelines on this with traditional printing, it's certainly much more extended. At the time of recording here, we're still dealing with a lot of supply chain issues in various parts of the world. And that's really stretched the capacity issues that are available on various printers, BU in the U.S or Canada or the UK or Europe. So, you should, if doing a traditional print run from the point of saying, ‘Go to a printer that you've decided on everything that you've planned out,' you must at least give yourself six weeks at a minimum if you are in the UK. And at the moment, in the States, it can be quite extended into months. Again, if you're working with a printer, when they give you your price quote for going forward, they will include a quote about what that process time looks like for you, including shipping. And that's not an unsubstantial amount depending on where you're printing and shipping to. Joanna: That's great. And in fact, Chris, I like what you said earlier about the artisanal idea, and I think that's the angle or the mindset shift we need to make as indie authors is look. ‘Okay. So, yeah. We can get the ebook out. We can send the ebook to people and say, ‘Look, your special print edition will be a couple of months for fulfillment, but you can have the ebook now, you can read it now. And then your special object, your special, beautiful object will be on its way later.' I definitely think it's about communication with backers. Say on the crowdfunding, it's like, ‘Yeah. You're not going to get it as soon as this is finished funding. Basically, it might take a while.' But again, I also think having backed a lot of crowdfunding campaigns, sometimes it's a year later. I don't want people to feel like they are trying to compete with Print-on-Demand. I think that that's the main thing, right? It's a completely different product, really. Chris: Absolutely. And I think that's a really good point because this campaign back to the Brandon Sanderson project. That went live at the beginning of this year. And I think it was funded by March. Now, the first of those books will not..and ebooks even, will not be sent out until January, 2023. What he's been very good about is also making that clear, giving himself enough time to deliver. And just as an author, he's traditionally been one of the most transparent I've ever seen. He has a graph on his website that shows where he is in writing the various projects that he's working on. That is a quite exceptional thing. And he's great about updating that and showing where he's going to hit. And if he's going to miss, he gives you plenty of warnings. So, that's key to the crowdfunding sort of thought process is that you're very right. It does not have to be immediate. The moment something is funded does not mean that you have to be able to deliver, but you have to be able to know when you can deliver. John: I think people who are used to communicating with their readers in some way, shape, or form can benefit sometimes from having versions of their engagement with their audience over a period of time. So, there's almost like a kind of staging of things where rewards, if you want to call it that, come at different times through the process so that it isn't just immediate bundling of all formats available instantly, and that there's things that happen down the line with different formats and of the same thing. I think it's how people are successfully engaging and keeping their readership engaged with them over a long period of time. And that is how one might see a limited edition physical run happening, as you said a bit after the initial absorption of the novel or the memoir or whatever it is. Joanna: Absolutely. And that's great. And having talked with you guys and looked at projects together, and I'm like, ‘I am not doing this on my own.' Of course, authors can do this with printers, as you say, they can find a printer, they can do that work. If they want a partner to help, what does White Fox offer and what sort of questions should people be asking? Chris: We get these inquiries daily, not necessarily about crowdfunding models and products on that side of things. But really, I have a book idea, I want to bring it out in this way. How do I do so? We're very happy to have an initial conversation and give some options there to make sure that we're both on the right page over time and cost and quite very early on in the process. But should an author come to White Fox, we give a very clear agreement of what we can offer and what we can't and what that entails. And I think that we provide a pretty open door service as far as consultation, where we're very happy to advise and advise very objectively around what are the options that are available and worth it. I think that's also the key side of things because the last thing we were able to do would be pushing either a service or an option that just wasn't value for the investment from the author for doing it. John: And those queries are coming in from all over the world. As you said, right? At the top of the show, we have an office in the U.S., we're in London as well. And those queries sometimes depend very much on knowledge of different markets and what different objectives people have in different countries. So, we try and put as much thought and effort into that. The more thought and energy and consultation and effort we put in right at the beginning of a process, the better it is and the clearer everybody is about what they want to achieve. And we're helping authors across the board in pretty much everything from nose to tail in terms of their publishing objectives. We like to feel that we are holding their hand from the moment a manuscript comes to us, or even sometimes in the process of a manuscript being written to everything through production, design, sales, distribution, do they have an eCommerce strategy? Is there something which represents a direct consumer or is it through the trade through marketing, through PR? But really, that's what we do. We help by consulting on a project because in this world that we live in, this ecosystem and publishing is so varied and disparate across adult and children's and fiction and non-fiction and trade and academic. There are so many things that we try and get sorted at the beginning through a process where we really try and understand what it is somebody wants to achieve and the timelines and the schedules and the objectives, and what success looks like for them — which I know is an awful phrase — but it's the best way of describing it because we don't have a publishing schedule. We're not like a traditional publisher. We don't have a publishing schedule into which books fit. Every project we work on has its own schedule. Every writer is a unique engagement for us. So, we have to get that consultation process right. Joanna: Fantastic. Where can people find more information and everything you do at White Fox? John: Well, thank you for this opportunity. As I said earlier, free downloadable serial, which is available at our website, which is wearewhitefox.com/crowdfunding. And we've really tried to on this specific subject, put in as much information, be as transparent as possible, look at different platforms and options. There are some case studies, some pros and cons, and try to put it all out there, which we hope is a really, really useful resource for people. And on our website, you will find details of other projects that we've worked on, other case studies. Examples of everything that we have done and are just about to do in terms of holding writers' hands through this process of publishing. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much both of you for your time. That was great. John: Thank you very, very much, Joanna for the opportunity. Chris: Yes. Thank you, Joanna.The post Publishing Special Print Editions And Crowdfunding with John Bond and Chris Wold from White Fox first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What are the different types of editing? How can you find and work effectively with the best editor for your book? What are some editing tips to watch out for in your fiction or non-fiction manuscript? With Kristen Tate from The Blue Garret. In the intro, hiring virtual assistants [ALLi]; and I'm recording my audiobook of How to Write a Novel, launching in the next few weeks. Do you need a professional editor for your book? Check out my list of recommended editors and proofreaders here. Kristen Tate is an editor and founder of The Blue Garret, which offers editing services and advice for authors. She has a Ph.D. in English, from Columbia University, focusing on novels and publishing history. And she's the author of All The Words: A Year of Reading About Writing. 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 The three phases of editing and when an author would use themWith AI tools available, why do we need human editors?Common issues that editors find in fiction and non-fictionWhen to consider rewriting or re-editing a bookTips for how to approach a rewrite and re-editHow to find an editor who’s a good fit for you You can find Kristen Tate at TheBlueGarret.com and on Twitter @KristenTateSF Transcript of Interview with Kristen Tate Joanna: Kristen Tate is an editor and founder of The Blue Garret, which offers editing services and advice for authors. She has a Ph.D. in English, from Columbia University, focusing on novels and publishing history. And she's the author of All The Words: A Year of Reading About Writing. Kristen is also my editor mostly for fiction, but also for my recent, How To Write a Novel book. Welcome to the show, Kristen. Kristen: Thanks, Joanna. It's so great to be having a real-life conversation with you, not just in the Microsoft Word comments. I'm thrilled to be here. Joanna: That is funny. And maybe we'll come back to this, but you and I have never spoken before today, which is brilliant. And of course, introvert writers, introvert editors. I mean, why do we need to speak? It's just not necessary! Kristen: We communicate very well in those document comments. Joanna: Exactly, in writing. Before we get into that, tell us a bit more about you and why you chose to become an editor? Kristen: I think as is the case for many of us, this was very much a winding path for me. But when I look back and I follow all the threads, I can see that really what I was trying to do all along was find a job that would allow me to spend most of my time reading and thinking about words. As you said, I have a Ph.D. in English from Columbia, and I thought at one point I was going to become an English professor and I did love being a graduate student. I really did get to spend the bulk of my time reading and thinking, and also starting to teach, which I realized that I loved doing too. But then there were a lot of other things about the academic life that didn't match up with the life I wanted to lead and how I wanted to spend my time. So at the point, I made the decision, I was going to step away from academia. I also had two tiny human children and was spending a lot of time with them and gradually trying to, figure out other things, to find my next steps. I knew I could write and I could edit. I started doing some freelance copywriting and copy editing. And I also did an internship with a wonderful local publisher here in San Francisco, Chronicle Books, to see if publishing would be a good fit. TI loved my time there, but also found that much like in academia, there was a lot of talking about books and meetings about books, but not a lot of time really sitting and working with words. So I realized that was not going to be the path for me and continued on with the freelance copywriting and copy editing. Then in 2015, I worked with, a copywriting client on a business book he was self-publishing and this was the first I had heard of any such thing. And that just opened up a whole new world for me. And I realized that this was something I could specialize in. So I started doing a lot of learning. That's about the time I found your podcast and just soaked it all in. I went back and did some more retraining and made sure that I had the skills I needed to work on both fiction and nonfiction, and then I've never looked back. And now it feels like this is the thing I was always meant to do. I really do get to spend the bulk of my working day, sitting quietly and as an introvert, reading books and thinking about words and I'm thrilled that I found, my place, my spot. Joan: I love that. I love that you identified the things you didn't want as well in the career. I think that's so important. I also want to say that you said you love teaching, and we'll talk about how you do editing, but I love the little comments you leave for me sometimes. I've talked openly on this show that I have some blind spots and you put a little comment and you'll say, ‘This is the reason I've made this change.' And you try your best to educate me in things that, I just can't see it. Of course, I just love to know these little bits and bobs, even though I might not remember them. So I feel like you still do a bit of teaching. Also, you do still have courses, and you try and educate through your site. Kristen: I do. That's a big part of what I do. A lot of that is editing is expensive. Especially for folks starting out who don't have book sales to fund the editing of the next book, it's really important to me that some of this be accessible. So you get my teaching in the comments, but I share a lot of stuff on my website. There's a lot of blog posts there. I do have a course that's specifically targeted for indie authors that's about the whole copyediting process and will teach you everything that you don't know and might be worried about. And I've mentioned to you, I do teach, I try to teach in my edits. I try to explain what I'm doing. Because I think I want to demystify the process for authors. It can feel scary to be handing over your labor of love to someone else and let them into your manuscript. It's important to me for authors to know why I'm making the suggestions I'm making. Now, whether you remember it or not, that doesn't matter. I really see myself, I'm the comma expert. You don't have to be the comma expert. That's exactly why you're hiring me. I think writers sometimes feel like they're supposed to know more than they do. And I really see authors, you are the idea specialist, you're the creative person bringing these ideas to life through your words. My job is just to make them better, to make sure they're clean and correct. And to improve anything I can see could be improved. It's definitely it's not a gotcha thing. Like, ‘Oh, Joanna, I told you about this comma and here you are using again.' That literally, never crosses my mind. And I don't think it crosses the mind of other editors. We're really oriented towards, ‘Oh, here's a comma I can fix.' Like, ‘Here's a way I can improve this.' We really are helpers, you know. Joanna: Helpers; that's exactly right. But of course, we're using the word editing. You've mentioned copyediting. I mean, we use this one word, editing, but I feel like it's not one thing. And there are different phases, there are different types, and it depends on so many things. Can you briefly outline the different types of editing, phases of editing, and what authors might expect? Kristen: Let's break that down. I think that's another thing that many writers don't know going into the process and like everything else, knowledge is power. So I really break this down into three stages. First is content editing, which is sometimes also called developmental editing or structural editing. And not all writers and not all books need this step. But I think especially for newer writers, it can be a great way to get feedback on how the story is working and on things that you might not have seen in your work. This is really a time for an editor to look at big picture issues. Does the plot hold together? Does your protagonist have a defined character arc? How is the pacing across the course of a novel? You can hire an editor for this, but you can also get feedback from critique groups or beta readers. It just might not be as thorough and they might not be able to tell you how to fix any problems they find. An editor ideally will give you some ideas about how you might make changes to your manuscript. So that's content editing, that's stage one. Second is copyediting. And really that's what we've been talking about so far. This is really at the polishing stage. This is the one step that I think every author should try to hire a professional editor for if it's at all possible for you. The goal at this stage is to end up with a manuscript that is correct, consistent, clear, and stylish. Those first three are really the heart of copyediting. It's aboutT making sure things like grammar and mechanics are correct. All those commas are where they're supposed to be. But it's also about making your book look like any other book a reader might pick up off their shelf.  Traditional publishers use style guides. Here in the U.S., that means Chicago Manual style. In the UK, that's usually the New Oxford Style Manual. And those rules, they're conventions. And they're different from what you see in journalism or web copy. They're small things. Like writing out numbers up to a hundred. A reader's not going to misunderstand it, but it sends a subtle cue that this book is slightly different from other books. That's when I'm working with indie authors, in particular, my goal absolutely is to make sure that their book looks indistinguishable from something that Harper Collins or another publisher is putting out. The last piece of that, that second stage, is style. Once you've made sure all the mechanics and all of that are correct, spelling's right, you're left with style. Some editors call this line editing. I think of it really as part of copy editing, but this is where an editor's going to be thinking through every sentence and asking, ‘Can this be improved in any way. Would a different verb be more effective or what if the last clause came first?' That's the second stage, that polishing stage. The last stage is proofreading. At this point, one of the things I always remind people I work with is to really stop fussing with the book after the copyediting process, because once you're in proofreading, you're really just trying to catch those final pesky typos or any tiny consistency errors. It's really a cleanup round. It also means doing things like ordering a print proof and paging through it and looking at your e-book files in an e-reader or an app, and making sure there aren't any weird little line breaks or something. It's just doing all those final checks. So trying to be a stand-in for the reader and making sure you catch any problems before it's your reader who's catching that. Those are the three stages, content editing, copyediting, and proofreading. Again, you don't need to pay for professional editing for all three of these stages for every book. That is the gold standard, but it's also, it's expensive, as I've said. So you really need to think through your goals for the book that you're working on right now and what your overall budget for that book is. And where you are as a writer in terms of experience and what kinds of outside resources like critique groups you might have access to. Joanna: That's great. What a great overview. I've used all different kinds at different stages. I'm a fan of editors. I think that a human editor is so important and I say, human, because, of course, there's lots of tools now. I use ProWritingAid, there's Grammarly. There are more tools emerging all the time that can help authors with editing. How can we use these tools in the best way to help bring down the cost or at least get rid of some of the most basic issues in order that the edit, perhaps the human can focus on what humans do? And why do we still need a human editor? Kristen: This is such an interesting question, and I think we are going to be thinking and talking about this for years to come. This is the future that is in front of us. I live in a household with a couple of pretty serious computer geeks. This is a dinner table conversation for us. So I tend to be maybe more open-minded than some other editors about how we can use these things. I do think that there are editors out there who are fearful of software and AI tools in the same way that some writers are fearful of them. I think the fear is that these things are going to eliminate our jobs. I just don't see that happening. I really see these as tools that we can use to make our work as writers and editors both faster and better. Editors are already using some of these tools. I also use ProWritingAid as a check. I don't run it on your manuscripts because I know you do it, but for other clients, I will run that through because it does flag things that I could easily miss. So I think it's good to talk about what a program like that is good at and then what it misses. It's excellent obviously at catching mechanical problems like missing punctuation or something like that. I think it's also really good at flagging things like cliched phrases and repetition and lack of sentence variety. Those are things that I often will catch, but they won't always rise to the surface for me, especially if one of those things pops up in a passage where I'm really spending a lot of time fussing over a sentence. So I just like knowing that I don't need to think so much about cliches because ProWritingAid is going to flag those for me, and then I can pass along that feedback to a writer. So those are the good things about a program like that. I think it's important to note that they do sometimes get things wrong. And I think this is especially important in fiction because there are so few absolute rules. Even common rules are a little bit bendier I think than many writers think. But one thing that I think ProWriting Aid is very good at flagging is passive voice. And this is something that we've talked about in our comment conversation. Joanna: I have overcorrected and then you have put them back. Kristen: Yes. That is a demonstration of exactly why you need a human editor. I think the thing to know there is that sometimes you really do need passive voice. There's a reason that we have this construction. A good example might be a sentence like, ‘A red Maserati was parked in the driveway. So if I'm a character and I'm pulling up to my home and there's this red Maserati I've never seen before parked in my driveway, I don't know who parked it there. And that's actually part of the mystery of the sentence. So that sentence really does need to be in passive voice because the important information there is the red Maserati and we've got it upfront. So there are things like that, that you don't want to change. I think to take away, I think the fear around these tools is to remember that you, as a writer are writing books for human readers. And you need a human editor to be a stand-in for your readers. That's really one of my jobs. So when I'm editing, I think of myself first and foremost as a reader. I'm paying attention to things like, where am I confused or where does something seem slow? Where do I stumble over a sentence? And we might see an AI program get to that level of nuance and analysis in our lifetimes, but we're definitely not there now. I think too, that an AI is never going to be able to give the kind of personal warm feedback that a human editor can give. And that's part of what you're getting. You're hiring someone who's going to know your book almost as well as you do and can encourage you. And remind you of the good things about it when you are stuck in that inevitable cycle of, ‘Oh, this is all terrible. And I am so bored with it and I wanted to quit it.' I just don't think an AI is ever going to be able to provide that encouragement to keep going. Joanna: I think at the end of the day, like you said, there's going to be a human reader. So you need a human perspective and absolutely everyone knows on this show that I'm positive about AI tools, but I absolutely want to use human editors. Let's get into some of the common issues. Of course, one of the great things I feel about editors is you've read so many manuscripts. And even though as writers, we've read a lot of books, we read books that are finished. We read the final product. We never read those early manuscripts. Lots of people send me them, but I never read them because that's not what I do, I'm not an editor. What are some of the most common issues you see in fiction in particular? Kristen: That's such a good point. I think that's something to remember too, if you are an early-stage writer, do you remember that you are seeing finished books, and many times those books have been worked on by editors. So you don't need to be performing up to that level yet. And that's fine. In terms of content editing, that first stage that we talked about, I would say the number one issue I talk about with writers is point of view. So for beginning writers, this often means deciding which character or characters is going to tell a story, making sure they aren't hopping from one character's point of view to another, in a way that's going to confuse readers. For more experienced writers, what we're often doing is working on deepening point of view. So using various tricks, like weaving in little glimpses of interiority. Thoughts and feelings and memories into spots like dialogue exchanges, or any other place we can kind of fit them in to add some extra texture, or cutting out things, what are called filter words. So if you have a sentence, like, ‘I saw the leaves on the trees shiver in the breeze.' That ‘I saw,' if you're deep in that first-person narrator's perspective, the reader doesn't even need that, ‘I saw.' They're going to understand intuitively that this is the narrator character seeing those leaves shivering. And then you can just cut that out. The important verb in that sentence is the shivered. That's a great verb. And so we want to put it in the starring spot. So using tricks like that. The other really big issue I find many writers struggle with is the opening of a novel. This is a hard balance to pull off. Because you want to get the story started. Because seeing a character in a scene and facing some kind of conflict, that's what's going to pull the reader in, but at the same time, you need to show the reader what this character is all about. Often that involves bringing in some backstory. I work with writers a lot about getting that balance correct. At the beginning of the novel, I see a lot of manuscripts come into me with a big long prologue that's often about a really important event. Like maybe the kind of key backstory event of their main character's life. That material absolutely has a place in the novel. But often that place is woven in in different chunks over the course of the early chapters. Readers can really get invested in the life story that's happening. So those are all content editing issues. From a copyediting standpoint, the number one issue I spend time on is probably dialogue. I'm always thinking about, ‘Does something sound like dialogue for this character? Is it in their voice?' And again, this is another skill that I think writers develop over time, and it's a little bit hard to pull off. To find that balance; we're not trying to duplicate real speech. Because that would be full of misdirections and hesitations and ums and all of that. But we also don't want it to sound just like the narrative. Finding that balance can be tricky. I spend a lot of time helping writers think about things like word usage and formality and informality and what's right for each character. And then I spend a lot of time on dialogue tags. So your dialogue tag is that little bit that identifies who says a sentence. If you have a line, like, ‘Give me back that book, Kristen said.' That Kristen said is the dialogue tag. This is something I think we're going to talk about the revisions that you did for your first books in the ‘ARKANE' series. I know this is one thing that you focused on, and I think this is such a great tip. A lot of those dialogue tags you can actually convert into what's called an action tag. So you would give the dialogue line, ‘Give me back that book,' and then add something like this. ‘Kristen knew she'd never be able to find another copy just like this one.' It identifies the dialogue, the speaker of the dialogue line, but also adds a little introspection. We get a sense of what Kristen is thinking about this book and why it's important to her. So it's a little bit of a two for one. There are little tricks like that, that when I'm copy editing, I try to weave into my edit. They seem small, but they can actually be quite powerful. Joanna: This is another reason why we work with editors, is because you are just blind to your own work and to have someone else's brain… That's basically, what we're doing. We're hiring someone else's brain when you hire an editor. That's how I think. And someone who is probably more obsessed. No, definitely more obsessed with words. I love words. I use words all the time, but I am not as obsessed with the rules, like, you mentioned the style and all of these things. My brain just doesn't think that way. And I am sure some writers do, but I feel like this is a huge difference. An editor's brain just sees all these things that I can't even see in my work. Kristen: Yes, absolutely. We're trained to do that. That is part of your training is to have that reflex step in. Again, as you said, as a writer, you're working on your own books. I read dozens of manuscripts every year. So I'm seeing different writers tackle these things in different ways and stumble across these problems in different ways. And so I just am more alert and able to pick them out. I generally know what the solution is as well because I've helped another writer solve that. Joanna: Yeah, exactly. So let's just talk about non-fiction because you do also edit non-fiction as well. What are some of the common issues with nonfiction? Kristen: It's actually quite different in a lot of ways. The copyediting is not so different, but when you're, again, stepping back to that first stage of content editing. For fiction, a writer will generally come to me and they have their characters and their plot mapped out. We don't think about nonfiction books having a plot, but really they do. This is especially true if you think about creative nonfiction, like memoirs and travel writing writers have so much material. If it's based on your own experience, you have just this wealth of stuff to draw on. So even if you're writing a book, say about a week-long trip, you can imagine how much you have to work with there. So for those kinds of books, I'm really working with an author on finding that kind of narrative spine. You need to find a way to tell the story of the experience. And show how it shaped you and changed you. Just like in a good novel, your protagonist is going have a character arc. You want that in your creative nonfiction as well. For something more straightforward like a self-help book or an instructional book, it's about helping that author really zero in on their specific expertise and experience or on a concrete idea or, or argument. I think this is something you really nailed for your forthcoming How to Write a Novel book. This is a huge topic with lots of books on the subject. And you zeroed in on the discovery writer angle, and also brought in a lot of experience about writing for audio, which we all need to be thinking about. Finding that angle was very smart. Because most writing craft books assume that writers are advanced planners when that doesn't work for everyone. So that's a great example of you zeroed in on that specific hook for your non-fiction book. Beyond the plot of the book, for non-fiction, I'm paying a lot of attention to structure and organization. I always pull out the whole outline and look at that separately and holistically. And there again, I'm trying to put myself in the place of the reader. Is the reader going to get confused at any point. Are these sections in the right order? Maybe there's something that's later in the book that actually would be more beneficial if it came earlier. So I'm really trying to step back and think about those things. And then I think, from a copyeditor standpoint, I also look for opportunities to add internal references and links back to different places in the book. So this is a great example of something that someone who's spent months writing a non-fiction book is not going to be able to see those connections always. But I'm reading through the whole book in a short window of time, usually like a week or two weeks. So I have a chance to hold the whole book in my mind and I can see a place where, ‘Okay, well, you talked about point of view in chapter 12, and there's a short discussion in chapter five. So we should also mention that there's going to be a longer discussion in chapter 12.' Many times an author is just not going to see that opportunity at all. But those are great signposts for readers. Joanna: Brilliant. I treat you as like a first reader as well because some people use beta readers, some people have other writer-friends, whatever, who read their book first and give other feedback like that. But I don't use writing groups. I do a lot of self-editing, but then you are also seeing it, like you said there, you're seeing it as the whole thing. You're seeing the whole book. And so whether it hangs together. This goes back to the what's human and what's human about the editing; does this thing hang together and progress in your mind from beginning to end, whatever type of book it is, it's a journey for the reader. Kristen: Absolutely. The thing that the editor can do that the writer can no longer do is we can see it fresh. I approach it, especially if this is my first read, I've obviously never stepped into the manuscript before. You're hiring someone to get that fresh pair of eyes that you just cannot have yourself any longer. Joanna: Absolutely. Let's just also talk about rewriting older books, because the first books we've worked on together are my first three thrillers, which you edited these 2022 editions of Stone of Fire, Crypt of Bone, and Arc of Blood. It was 10 years after I first published them, and I've learned a lot. And yet I learned a lot, but you still did a plum and a good edit on them as well. So I feel like this kind of rewriting I'm really happy I did it. I'm really happy we went through that process, but I also know that it's a big deal for people. When should people consider rewriting, re-editing, and what should they watch out for? Kristen: Great question. It really depends on your overall goals for your author career and then where those books that you're considering rewriting or re-editing fit into the picture. If it's an early standalone novel, then I would likely leave it alone. I think readers do understand that you learn and evolve as a writer and someone who is a super fan might go back and find that much earlier book. And even if your craft isn't at the level that it is with later books, they can still enjoy it because they can see the seeds of where you're going or have a chance to see you tackling a theme that you often return to in a different way in an early book. Unless you have a lot of very low reviews or comments about things like grammar mistakes, I just leave that be. I would say the same if you have a limited series, something that's just three or four books, and then you're done. So I think rather than going back and re-editing and revising that I'd focus on putting the financial and time resources into the next series and making that as good as it can be. Now, where I do think it makes sense is if you have a long-running series, that is the centerpiece for your author brand, as ARKANE is for yours. So this is a series that's going to run for many, many future books. And especially, if you are going to be investing advertising dollars into getting folks to start with the first book, then it might make sense to work with an editor on that first book, or to do your own kind of revision of that, to make sure that your advertising investment is going to pay off. Here I'd really look at the numbers. I think authors have so many emotions around your books, and that makes absolute sense, but if you can decide some of these things just really based on the numbers, and I think here, I'd look at your read through. If you are seeing a lot of people reading book one, and then there's a big drop-off for book two, that might be a sign that some additional work could be helpful. In terms of how to approach this, I would encourage folks to start with some research. So you might read a couple of advanced writing craft books, even if you feel like you've done that work in the past, find some new ones, you're always going to learn some new tips. I would also really sit down and read very closely and carefully and with a pencil or highlighting in your Kindle, some recent popular books in your genre, and really be looking for those things. Things like the dialogue tags, we just talked about, look for technical things that you can see these writers doing and make a list of those things. And then go back to your novels and see if you can find places where you can apply those. Obviously, you don't want to change your character arcs or your plot or anything like that. You don't want to make those books unfamiliar to readers who have already read them and have an attachment to them. But you're just trying to elevate them a little bit. I have a client who used the term ‘upwriting' for this kind of work, and I really love it. I think it's a good term. You're looking for opportunities to make what's already on the page better. Joanna: Upwriting. That's a good one. I like that. Kristen: Isn't that great? Yeah. Joanna: That's excellent. We've talked a lot about craft, but I also think working relationships are just so important. And I was thinking back, and you did some checking of, I think my Valley Of Dry Bones years ago. Kristen: That's right. Joanna: About San Francisco and at the time, and I think you were in the acknowledgments of that book as checking that bit about San Francisco. It literally, wasn't an edit thing. It was more, like, a sort of local beta reader or something. Kristen: Yeah, exactly. Joanna: And then when my previous editor moved on and inevitably people move into other things and I was like, ‘I really need a new editor.' And I remembered our conversation. Then we connected by email and social media. I feel like, in that way, I was aware of you and then, but then obviously, when we were, like, ‘Oh, are you available?' And then we looked at a contract and we were like, ‘Well, I'm not sure if this is going to work for me.' And you were like, ‘Yeah, let's just see what happens because it felt like we were doing the project to see if we could actually work together.' I'm just so happy with our editorial relationship and you really match what I'm looking for at my stage of my writing career, both for my writing and personality-wise. But I totally get that everyone wants different things. How can authors find an editor who matches with them for their book for the time of their career, for their personality? Kristen: That's a really good question. First of all, thank you. That's an editor's dream always is to hear, ‘Oh, you are a great match for me, and that people appreciate your work.' So that's so lovely to hear. I think the personality thing is a really big deal. And again, this comes back to we're humans. And so I think so much of it is about communication style. That's one thing I always advise folks who are looking for an editor to pay a lot of attention to. So if you're the kind of person who only wants to communicate over email, make sure that's what your editor does. Or if you're someone who wants to get on a Zoom call to go over the feedback or kick around ideas after you've gotten a content edit back again, make sure you're working with an editor who is happy to do that. So it's about that. And then I think it's also about how do you like to receive feedback. Do some kind of self-reflection and think about your favorite teachers. Again, editing is closely related to teaching, and think about how you like to receive feedback. Some folks want an editor who is just super direct, who makes the changes right in their manuscript. Maybe doesn't do a whole lot of explanation, and it's just very straightforward. And as you know, I'm a little more talky in my editing. I leave a lot of comments and I give a lot of explanations, all of which take more time for you also to work through. It takes more time for me to do, which makes me a little bit more expensive, but that's just how I do things. I think as an author, looking for an editor and especially if you're looking for someone who's going to be with you through several books, I think it's really worth taking your time with that process. So many editors offer a sample edit, and that's what we did with those first thrillers, really. We agreed we were going to work together on those few books and then see where we were. But a sample edit is a great way to get a feel for exactly the way an editor is going to treat your words and exactly the kind of comments you're going to get and all of that. Take the time to talk to a few people, and rely on your intuition here. It's okay to go with your gut. I think that's going to lead you to a better fit. Joanna: A lot of people email me because I have a list of editors, thecreativepenn.com/editors. And of course, you are on that list. And there are lots of other people on that list. People always email me and say, ‘Hey, you've got a big list, but can you just recommend someone who would be the right editor for me?' And I'm, like, ‘No, I can't, I literally can't do that.' It's like dating, everyone's got a different match. Kristen: That is the correct analogy. I think it's important. And I would say, your list is really great. I would also say another good place to look is there are a lot of editing organizations. Here in the U.S., there's The Editorial Freelancers Association. In the UK, there's the Chartered Institute of Editors and Proofreaders, and they have directories and they also have a job list. So you can talk a little bit about your book and you'll get literally dozens of editors emailing you if they think that they're going to be a good fit. There are a lot of folks out there. You have a lot of choices. So take the time and do some research, look at people's websites, look at how they conduct themselves on social media, and find someone who you just feel like you vibe with. Like that's the good way to do it. Joanna: And trust is such a big deal. Actually, let's just answer this question because people do ask it as new writers with trust. People say, ‘If I send my manuscript to an editor, what if they steal it or publish it or other things.' How do you answer it when people worry about that trust issue of actually sending a manuscript? Kristen: I get that question all the time. First there are a couple of practical answers. You don't have to register your copyright in a work in order for you to have copyright over it. Once it's in a fixed form, which means wherever it is on a legal pad or in a Microsoft word document, you have copyright. So it actually would be illegal for me to do that. And then just had a practical sense I think writers when they're just starting out, they don't realize just how heavy a lift it is to put a book out there and actually sell it. So, it doesn't make any sense for me to spend the time doing that. In a practical sense, I use a contract with everyone. You refer to that and the contract specifies that this is your work and actually also assigns the copyright of any edits I make to the writer. So that's something to pay attention to. Do work with an editor who uses a contract and read that contract, and if there's something that you want to have added or changed ask for that change, and most folks are willing to do that. We do understand, it's not just even about are you going to seal my manuscript? I think it's a vulnerable thing to send a piece of writing to someone to have them evaluate it. And I think we do know that as editors and take that trust seriously and try to honor and respect that leap of faith that writers are making. Joanna: Absolutely. And then also a good business relationship goes both ways. And basically, as soon as you invoice me, I pay it. I'm like, ‘I gotta pay you.' Kristen: It's amazing how fast it is. Like sometimes less than a minute goes by. Joanna: I'm just waiting to pay you. To me, this is really important. I do this with my book cover designer. I do this with any people I value in my business I need to pay. And I think this is a really important thing. You've mentioned expensive, but it's about value to me. And that's what I'm paying for. I'm paying for your brain and it's valuable. But of course, it goes both ways because you only have one brain and so you can't just help everybody. So it's also important for you to have a sustainable business. How do you make sure you get the right clients and who are your ideal clients in case people listening, inundate you? Kristen: For me, it's really about building those long-term relationships and I love working with clients on multiple books. I love people who are writing series. I think for me, the key thing is I love working with writers who really want to do the work. Who are ready to geek out with me about a detail. This week I'm working with a fantasy author and we're going back and forth about, ‘Are we going to capitalize the term lore keepers?' And she is just as invested in this as I am and we've talked about, ‘Okay, well, what else have we capitalized across the course of these novels and how does this suit?' I really love people who want to really think in that deep and very detailed way about their books. I love working with newer writers, but I especially like newer writers who understand that likely their first book is going to need a substantial amount of work and that's okay. That's a very usual normal thing. But also I want to work with folks who are prepared to do it. It's heartbreaking for me to spend a lot of time on a manuscript evaluation and send it off. And then the writer just is overwhelmed and puts it in a drawer. So I do spend a lot of time to try to build in kind of touch points. I go back and talk to people and try to give the kind of constructive feedback in a manuscript evaluation that will help them take those next steps. I also recognize that's hard. So that's something I like people to understand. I also love working with more experienced writers like yourself because it challenges me to dig a little bit deeper. I have to look harder. There's always the commas. But if I'm working on a manuscript that's technically very clean I have to challenge myself to look a little bit harder to find improvements. That helps me challenge myself and keep learning advanced skills and keep learning and studying and thinking. And that's really kind of all my favorite things. Joanna: Oh, fantastic. Tell us what you have for writers over at Blue Garret and where people can find you online. Kristen: Everything is on my website. So that's the Blue Garret with two Rs and one T, which, I spend a lot of time saying that just like your creative Penn with two Ns, but I love the name and have a personal connection with it. So it's worth it. So everything really is there. The biggest thing I do every week, I send a weekly newsletter that usually has a very in-depth piece about writing craft. Right now, I am doing a series where I've picked one bestseller a month and I'm analyzing it in very granular detail to pull out techniques that writers can take away and try out with their own writing. As you know, we talked about before, I also have a short class for indie authors about how to find an editor and how to work with someone. And what does the copy-editing process look like? If you're feeling overwhelmed by that process, or just don't feel like you don't have a good grasp of what it is, this course has a lot of good videos and visuals, and we'll really walk you through the process of finding an editor who will be a good fit for you. And then in addition to my website, you can find me on Twitter @KristenTateSF as in San Francisco. And then I'm also on Instagram @BlueGarret. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Kristen. That was great. Kristen: I loved it.The post Different Kinds Of Editing, And How To Find An Editor With Kristen Tate first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you write twists that surprise a reader? How can you market your books effectively as a traditionally published author? Clare Mackintosh talks about her creative process, and how she works with her publisher to reach more readers. In the intro, Kate Bush is “the world’s biggest independent artist” right now and more on intellectual property rights [Music Business Worldwide]; A long-term view of IP [Kris Rusch]; Rethinking the Writing Business by Kris Rusch; 24 Assets by Daniel Priestley; Cosmopolitan uses AI-generated cover; My interview on AI and writing with Andrew Mayne, and more on AI + the future of creativity. 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 Clare Mackintosh is the multi-award-winning author of five Sunday Times bestselling novels. Translated into 40 languages, her books have sold more than 2 million copies worldwide and have been New York Times and international bestsellers. Her latest book, The Last Party is the first in a new crime series. Show Notes 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. How being a police detective is like being a writer The difference between a twist and a reveal, and how Clare plots her novels Why marketing is important, even for traditionally published authors Why authors need an email list, regardless of how you choose to publish Using video in book marketing How networking has played an important part in Clare's publishing journey You can find Clare Mackintosh at ClareMackintosh.com and on Twitter @claremackint0sh Transcript of Interview with Clare Mackintosh Joanna Penn: Clare Mackintosh is the multi-award-winning author of five Sunday Times bestselling novels. Translated into 40 languages, her books have sold more than 2 million copies worldwide and have been New York Times and international bestsellers. Her latest book, The Last Party is the first in a new crime series. Welcome, Clare. Clare Mackintosh: Hi, thanks for having me. Joanna Penn: I'm so excited to talk to you. First up, tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Clare Mackintosh: I have always been a storyteller, always written short stories, written little snippets, pen pictures of characters, always a voracious reader, but like a lot of people didn't ever see as a child that there was a potential career here. I enjoyed writing, but it wasn't something I saw as a job possibility. I didn't know anybody who worked in the arts, who produced music or poetry or anything. I just knew people who worked in jobs. I went to university, I did French and business at university. And then in a slight plot twist, I joined the police and spent 12 years in the police. But, I say this a lot because people think that it's such a different career being in the police to writing novels, but there are so many similarities between the two careers. When you are a detective, you're a storyteller. You are having to write a witness statement for someone, a statement for someone who's been a victim of crime. You have this immense responsibility to find exactly the right words to put across what's happened to this person. Victims don't start with a beginning and then a middle and an end; they start with the end. They start by telling you they've been attacked or they've been burgled, and then you have to pull them back and work out what was their origin story and how did those events lead to where you are now. It's all about storytelling, pulling out the narrative that the cameras have got to tell you and the forensics and all the unreliable witnesses all over the place, and then presenting that story in a compelling way to an audience, to a court. And that's exactly what we do now as writers. So it felt like a weirdly natural progression to go from stories that dealt with fact to stories that are fictional. Joanna Penn: How does your background in the police weave its way into your fiction? Because, obviously, you've got lots of books now. Are your stories based on your experience, or how do they weave in? Clare Mackintosh: They're hardly ever based on real-life, or at least not on real-life cases. I think people perhaps have an idea that ex-police officers have this huge bank of stories that they could fictionalize. And maybe some officers do. My experience of crimes is that, for the most part, they're really quite boring and criminals are really quite stupid. And so the idea of these criminal masterminds that we see in Bond films or in crime novels is really quite unusual. It's quite rare. What being a police officer taught me that I put into all my books is about people. It's about really understanding people and coming into contact with people from all walks of life. That really meant I am able to write with a degree of authenticity about people outside my own lived experience, outside my sort of comfortable bubble that I grew up in. What it also did was it showed me how fine that line is between a safe life and an unsafe life. How easily we can cross over from witness to victim, to offender, and back again. And that gray area is what I and lots of other thriller writers like to write about. Joanna Penn: You chose mainly the crime thriller genre. I know you've written some other things like memoir, but why did you go that way? Did you just not want to leave it behind, or do you just love crime? Clare Mackintosh: I do love crime, and I grew up really reading crime, and my first great loves were ‘The Famous Five' books. And although people sort of put them in a children's book genre, they are, of course, crime novels. They're about kids playing detective. I grew up reading crime, but actually, when I wrote, I Let You Go, which was my debut, I didn't know what genre it was going to be, which seems odd for anyone who's read it because it is about a hit-and-run. And so it's probably fairly obvious that it's a crime, but stories can take lots of different angles. When I first wrote that book, I was really focusing on a woman who had been through this terrible trauma. There'd been a hit-and-run in which a child had been killed. And the focus of the novel was how do we move on from that? How do you deal with trauma and grief in your past life and build a new future? That's a story which could spin off in lots of different directions and hit lots of different genres. And the one that it ended up in happened to be the psychological thriller genre. As you know, once you write one book in a genre, you kind of need to keep going because that's what readers expect. Joanna Penn: Absolutely. I Let You Go is quite famous for its twist, and no spoilers, obviously. But you do write twists and I've also seen your plotting methods on your various videos and blog posts and things. How do you plot and write twists? Clare Mackintosh: It's really hard. Joanna Penn: I'm glad you said that because I'm like, ‘Oh, my goodness, you just seem to do them.' Clare Mackintosh: I find it really hard. One of the things I really want to say because I think it's really important for people listening at home who perhaps are struggling with the pressure of putting twists in their works in progress is that you do not have to have a twist. And so often when I see that a book has an incredible twist, actually, what it's got is a really good reveal. Understanding the difference between a twist and a reveal is quite an important thing to do. And then take the pressure off yourself because you do need to have reveals, ideally more than one, but you don't have to have a twist. So the first thing that I do is work out, is this a book which needs reveals, or is it a book which wants a twist? And can I think of a good one to go in it? Sometimes the book starts with a twist. And in the case of I Let You Go in the case of, Let Me Lie, the twist is what came first. In other times, it's the other way around, and it's the situation. My most recent thriller, Hostage, is set on an aeroplane, it's set on a nonstop 20-hour flight. And there is actually a twist in it as it turns out, but it didn't start with a twist. It started with a situation. It started with a locked room thriller in an aeroplane. And that was a case of plotting the novel, writing the novel, and then realizing that there was an opportunity to pull the rug out from people's feet. So what I do is I plot my novels out and I plot them out in pretty forensic detail. I feel like if I was an architect, I wouldn't be able to build a house without knowing what the plans were. So that's how I start off with my three-act structure, gradually adding more meat onto the bone. I'm just mixing my metaphors horribly now. Joanna Penn: That's fine. Clare Mackintosh: Houses, bones, gardening, all sorts. So I'm adding and adding and adding until I end up with a chapter outline. And at this point, if you kind of can imagine a table or a spreadsheet, and I know that there'll be people at home, in fact, including you probably going, ‘But you can use Scrivener for that.' And you can, it's just not my bag. I like a nice, old-fashioned word table once I've moved on from my post-it notes. I have a column against my chapters, which is called the Reader's Journey. And this is where I play God. This is where I manipulate my readers, where I decide how I want them to feel and what I want them to think at every stage of this book. That's a really important part of my twist building because it means I can say, ‘Okay, in this chapter, you think A did it and, you know, B is really nice, and in this chapter, you now realize B isn't nice because of what they've done there, but now you don't trust C.' I make sure that I'm giving my reader whiplash, I suppose, right the way through. Only once I've done all of that do I start writing. Joanna Penn: That's fantastic. I love that. The reader's emotional journey there. I'm more of an intuitive writer. I don't do any plotting. I just sit down and write and stuff happens. And if it surprises me, then I hope it surprises the reader. But I think, we're two extremes, I think, that we are the plotter and the pantser. So although I say discovery writer, I don't like the pantser word. Clare Mackintosh: No. I actually refuse to use that word because… Joanna Penn: Always American, isn't it? Clare Mackintosh: Well, it's a really flippant term for what is a professional process, whether you are writing for money, whether you write as a hobbyist, whether you are published or not. Actually, we are really serious about our writing and calling someone a pantser, yeah, I don't like it. Joanna Penn: I don't. I use discovery writer. But I think that's fantastic, the reader's journey. We should just be clear. You said the difference between a twist and a reveal. Could you just define those two? Clare Mackintosh: My definition is that a reveal is the answer to a question that the reader has been asking. So an example of that is, who killed the victim? A twist is an answer to a question that the reader hadn't even thought to ask. So you totally change their world by presenting them with something unexpected. Joanna Penn: I think that reveal, as you say, has to be in every book. We have to open questions and then answer questions. That's basically what we have to do. But yeah, the twist, as you say, doesn't have to be in everything, but you do them so well. Let's move into marketing, and it's interesting you did French and business at university because having watched you now for, I don't know, I guess, seven, eight years, you are very good at business. And let's talk about marketing because marketing is something that a lot of indie authors know they have to do, but I feel like traditionally published authors often just want someone else to do it. Why do you think marketing is so important even for traditionally published authors? Clare Mackintosh: Because marketing is important to book publishing and you can't opt-out of that. If you want people to read your books, then they have to be marketed. So then it comes down to, who is doing the marketing? And yes, of course, if you are with a large traditional publisher, then you will have a marketing team. But an author's expectations can be really dashed by assuming that that marketing team is going to do everything because budgets are different and publishers have different sizes. And regardless of the size of a team, they have lots of other books to market as well. I'm really lucky; I have an incredible in-house team and they work really, really hard on my books. But I'm not their only author, although sometimes it feels like it, and I'm in awe of how they manage to juggle all their different projects. So, they will be focusing on my books at a particular time of the year, whereas I want to keep a year-round overview. But also the best person to market your books is yourself because you know your products, you know your books inside out. You are the one that will spot an opportunity for marketing, for advertising, for PR, and be able to leap on it really quickly. For me, the perfect approach is a hybrid approach whereby I assume the role of CEO of my author business, and I have my mini departments within my own world, but then I'm also working with my publisher and their setup, and we all work together. I have freelancers I work with because this year, I just reached a point…not this year, end of last year just reached a point where I just couldn't do it all. And I don't find it easy to let go at all. So that's been quite a long time coming and it's well over June. So I have a team of freelancers and they work directly now with my in-house team. This is my kind of next step is that I get to move slightly away from it, which is a work in progress. Joanna Penn: Wow. That's brilliant. I definitely remember hiring those first people and just feeling like, ‘Is it going to be worth it? I could just do it better myself.' And then going, ‘No, stop it.' Clare Mackintosh: It's a hard thing. I constantly repeat to myself, just because you can do something doesn't mean you have to. And sometimes that's about ability, sometimes it's about time, sometimes it's just not the right thing to do. You don't have to do every project you think of. So yeah, work in progress. Joanna Penn: You mentioned there the author's expectations. And I feel that a lot of the most disappointed traditionally published authors are the ones who thought that the publisher would do all the marketing and then they didn't, but it seems like you have from the very beginning sort of taken on, like, ‘Yes, I'm part of the marketing team,' which is just a very different attitude. You mentioned there the time of year is different, as in they might do things at launch but you have year-round. What types of things do you split between the publisher and yourself? Clare Mackintosh: Probably social media is one of the best examples of that because actually, that is split three ways. And I guess if you were particularly interested, you could go and look at say my Instagram feed and think, ‘I wonder, which of these posts was made by Clare herself and which was briefed by Clare but written by someone else? And which was written by Clare but scheduled by someone else?' The upshot is it's a real mixture. My publishers may well lead on things like there's an Audible deal, a countdown to release producing assets for that. My freelance team will lead on book club stuff. So I run my mailing list. Well, I run a book club instead of an author mailing list, and my freelancers will lead on that and update my social media feed with what book we're reading and various other things. And then I will lead on my personal life, so my personal book recommendations, my personal writing tips, my personal behind-the-scenes, what I'm doing. That's an approach which for me works really well. I've tried someone else doing everything and it doesn't work for me because I feel out of control, but more importantly, I feel out of touch with my readers, and I just can't do that. I don't see the point of being on social media if I'm not able to interact and chat to readers. So the perfect balance for me is that mixture. Joanna Penn: You mentioned email list there and you have a book club, but you do have an email list yourself, right? You email those people who are in your book club. We actually recently did a promotion, an email list promotion. And what I've always been a bit surprised about, I think, is traditionally published authors who don't have any email list, and indies as well. There are people listening who have not still started their email list because either they don't want to, they don't want to manage email, or they think nobody wants to hear from them, or they think the publishers should do it. Why is an email list so important to you, even though you are trad published? Clare Mackintosh: Oh, I mean, how long have you got!? Joanna Penn: The highlights. Clare Mackintosh: It is so important. Go and start your mailing list. Email remains the most effective form of communication. More people will open their email than they will see a social media post because you are landing in their inbox. It's like being invited through the front door instead of standing on their front lawn waving through the window and hoping they'll see you. The conversion rate is much better. The relationship that you're building feels more one-to-one. You have complete control over your mailing list. Meta can decide to take down Facebook or Instagram. It can change algorithms so that your posts aren't being shown to people in the same way. They can start charging. They can do myriad of things. You don't control that data, those people who follow you there, but you do control your mailing list, and so it remains the most valuable part of your marketing real estate. [Note from Joanna: I use and recommend ConvertKit for email marketing.] I'm always horrified when people don't have mailing lists. And I'm really horrified when authors let their publishers run their mailing lists for them. And this isn't really about workload. If your publisher wants to do your newsletter and take that work off your desk, that's terrific, then that's great, but the data has got to be yours. If your publisher says, ‘Oh, hey, we're going to start a mailing list for you. This is going to be great. You're going to be able to talk to your readers,' then you need to make sure that you are the one who owns that data because I hate to say it, but you might not stay with that publisher. You might get a better offer. They might ditch you. There are lots of reasons why people move on and you do not want to be leaving that data with your old publisher. The other reason I love mailing lists is because nobody but you knows how many people are on your list, and that means you can write without feeling self-conscious. I started all of this long before I was an author. I started when I had a blog. And so what I was publicizing was my blog. There are still people on my Facebook page who came to me through my blog and have kind of grown with me and now on what is effectively an author page. I remember having fewer than 100 people who liked my Facebook page and thinking, ‘Oh, this is such a small number of people. I feel so kind of embarrassed making announcements on this tiny, tiny platform.' And actually, you shouldn't ever feel embarrassed about a small platform because a small platform can be really engaged and focused. The brilliant thing about email is that you can have five people on that list, and one of them can be your mom, but you are still writing to four people that aren't personally connected to you. And those 4 people have no idea if they're 1 of 5 or 1 of 5,000, which helps with the smoke and mirrors that I think authors should invoke when they're starting out. I think let's be kind of out and proud and bold about our marketing. And it's easy to do that by email. Joanna Penn: I'm so glad you say all that. We definitely agree on that. I want to talk about video because you mentioned Hostage. I remember one of your TikToks or Instagrams or whatever, where you are dressed up as an air hostess, and I'm like, ‘Oh, Clare's so good at this stuff.' I hate video. We know each other and we're not on video right now. We're recording this audio. I just don't like doing video. And so I wanted to get your tips on, well, first of all, why do you do video? Do you think it's effective? And how do you do it? And are you just very good at it, or have you learned? Tips, basically. Why do you do video marketing? Do you think it's effective? Clare Mackintosh: I don't think anyone should do anything they don't want to do, and that applies to everything from email, I suppose, reluctantly, although I would argue that you should, but certainly social media platforms. If you hate Twitter, don't do Twitter, and the same applies to video. If you hate it and it makes you uncomfortable, it is very likely to look uncomfortable as well, and that is going to have a negative effect and often it's better not to do something than to do it badly. The reason I do video is because I think it is effective. I think people do linger over video in a way that they don't over static images and certainly in a way they don't over just text. Static-based images are not so great for people with visual impairments, and so, hopefully, all of us are using old text to describe what's in those images. The beauty of video is it gives something for everyone. You can have the captions, you can have the voiceover, you can have the imagery, and it means that it's content that can be consumed by lots of different people in lots of different ways, while they're commuting with their headphones. I really like it. I like short-form video because it's quite easy. I don't have to think about it too much. I am quite vain. I don't do stories very often, for example, on Instagram because I think the best kind of stories that people do are very sort of off-the-cuff going about their daily business. And actually, most of the time in my daily life, if I'm not in pajamas, I'm not far off. I haven't washed my hair. I haven't worn any makeup on. I don't really want to be camera-ready. I'm quite hot on brand management, and looking like a mess doesn't really fit my brand. So I tend to be a bit more planned, and that means that I might batch film some content perhaps, or I might do something that doesn't require me to actually be talking to camera. That's one of my tips for people who are uncomfortable with video is do a video, but you don't have to be on it. So you can use voiceover, a beautiful video of where you've had your dog walk, and you can tell us about your plot walk, or you can flip through a book before you show us the cover while you overlay some texts that tells us how great it is. All those things will work on Reels, will work on TikTok. I joined TikTok really because I like to try things out. And so there are lots and lots of things. I joined Vine, I joined Rooms. What's the audio-only one that I got quite excited about? Joanna Penn: Clubhouse. Clare Mackintosh: Yes, I joined Clubhouse. Joanna Penn: Everyone did that and then disappeared a month later. Clare Mackintosh: I like to join at the start. I think it's important to join, to understand it, to see if that's where your readers might be if that's where your author network might be, to claim an account name, at the very least, so that no one else claims it, and then just see. TikTok is something that I thought, this is clearly exploding, BookTok is exploding. It doesn't show any signs of slowing down. Although at the moment, crime and thriller and mystery are not big genres on there, there's absolutely nothing to stop them certainly taking off. At the moment, it's very much about fantasy and romance, but all it takes really is for a crime book to go viral from some reader's feed. And that could easily kickstart a big crime and thriller movement on TikTok. And if that happens, I'd like to have a presence. I want people to be able to tag me. I want to be able to take part. And then the other reason why I do TikTok is because it allows me to, I suppose, show a bit of personality without being personal. I don't want to give you a tour of my house. I don't want to introduce you to my family, really. I've got teenagers. They certainly don't want to be introduced to anyone. I want to build that personal connection with readers, and actually doing that through some tongue-in-cheek videos is quite a fun thing to do. I'm enjoying it. Joanna Penn: On marketing, a lot of us as indie authors, we have almost real-time access to sales data, so we can see the immediate ROI of a lot of this stuff. But, of course, as a traditionally published author, I know there are portals and things now, but most authors don't get access to any kind of real-time sales, right? And you mentioned like brand. Is all your marketing just all going towards brand? How do you know what marketing is working for you when you don't have access to sales data? Clare Mackintosh: The bottom line is I don't know. I don't have that real-time ROI. It is a continual source of frustration to me and the only part of my empire that doesn't work, which is really annoying in itself. I would love to have that data. And not only do I not have it personally, it doesn't exist. It's not even like I can ask my publishers to give me that real-time data. It just can't work like that in the traditionally published world at the moment. So it's really frustrating. And so what I do is I think about my return not in terms of sales, but in terms of growth, which is why I don't advertise, for example. I wouldn't do an advert for a book because that is not going to give me a return. Better for me would be to perhaps advertise my book club or to advertise, I don't know, from one of my social media feeds. Running writing tips and advertise to writing groups because if I bring people into my community, then I've got a system in place for creating loyalty, for engaging and creating a community who will then go on to read my books. So my return is community building rather than book sales. Joanna Penn: I think that's a great way to think about it. Once people come on your email list, you know they're interested. So I think that's a really good tip. You mentioned the empire, which I love, and I love that you are ambitious and, obviously, again, you have that business background. Do you have a 5-year plan, 10-year plan, ‘Clare Mackintosh takes over the world' type of plan? Clare Mackintosh: I do. In fact, it probably needs updating. I'm at various critical points. So I do in terms of business goals. For example, one of my goals was to become a book-a-year author, which I haven't been. I'm relatively slow in publishing terms. And more importantly for me, I've been inconsistent. So my books have come out perhaps 15 months apart or 18 months or 20. And that's really difficult. It's difficult for me to plan my year, so my work-life balance is harder to… I'm sort of laughing because I don't have a work-life balance, but it's harder to maintain. It's harder for retailers because they can't hold a slot if you think about expecting perhaps the Richard Osman every autumn, for example. So it's harder for retailers. It's not great for readers because, again, you want to build that connection so that readers know that they can take a Clare Mackintosh on holiday with them every summer. So I decided that I would become a book-a-year author and that's been something we've sort of been moving towards. I have goals in terms of Sunday Times top 10 and how long I'd like to spend in there and where I'd like to come. Lots of goals and lots of plans to get the balance right, which I don't have at the moment. Joanna Penn: Oh, does anyone!? Clare Mackintosh: It's hard to know, isn't it? I follow some authors that I think you have absolutely got it right. You're nailing the business side. You are regularly hitting the top of the charts and you are also learning to, I don't know, paint or traveling the world. So yeah, lots to work on. Joanna Penn: But that's partly why we do this, right? Because we like learning new things, and you clearly like learning new things and so do I. I know we're almost running out of time. So I do want to ask you because you have said to me that you are a staunch traditional author with no plans to go indie, which I love because so often I just meet really ambitious indie authors and not so much traditional. And I also love you're happy with your publishing choices because, of course, there's a lot of people who aren't. Now many listeners, when I think about it sometimes, too, are interested in getting a deal with an agent and traditional publisher. What are your recommendations for authors who want to pitch [for a traditional deal], especially if they might have already released some books as an indie? Clare Mackintosh: You're off to a really good start if you've already got a track record because so many people will be pitching to agents with no track record. We don't know if you can finish a book even, let alone if you can publish one successfully. So if you've got a track record with self-publishing, then that's huge, a great thing to lean on. But, I didn't pitch. This is the thing that I find slightly awkward is that I never submitted, I was introduced. And that's an annoying story for people because it makes people think it's all about who you know. In order to make that connection, in order for that introduction to happen, I had done a phenomenal amount of networking within publishing, having known nobody in publishing, organizing a literary festival, volunteering at events, speaking to people. Really, my biggest bit of advice for people who are thinking of submitting through the traditional process is to get to know people, go to literary events, and do the kind of open mic-type pitching or the pitch to agents. Meet people, listen to authors, work out who they're published by. Really, really do your research because it will pay off. And actually those chance connections. I hear about again and again because ultimately, agents are interested in people, and if they're interested in you and you're a good writer, then you're home and dry. Joanna Penn: I was going to add, I'm glad you said it. You are very, very good at networking. I remember when you were doing that..it was the Chip Lit Fest, right? You used to organize that. And I was like, ‘Goodness me, I know how much…' It's hard work. I'm doing an event this weekend. It's just one day with 35 people, and you still organize this sort of massive event. And you put in far more hours, I think, preparing for those relationships than most people do in pitching for years. So it's not like you sat around just going, ‘Oh, I'll just meet some people.' Clare Mackintosh: No, absolutely not. And with the literary festival, I had a big team of volunteers working with me. So I certainly didn't do it alone. But yeah, you do have to put the graft in like writing. If we looked at our hourly rate from writing, certainly for those of us like me who write really slowly and throw away more words than we publish, it would not be worth us doing this. It's a ridiculous way to make a living. And the same kind of applies to networking. If I thought, ‘Oh, actually, it took me 200 hours worth of networking in order to get a particular event,' for example, then it wouldn't be worth it. But if that networking has been going to parties, if it's been having dinner with interesting people, if it's been cocktails or a nice walk with other writers, then actually, there's a really blurred line, isn't there? Between networking and just getting to know people. And I think that if you enjoy getting to know people, then it's not a chore, and then when the payoff comes, it feels like it's come for free. Joanna Penn: Because you weren't expecting it. You didn't every day you did something and go, ‘Oh, I'm expecting to get a book deal.' You did it the right way, and I really appreciate how you've done things. Clare Mackintosh: Yeah. And if you ever go into any networking opportunity with the mindset that I'm doing this in order to get this result, then it's really not going to work. It just isn't. You go to that party or take up that coffee invitation with the intention of just finding out about someone, having fun, enjoying an hour or more. And if something comes of it, that's brilliant. Networking is so important. And I can track things back, an opportunity, perhaps an event, perhaps a trip abroad somewhere. I can track it back through sometimes years and through several different layers of people, friends of friends of friends of friends right back to the first meeting. I'll think back to that first meeting and think, ‘Did I envisage that what happened, in the end, was going to be the result from it?' And I didn't, but I did have an inkling that this would be a worthwhile use of my time. Joanna Penn: Brilliant. Where can people find you and your books online? Clare Mackintosh: Well, the advantage of being called Clare Mackintosh is there aren't actually that many of us. So you can just Google me. I'm really available online. My website is claremackintosh.com. I'm on Twitter as @claremackint0sh, and everywhere else as @claremackwrites. You can join my book club. There'll be a popup on my website and I'd love to see you there. Joanna Penn: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Clare. That was great. Clare Mackintosh: Thank you.The post Writing Twists And Marketing As A Traditionally Published Author With Clare Mackintosh first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What is GPT-3 and how can writers use it responsibly as part of their creative process? How can we approach AI tools with curiosity, rather than fear? Thriller author Andrew Mayne talks about these aspects and more. In the intro, I mention the discussion about whether Google’s language model, LaMDA, could be sentient [The Verge]; and the Alliance of Independent Authors Ethical Usage of AI tools. If you'd like to know more about using AI for writing, images, marketing, voice, translation, and more, check out my course, The AI-Assisted Author. Andrew Mayne is the multi-award-nominated and internationally best-selling author of thrillers. He's also a magician, a magic consultant, and the author of over 50 books on magic. He invented an underwater stealth suit for shark diving, and he works with OpenAI as a science communicator. He also has books for authors, including, ‘How to Write a Novella in 24 hours,' and a co-hosts the podcast ‘Weird Things.' Show notes: How Andrew got into AI and first used a vision model for his shark suitWhat is GPT-3 and what is DALL-E? (You can find out more on OpenAI.comHow writers can use GPT-3 as an amplifier, and how to prompt it to get an effective response, as well as the different applicationsApproaching AI with an attitude of curiosity, rather than fearWhat is ‘AI-assisted' and why we should label AI-generated words and artWays to address the lack of diversity and bias in AI models You can find Andrew at www.AndrewMayne.com and his blog here which includes articles on using GPT-3. You can find GPT-3 on OpenAI.com. You can also follow Andrew on Twitter @andrewmayne There are many tools built on top of GPT-3. Here's my list of AI writing tools. I use and recommend Sudowrite for fiction, in particular. Transcript of Interview with Andrew Mayne Joanna: Andrew Mayne is the multi-award-nominated and internationally best-selling author of thrillers. He's also a magician, a magic consultant, and author of over 50 books on magic. He invented an underwater stealth suit for shark diving, and he works with OpenAI as a science communicator. He also has books for authors, including, ‘How to Write a Novella in 24 hours,' and a co-hosts the podcast ‘Weird Things.' So, welcome to the show, Andrew. Andrew: Hey, thank you for having me. Joanna: Oh, you do so many things. But we are actually going to talk about AI today. But I wanted to first ask you: With your background in magic, and also creativity, how did you become interested in AI? Andrew: Well, ever since I was a little boy, I was really interested in science, and entertainment, and everything in between. And I loved robots when I was a kid. And I'd build robots from science fairs and stuff, and I would use coffee cans, and little motors and things I pulled from toys to do that. And then when we got our first personal computer, I would try to build little chat bots and ask it questions, have it respond. And then I got kind of bit by the magic bug when I was in high school, because I lived in South Florida, and we had a lot of cruise ships there. And that seemed like a really cool way to see the world. And that became more of just a passive hobby, with AI and artificial intelligence. But then, sometimes you keep coming back to things. I had friends that were active in [AI]. And I knew some people were actually been to some pioneers in it that I used to sort of just pester with questions and stuff. But it was actually just a few years ago, when I got back into… I was just, realized that programming was something that I never really took seriously. Like, I always knew a little bit about programming. And I thought, ‘Why don't I just go learn a programming language?‘ And, you know, the older you get, it's helpful to just keep learning things. So I started to learn to program. And then I found myself involved with doing a special for Discovery Channel for Shark Week, where I was gonna try to build a suit to make myself invisible to sharks, as you explained at the top of the show, which is dumb. But it sounded like a fun thing to do. I had talked to shark scientists, and they'd explained to me, sharks have an incredible array of senses. And when you're down there, you're at a huge disadvantage, because we're tree-climbing monkeys, in the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by apex predators. And I thought, ‘How can I help myself out?' And I thought, one of the things I could do is try to build a system where I could see 360 all around me, and then use maybe, like, image recognition or something to tell me, ‘Hey, there's a shark behind you.' Because the thing I found out about Great Whites is they're ambush hunters, and they can tell where you're looking. And if you're not looking at them, then they're gonna sneak up on you. And if you're not looking at them, and they're sneaking up on you, you don't see them. There's a lot of open source code for, like, vision systems, and creating software to recognize stuff, and there's a lot of helpful tutorials. And I started off as just a complete novice in it, but I got fascinated by it, because as I was learning how you create something to detect an image, or train it to recognize something like a shark, I was talking to shark scientists who were explaining to me that, ‘Hey, you know, one of things that's interesting about shark vision is that they don't see you inside of the shark cage. They actually see the outline of the cage.' And something clicked for me, because we talk about sharks having such incredible senses, a sense of smell, they see us better, or probably see as well or as better than we do. They have these ability to sense electrical fields, they can sense vibrations, all of this data is huge. But they have small brains relatively, compared to, let's say, an upper primate. And when that person said that to me, like, ‘Oh, that's an algorithm used to reduce the complexity of the information so it can make a decision.' And I'm like, ‘Oh, a Great White is a collection of algorithms, as we are, too.' And that particular one they described is very similar to something I was looking at in vision research, which is dealing with, like, detection of edges. And that was, when one thing connects between something and something else, and, I mean, that's kind of the basis, I think that we, as writers, is we love to either make connections or find connections, and we see that connection, just something triggers in our head. And that, to me, was, ‘Oh, this is fascinating. This is really what artificial intelligence is about — this optimization. And so, I started getting more into artificial intelligence, learning how to build little, small neural networks, and neural networks is basically kind of like how our brain works, but it's, like, just a simple arrangement of, we call them parameters, but that's basically if-this-then-that kind of thing, but just in a sort of statistical way that it's trained. It was just fascinating, because you'd start to see results. I built a little image generator model from some code I found online. And I could, like, ‘Ah, that kind of looks like a goat. Oh, that kind of looks like something.' And it just was just a wonderful awakening for me to realize how cool this was, and happened at this time, with artificial intelligence has just expanded so much, and that's where the interest came from. Joanna: Yeah, I love that. But let's get specific around the AI tools for writers. So, I've mentioned GPT-3 on this show before, but perhaps you could just give an overview from your perspective, and what other AI tools, like DALL-E from OpenAI as well, what is it like right now for writers? Andrew: Well, it's a very exciting period, and I was very fortunate, because two years ago, when OpenAI came out with GPT-3, I got invited as a creative to play around with this. GPT-3 was an AI that was trained by taking a tremendous amount of text data, and they built the fifth-largest supercomputer in the world to build this. And then, when they got this, they weren't sure, what were its capabilities? I was invited to sort of play around and start experimenting with GPT-3, first, kind of…because they knew I was a writer. They didn't know that I, how nerdy I was about AI. So, for me to be able to interact with the system for hours on end, to see what it could do, was exciting. So, I helped write a lot of the examples that you'll see if you get access to GPT-3, because then I ended up…now I work for them. But, like, I started creating examples and stuff, and exploring, because I found that as a writer, we're very used to the world of words and how words are presented. And that kind of was helpful, because this was a point at which AI understood a bit about structure, understood a lot about grammar, understood a lot about if you say what TL;DR means, what that means, or if you say ‘in conclusion,' and I found that it was really, really helpful… You could use it as an amplifier. You could start a little character description. It could help make the description a little more interesting. For nonfiction writing, it was really helpful because you could write some things, and then it might help you continue your thought. And then you could just write ‘in conclusion,' and it could sum up things for you. It actually affected the way that I write, when I write, like, nonfiction. For instance, like, I start everything with a TL;DR right now, because watching a model take a bunch of information and compress it down to the most important points made me think about, ‘Okay, when I start writing,' and this is obvious to a lot of people… For me, like, I really need to start from there, and then always look back to that, and not deviate. So, both for writing and learning how it worked, affected me. Joanna: So, you mentioned a few things there. You mentioned amplifying, and expanding things, or continuing thoughts. I've used it too, so I get what you mean. But many authors who hear “AI and writing,” they think that you just click a button and out pops a novel. You have written a blog post, ‘Will AI ever write a novel?‘ So, where are we with it right now? And I guess, how do we drive it? Because you've also written about prompt engineering? Andrew: So, my personal belief is, yeah, of course, it's going to be able to write novels, and people go, like, ‘but it won't know human experience.' Like, ‘No, it'll be able to read a million biographies, and it will know human experience deeper than any of us know.‘ But it still comes back down to, is that doesn't negate the value of writers. I think it actually amplifies it, because there are systems that create really good music right now. If we take the singer Billy Eilish, she's incredibly talented. And part of what makes her music have value to us is her story. She and her brother, composing music in their parents' home, trying to make their own sound, not being people that were, you know, the industry would have picked to say, ‘You get to be the superstars,' but they did it on their own. And then they became famous. And that emotion is based in part the fact that they're real people. And there's gonna be places for there's fake, like, Japanese digital pop stars, and so there's gonna be a place for that, but I'm always gonna want to sit down and read stories. Sometimes I might want just a computer story, but I like to know that there was a person who wrote this. I like to know this was created by somebody, because writing is about choices, and creativity is about choices. And these tools can give you a lot of options, but you still have to make choices, whether it's GPT-3 is saying, ‘Do you want this character to be this? Or do you want it to be that?' Or for you deciding where you want to take it. And that's what we see with DALL-E. DALL-E is our system that generates images. And they're incredible. Like, I have just ordered a couple to have hanging in my place here, because I just love the look of them. I can tell the difference between an artist who uses DALL-E and just somebody who just says, ‘Oh, a cool rabbit, or this.' Artists bring more to it, and these tools really are amplifiers. One more example to think about is, imagine in 1826 you showed a portrait artist the first photograph. They might have been frightened. ‘Oh, no. What happens to my industry?' And it was disruptive. But now imagine back then, 1826, trying to explain what does somebody like James Cameron do for a living? And it's incomprehensible. But that field of art, the number of people who were able to make a living by art, increased dramatically. The value we placed on that actually went up a lot. I've had friends be like, ‘Oh, well, Mozart got along fine without a commercial business.' I'm like, ‘Mozart was supported by the royalty.' Like, he was the one dude that got that opportunity. We live in a world with millions of artists, and opportunities that come and go, but this technology can amplify that. If you have that creativity, don't be scared by it. Be excited by it. Joanna: I'm definitely with you. I'm an optimist about it. But it's interesting there. So, you talked about there a person wrote this or an artist created this, but we can use the tools, and it amplifies the value. If we think about a continuum from zero to 100%, so 0% AI to 100% AI, this is the issue I see, and people argue with me about this, and so I'm wondering about what you think. So, where is the point where it becomes more AI-created, or, AI-enhanced? Here's a human example. Someone like James Patterson, who co-writes with so many people, and he does these outlines, right, but a lot of his co-writers do the bulk of the words. So, they get a co-written name on the book cover. So, if an author has an idea and then uses something like GPT-3 to generate most of the words, do we have to talk about this in the publishing industry? Do we just put the author's name on? Where do you think this continuum goes, I guess? Andrew: Well, and understand, OpenAI, by the way, OpenAI, we're a research organization. We're a for-profit owned by a nonprofit, all right. And the goal of the nonprofit is to develop benevolent artificial general intelligence, an AGI. AGI is basically described as something that's as capable or more capable than a human, but more efficient to do certain things. And we want to make sure that AI is helpful overall. There would be disruptions, but we want it to be a net benefit for all of humanity. And we look at how things might be disruptive. So, right now what we do with DALL-E, with that image generator, we put a little logo on there, that's a little color bars, to show that this was, it's our signature. And we tell everybody using this, ‘You need to tell people an AI made this. You need to tell everybody that an AI created this.' Because we're trying to set a precedent to say, like, ‘You should tell your audience when it's AI, or maybe assisted by AI, etc., going forward.' I mean, the danger gets into what does ‘assisted by AI' mean now? Because if you open up Google Docs, and you start to write something, it will do completion for you. And it uses a model, not as capable as GPT-3, but a really good model. That's AI-assisted now. And so, that's sort of where it gets gray is how much. But if you're just turning out a thing, and if it's substantial, the most of the work was done by an AI, probably a good idea to tell your audience. You know, I think that…because people are going to want authenticity, and sometimes it won't matter, but sometimes it will. Joanna: Yes, well, actually, I did a short story last year, which I self-published, and I put in the back a little, in my author's note, I did an AI declaration. And I'm also encouraging people to do this, but I don't think most people are doing it. [Note from Joanna: See the Alliance of Independent Authors Ethical Author Declaration of AI usage for more details.] And you're indie, but also traditionally published. So, how are you tackling this? I think you mentioned on your blog that you're using some passages from AI in your next traditionally published novel? Andrew: Yes, I actually think I probably had the first GPT-3 content published in a book, but it's a part of a book where it's a computer talking. And so, that's what I did, is I said, ‘It's this thing,' and that they realize, ‘Hey, it's a computer talking,' like, ‘Yeah, it was, actually.' And there was sort of a race for me, like, ‘I wanna do whole books.' Like, ‘Well, are they gonna be good? Are they going to be good?' And eventually, they will be. I think they'll probably be exceptional. But I think that as far as in the publishing industry, you know, you look at the state of it now is that they look to see, ‘What is your platform and how many Twitter followers do you have? You know, what's your Facebook count?' and all this. And I think that is sad for me, because I think, I mean, I was very fortunate because I haven't done television stuff. Those things are good for me, but I think if, like, I was trying to make a name for myself as an author today, versus where I was 10 years ago, it's a different landscape. I guess my point is, like, I don't know how publishers are going to handle the AI side of things. You know, with some publishers, if they can just have a small group of writers, a stable of stuff, working with AI, do it, and just churn out a bunch of public books, maybe that'll happen. Will the quality be there? I don't know. Joanna: Well, and this is why I'm very interesting, because, of course, as authors, we license our rights to publishers, and there are some imprints of some famous publishing houses that will have a lot of books that, you know, are within a genre-specific template. It's hard not to name names. But you know what I mean. Within certain genres, there are templates that you could use. And if you had — and many of the publishers do — a huge corpus of copyright work that they own, that they could train a model with, could they not generate these books, that do satisfy readers? And as you know, quality is in the eye of the beholder of the reader. So what we think is quality might not be what other people do, for example. Andrew: So, the limit is, right now, when you have GPT-3, or you have a model generate your text for you, there's a thing called the token size. And basically, a token is how it takes words and converts them into a numerical value. And so, it's really, it's all math. Same with the images, everything else. So, GPT-3 has this, it can take in about, let's say, 3500 words, or generate 3500 words that relate to each other. If you did chapter one, and had it generate 3500 words, and then did chapter two, it'll have no idea what was in chapter one, because that's too many words. You could do a little summary or a little ways, a little hacky things you can try to do to get it there. GPT-3, and other models…and GPT-3 has, like, double what everybody else has. The standard's, like, maybe 2000 tokens, right? None of these models have ever read a book in its entirety. None of them have ever read a book and read at the top, and then read at the end, and they're able to tell you that. They can tell you though, you'll say, ‘Oh no, this AI told me about this about a book.' Like, it read somebody's review of that book. There are models for summarization, and I built some of these, that will take it and condense it down. You'll still see that they struggle with, like, an example is, like, it might read ‘Harry Potter.' And then at the beginning of ‘Harry Potter,' you know, Harry's told his parents died in a car accident, which we know, spoiler alert, it's not true. Voldemort killed them. But you don't find that out till the very end. A model that might just read things in parts would tell you, ‘Oh, yeah. His parents were killed in a car accident.' Like, ‘No, no. That got reversed later on.' So, right now, for the shorter-term future, an AI can't write a whole book, because it doesn't understand the beginning, middle, and end of a long-form novel. That will change eventually. But I think we, as writers, can start thinking about, you know, what does the novel mean? Like, I write series. Like, I, that spin, I found that I like to do it, and the market's really good for that. But writing a series is challenging, because I have to remember the names of everybody and everything else like that. And I would love to be able to use AI to help me keep track of all that stuff. And I would love to be able to write on a much bigger canvas, too. And I think that's the thing to think about, is, like, one, it can shorten the time you write, you could increase your output, it could let you spend more time making cool choices, and less time having to do things that you don't wanna do, revisions, etc. And then, I think overall, can make us all better writers. Joanna: Yes, and I totally agree. Thinking of it as a tool, rather than another writer, is the much better way. But I just wanted to circle back on prompt engineering, because when I started to play this, so, I'm not a programmer. I did get access to the beta for GPT-3, but I now use Sudowrite, which is, like, a front end on GPT-3. And many writers listening won't be programmers. But what I discovered very quickly was that you have to drive it in a certain way. And I believe you actually use the term prompt engineering. How do we drive GPT-3 in the best way, in order to get the best results? Andrew: So, a thing that I think is interesting, and it even alludes, like, I'll see research papers come out talking about prompt design. And I think that even… Not to be too critical, but sometimes they really miss the point of what these models really are. There's a base level, they're a prediction machine, but they're emulators. And to emulate something, they have to know what they need to do. If you ask one of these models, like, how many fish live in a wallet? Which is an absurd question, it might give you an answer, because it's trying to find some sort of rationale to this question, and it'll answer something. It's like if I wrote that on a piece of paper and slipped it under your door, and it said, ‘How many fish live in a wallet?' You might be like, ‘I don't know, one? Okay, whatever.' But if you tell the model, ‘Hey, if this question makes sense, answer it. If it's illogical, say illogical.' Literally say that at the top, literally tell it that, and then go, ‘Question. How many fish live in a wallet? And answer,' it's more likely to say, ‘Wait, this is illogical. This doesn't make any sense.' And then if you say, ‘If I have $5 in my wallet, how much do I have in my wallet?' And it's, ‘Oh, you have $5.' And so, telling it what you need. And it's an example of why you need to direct it. If you want it to do a style… If you say ‘write a news article,' and I, ‘Oh, write an article about blank.' Well, if you were a writer who was a contract writer, you would know the publication you were writing for, right? You would know the topic, you'd know the audience, you'd know all these things. And so, sometimes people go, like, ‘Oh, I asked GPT-3 to write an article, and it wasn't any good.' I'm like, ‘I guarantee you, if you just threw that out to a bunch of random people with no other information, it wouldn't be very good either.' But when you give it more background, to say, if you say, ‘Oh, give me a starting paragraph about this topic for “The Atlantic” magazine,' then it's going to know, ‘Oh, I know the style,' it knows the narrative, and then it's going to follow through on that in a better way. So that's the thing to think about. You have to give it enough information to do what you want. It doesn't read minds. I did some examples where I used one of our newer models to create games, just by using text descriptions. I actually got it to make Wordle without any code, by giving it, like, five instructions. But I had to explain the rules of the game. And I had some people look at this, like, ‘Oh, well, you had to write all the stuff to get that game.' I'm like, ‘Well, yeah. I knew what I wanted to get.' If I just said ‘create a game,' it could have give me tic tac toe. I had to be specific about what I want, and that's the same thing with the models. You need to direct it with…give it the same sort of input you would, you know, if somebody were eager to help, maybe, kind of, a really smart middle-schooler. Joanna: Yes, I mean, you've built an app thing, haven't you? Where you can chat with a particular type of character, as such. Are you still working on that? Andrew: Before I went to work for OpenAI, I built a lot of demo applications, and was kind of helping them figure out, like, how do you release stuff? I built a thing where you could email historical figures. And you would just basically, like, you know, send an email to their name, I forgot, if you send an email to their name, whatever and ask a question, and you can just…anybody, Ben Franklin, whatever, and it was fun. It was this cool demo. You'd email them, and they'd email you back. I don't have that up and running anymore, because now our guidelines are we want to be more protective. Because we could have written Pol Pot, you know, some awful people in history, which now, we'd probably be like, ‘We want to make sure that somebody is checking these responses first before we invite somebody to commit atrocities.' And part of the reason we do that, too, is people go, like, ‘Well, how dangerous are these models or whatever?' One, we don't know. I think that we err on the side of being a little over-cautious. Because maybe these models really aren't potentially that harmful or dangerous, but the later ones that are coming are going to be way more powerful, and that's when you've got to be careful. When you have, basically, the ability to type in a request to a super-intelligent person that maybe doesn't have the same sort of ethical boundaries we do, that could have scary implications. Like, ‘Oh, create a computer virus to mine Bitcoin on everybody I know's, you know, computer.' The systems are gonna be able to do that, if they're not… I mean, that's gonna be a thing, you know, if we're not careful. So, I'm like, so, I tell people, like, ‘Oh, why are you so restrictive?' It's like, ‘Well, we wanna get in that habit now. We'd rather be a little restrictive early than a little restrictive too late.' Joanna: Yes. And I do urge people to go and look at OpenAI, the website, and there's the mission there, and statements. And I really appreciate how careful it's been. However, I would say there's always going to be issues, technology is a double-edged sword, isn't it? Andrew: Yes. Joanna: But you mentioned there, the responsibility in the output. The models are trained on data — including out of copyright books. But these models are trained on data. And this is one of the things I think about a lot, which is, most of the data, apparently, it's trained on are out-of-copyright books. So, I believe they're not trained on works in copyright, because of the issues of licensing. But, of course, most of the books out of copyright, are written by dead old white men, in English, probably mostly of a Christian persuasion. And so I feel like, To address diversity and issues of bias, we need to train models on works in copyright, by far more diverse writers, in the last 75 years of publishing. So, how do you think we could figure that out, and fix that? Andrew: Well, yes, I mean, one of the solutions we do right now is we have a series of models called our Instruct models, where the original GPT-3 DaVinci was trained on a large amount of text, and then it just does what it does. And that is the amazing part about it, too. We never trained it to be a chatbot. It just figured it out. It figured out all these things, which is awesome, and terrifying. And so, the Instruct models are ones where we said, ‘Hey, we know people wanna perform certain tasks a lot, and they want reliability,' so we train those models to be very reliable in what they do. When you train that, you can also say, ‘Hey, let's amplify certain things in the dataset. Let's minimize other things.' And a simple solution, people say, ‘Well just take out all the bad stuff.' Well, the problem is, if you've ever met a child, and you'd stand next to that child on a street, and they look at people, and they make observations, children would get cancelled very quickly, because they don't know any better. They don't understand what's an appropriate question or what's not, you know. And that's where, if you take all that stuff out of there, you might have a model that's extremely naïve about the world. And then it's going to innocently ask you something like, ‘Why are you typing so slow? Are you dumb?' You know, and be like, ‘Well you're not supposed to say that.' You want to build models that have a lot of knowledge about the world, but also have good judgment. And part of the things you can do is if you want to make things that are…like, what we did with DALL-E is when we first tested, you said, ‘Hey, create a bunch of images of scientists.' If they were all men, that's not good, purely just on the basis of being as not a good artistic tool, because people are gonna wanna be able to have a wider variety. So you can make things more steerable. And you can say, ‘Hey, have it, one, try to make sure the model is more diverse in what it represents, but also gives you more control.' You could say, ‘I want an Indonesian woman scientist working in a lab, with two other women, as they observe something,' you make it controllable, so the person has the opportunity to get the output they want. Joanna: But I guess that is sort of artificial, trying to fix a bias. Whereas if we actually read in, say, the works of all writers in different languages across the last 80 years, then that might provide more variety in the training data. And also, now, I believe we can create synthetic data, so we can do different, you know, and I'm thinking text, not images, obviously, for training the text models. And then I also kind of see this as a way that potentially writers could have data licensing, potentially, like, would you like to put your book in this corpus of data that we're training the next model on, for example? Do you think that's just entirely ridiculous? Andrew: No, not at all. No. I would love for us to find ways in which we can do that. And Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI. Sam is an incredibly thoughtful guy, and he's talked about the point, at some date, of, like, if we start training models, is to have ways for people to contribute to it, and also benefit from it, etc. Because there's going to be a point when you're just going to need a lot more data. And finding that way of making sure that people feel, one, that everybody benefits from it, but two, like, yeah, trying to figure out just how we can have it just represent a lot more points of view, in a way that just is beneficial. Joanna: Yes. And I guess the other thing is from a selfish writer viewpoint, like yourself, I've been writing novels for over a decade. And I would just love to train a model with my backlist. And of course, none of us, individually, can have a backlist big enough to train any model, right? But I almost see it as, say, let's say, a group of thriller writers could get together and create their own training dataset for a model, and that would give us a far more fine-tuned output. Do you think that's possible? Andrew: Well, actually, right now, we could take all of your books, and we could break it into, let's say, paragraph-by-paragraph sections, and we could put it into…we could train… We can fine tune. So, we offer a service where you can fine-tune a model, and give it data. You could do that now. It's not going to be able to write a whole book, but if you start writing a passage and mention a character, it would probably complete things based upon what it knows. And so, for probably doing a paragraph-by-paragraph level, probably possible right now. Joanna: Oh, okay. So, are you thinking about doing that for your books? Andrew: I've thought about it. I haven't done it. Early on, when I was a writer, they were like, ‘Oh, let's train some data. Let's try some stuff.' And I did a little bit of it. But, I mean, I'm like the car mechanic whose car's always broken down. I'm always pursuing some other shiny new object and stuff. And so, I've played with it to a limited extent, to see, like, ‘Oh, how could do completion stuff,' but that's…and I've done a lot of, like, helping other people, like, train stuff, like people who work in commercial properties and stuff, that wanna use it as a writing tools, like, ‘This is how you prepare the data. This is how you do it.' But I should probably do it as an experiment, to see. I do try to be mindful because I'm a writer, active writer, and I work in AI, of just trying to do things in a way that people feel is responsible. Joanna: Yeah, well, I mean, I think this is fascinating. And of course, you do, you span different publishing routes. So, you are still indie as well as traditional, right? You still self-publish? Andrew: I haven't self-published anything in a while. Like, I do two books a year right now, Thomas & Mercer. And so, that kind of keeps me busy, because I'm full-time at OpenAI, and then that, so… Joanna: Well, I would call you a polymath, as in you seem to do a hell of a lot of things. You know, an inventor, and magic, and OpenAI and writing. And so, how do you manage your time between? Is it a full-time job at OpenAI, and also writing and everything? Andrew: Yeah, I'm full-time at OpenAI. I came on board originally as a contractor, and was helping them out with the GPT-3, and like I said before, writing documentation, creating examples. And then I went in with the, I had the title ‘Creative Applications,' because I'd just find creative ways you could use it. And it was sort of like, you have these incredibly brilliant people who get to build things, and they're constantly having to build them. And I'm like, ‘Can I play with them then?' And so, I get to just sort of take advantage of everybody else's hard work, and just play with it, and show people cool stuff. So, I worked on that for…worked with the API team doing that, and helping kind of just get the word out about it. And then, last year, I went, and I joined up…we have a comms team, we have an incredible team that helps, like, with communications and public relations, etc. And I asked, ‘Hey, could I work with you guys to see what this is all about too, because I really wanna get involved in helping communicate that.' So I came on board there, and they gave me the title ‘Science Communicator.' So, now I do a lot of stuff, like I'll talk to…if we wanna do a piece with, let's say, some journalists on it, on the models, and they wanna get sort of a backgrounder, I do that. I help explain the stuff, as a writer, like, how do we communicate this? How do we try to shape the messaging so people understand what we're doing? Joanna: Well, this is part of your communication, there are lots of people listening, and very interested. And, I mean, well, that's another question. So, I did apply for the beta, and I do have access to that API, but as I said, I'm not a programmer. So, we're recording this June 2022. If people listening want to use GPT-3, how would they go about doing that? Andrew: Well, what you can do, if you go to OpenAI, and you sign up for it, what you'll get access to is, there's a lot of technical stuff, documentation for if you wanted to code, but there's a playground, and there's a playground there. And you'll get a certain number of credits for free. And I don't remember how it is. But you can go in there and type things in, and just see things, what happens. You can put a little bit of your text, see what it does, you can go look at the examples. And so, the playground environment's easy. You don't have to code to do it. You'll see knobs like ‘temperature.' And temperature, think of that as randomness. How random do you want the response to be? Zero, not random at all. Set it higher. I've got some videos on YouTube where I explain some stuff. I need to do some better quality ones, but I've done a lot of sessions where just explaining that, but anybody could just go there and start playing around with it. And then if they want something more specific, there are different companies that have different writing tools that are based on top of it. [Note from Joanna: I use and recommend Sudowrite, which is built on top of GPT-3.] But at the basic level, you'll see the GPT-3 model, and also our newer model. We have a model called Text DaVinci, which is, if you're doing, like, technical, or, like, nonfiction, that's really good at giving you concise responses. Joanna: Definitely worth playing with. I picked up on this with GPT-2, and then GPT-3 came along. And I now kind of talk about it as ‘GPT-X,' because surely there's going to be some more numbers. And obviously, you can't talk about timings or anything. But it has been two years, really, since GPT-3, and obviously, DALL-E, the second one has come out. Can we expect, do you think, anytime soon, or in the next year or two, another iteration? Andrew: You know, we never talk about things before they're ready. And it just comes down to that. In the world of AI and research, too, is that it is, DALL-E, when that got released, I think we brought people in… And we have iterations of that. That got released maybe a month after, I think, we probably the model had finished training. You know, we published a paper talking about some of the concepts early on. So, these are things, like, we just don't know. We often just have no idea. Like, we might, ‘Oh, we wanna get this…try to do something here.' But in that time, though, one of the things that happened, which is just a couple months ago, is we released a couple new methods… We updated GPT-3. And actually, like, we went from the 2000 tokens to the 4000 tokens, which is kind of phenomenal. And we also added things like edit, where you can go in there and insert stuff in between. So, you can have a passage here and a passage below it, and you can say ‘add something in between there,' and it will work backwards and forwards from there. Which, to me, is such a phenomenal capability, when you really think about what that can do. Because previously, you would just give it the text and say, ‘Okay, complete this.' Now, we could go fill in there. So you could give it a passage and say, ‘Okay, add more detail here, or do this.' So, those capabilities right there, I think we announced it, we talked about them. But it didn't get quite the attention that I think personally those things should get because of what they can do if you're a writer. You can actually put text in there, and then say, ‘Okay, rewrite this in the first person point of view,' and it will change it to the point of view. And so, these capabilities, by themselves, are, if we had said, ‘Oh, this is some new special model, or whatever,' people would be like, ‘Oh, my,' and they are new models, but they'd be like, ‘Oh, that's really cool. It can do this now.' It's like, ‘Well, it can do it right now,' so… Joanna: Actually, that's a good point. Because Sudowrite did introduce a new thing, and you could type in a line and then you'd say, ‘Make it more horror,' and it would rewrite it in a more horror way, or a whatever, a sci-fi way. Andrew: Yeah, that was based upon the edit functionality we added. Joanna: There you go. Well, maybe it's just because it didn't have, like, a new number, a new release, but I guess, as you say, there's iterative changes, and then there's a big release, a big change. Andrew: Yeah, and, you know, part of it is that we are a research company first. And so, that means to how we approach things is that we don't wanna beat a drum in the way you would if it were, like, a new iPhone or something, generally speaking. Because OpenAI, we try to be cautious about how we do stuff. And we will do these incremental things and say, ‘Hey, look, what we've done. This is the capability now.' The Instruct models that I mentioned before, that was a pretty big deal, because that helped you basically guide a model better, made it more reliable and not giving you unwanted outputs. And so, a lot of important things are gonna be these incremental developments. Joanna: Right. We're almost out of time, but I just had one more question. On your blog, you wrote, ‘I think AI is going to upend everything in entertainment, and not just my little corner of publishing.' So, since you come from TV as well, and magic, and your shows, and everything, how will it do that? How will it upend everything? Andrew: So, I'll give you an example. I don't know if you watched the show, like, ‘Mandalorian,' but, like, at the end of it, they did use CG, in, like, the first season, at the end of it, they CG'ed Mark Hamill's younger face onto an actor, and it was not really… and everybody that works on the show works really hard, and everybody in VFX, not to be dismissive, but it wasn't really the best effect. It wasn't really the strongest way they could have done that. Because AI deepfake technology had been way more advanced. But it was a thing where the entertainment industry can be slow to catch on to things. And I'd made a joke to my wife, like, ‘Hey, you know, in two days, a YouTuber is going to upload a better version of this using an AI technology.' And I kid you not. Two days later, a YouTuber by the name of Shamook uploaded a better version of that. And ILM, to their credit, hired him. He now works for them and helps them do, you know, that sort of stuff. But AI, there's a lot of incredible stuff out there right now that people don't even realize. I have friends in VFX, who I'm like, ‘Why are you doing it this way?' Like, ‘Well, that's what the system does.' I'm like, ‘There is a free code library that does this easily.' And there's a lot of these things where, like, removing backgrounds from images, right, you have services, you can go pay for it. It's actually a free code you can download and run on your computer, if you just have a little bit of a technical capability, but people don't know that, and people are paying for these things. And so, I think, when it comes to entertainment, I think there's a lot of things in the pipeline where, when I wrote my first novel with a publisher, I had the benefit of a wonderful editor, Hannah Wood, who was at HarperCollins at the time, and that, I learned so much from having somebody really smart go through and edit stuff. When you think about when everybody gets that ability to collaborate, whether you're a screenwriter that gets an AI, to not write it for you, but tell you, like, ‘Oh, I think there should be more punch here. This should be there,' I think the stuff is going to get better. And I think that probably the pipeline is gonna shrink. The number of people that are gonna be needed to make something, that's going to get fewer. But then the opportunities for people to create more stuff will increase. Joanna: So, thinking about that, then, just to leave people with a glimmer of hope in this AI future, what kind of attitude do we need to have? Andrew: Be curious, and understand that every time there's been a new tool, there was the fear. The word processor, people were afraid, well, great, everybody's gonna write. What happened? Not really. The big, disruptive sort of things that happened, like, the biggest disruptions to publishing were eBooks. And then things like, you know, I'm a big fan of the Kindle Unlimited and that marketplace there, because I think that's, like, phenomenal. Like, like just the ability for an indie to go put there and compete with everybody else on sort of the same level. I think that these things are, if I said I only want to do things the way I did them 10 years ago, I wouldn't be where I was now. And I went through being a person who worked in entertainment and cruise ships and stuff, and being able to do big illusion shows. Then when watching the cruise lines and resorts go through recessions, and not being able to pay to bring big acts like that, to creating books and videos for magicians, then watching online piracy completely erase that. Just transitioning from point to point, getting into publishing when print publishing was on its decline, and then working with a wonderful publisher, they understand digital. So, we're creatives because we like change, usually the change that we bring about, but if we embrace the change that's around us and see opportunity, I think we're gonna be in an incredible place. AI needs creative people. Like, if we just released DALL-E… And we brought in a bunch of artists to work with this, and just experiment with it. If we didn't bring them into it, it wasn't gonna be as exciting or neat as it is. GPT-3, they brought me in. I got to be, as a writer and go work with this. So, everybody listening, it needs you. Like, AI is expanding, where it's going to need creative people who look at this stuff and figure out how to use it to create new things. And it's not gonna be as exciting without you. Joanna: Thank you so much. So, where can people find you and your books online? Andrew: I'm published by Thomas & Mercer, which is an Amazon company, so if you go to Amazon type, in ‘Andrew Mayne,' easiest sort of way to see what I have there. If you go to andrewmayne.com, I usually have a list of my most recent books there. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Andrew. That was great. Andrew: Thank you so much. Note from Joanna: If you'd like to know more about using AI for writing, images, marketing, voice, translation, and more, check out my course, The AI-Assisted Author. The post Writing With Artificial Intelligence With Andrew Mayne first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you sell books direct to your readers for all formats without dealing with the pain of shipping print books? How can you automate sales with email? How can you earn 80-90% of the sales price and have it go into your bank account in days or even hours, instead of months? Katie Cross talks about the benefits of selling direct and practical tips if you want to use Shopify. In the intro, Spotify acquires AI voice company, Sonantic [Spotify]; and Return on Investment for Authors [The Indy Author]. 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   Katie Cross is the author of over 30 books across fantasy, chick lit, and contemporary romance. 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? More money, more quickly. Connection with readers and access to customer dataHow to sell ebooks, audiobooks and print books directShopify apps, including integration with Lulu for print-on-demand, and Bookfunnel for delivery and customer serviceInternational shippingEmail automation and customer dataWhat about the tax?The long game, control over your business, and a mindset shift You can find Katie Cross at KatieCrossBooks.com and on Twitter @kcrosswriting Thanks also to MorganaBest.com for her help with my Shopify store. Transcript of Interview with Katie Cross Joanna: Katie Cross is the author of over 30 books across fantasy, chick lit, and contemporary romance. Today we're talking about selling books on Shopify. Welcome, Katie. Katie: Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited about this conversation. Joanna: Oh, me too. I will have explained in the introduction that this is something I'm focusing on, but let's start with a high-level question. Why did you decide to start focusing on selling direct as a priority rather than an afterthought? Katie: I think at first the desire for a little more control over my career is what drove me into the arms of direct sales. I got really frustrated with looking at Amazon and trying to do everything I could. I had over 20 books, and I was only making a couple thousand a month. I wanted to approach my business as more of an entrepreneur than just a creative. I didn't know how to do that until I could actually control more of the variables behind the scenes, like the distribution, my own website layout, the product pages, that kind of stuff. I wanted to get away from an Amazon product page that not only featured my product, but like a bajillion others and I wanted people to land on a really clean product page that I could test and make better. That desire for control, and the ability to help my readers have a better experience is what initially led me to throwing out my own website and doing the direct sales approach. Joanna: And I guess, for me, because I've been selling direct since like 2008, but I've only done e-books, audio courses, all the digital stuff, but you also do print. So, I wondered also on this, because I've always felt like, ‘Oh, my goodness, print's just way too complicated, and I don't want to do that.' How did you get over that? Katie: Oh, you know what, print is so easy. I think when I get questions, it's almost always about paperbacks. And it's so easy, it's not even funny. Shopify has third-party apps that you can download and link to, and then use on your Shopify store. And Lulu xPress has a Print-on-Demand app. So, I just upload my books to Lulu xPress the same sort of way I would to KDP or IngramSpark. hen anyone that orders the book, then that order goes to Lulu xPress, and it just prints and ships from Lulu xPress the same way. I knew I wanted to do all versions of all my books on my website. So, I was immediately like, ‘Well, I need to get paperback going.' And just did some research and talked to other people that were doing this with me, and heard about Lulu and I just set it up, and it was just minutes to getting my first paperback on the website. It's way simpler than it looks. I think there's a little bit of my mindset work in that. I think we are overwhelmed by things, especially new things, and we start telling ourselves these ideas like, ‘Oh, that's going to be too hard.' Or, ‘I have to do it this way.' Direct sales has taught me that there's probably a third-party app for everything that I want to do, and I can just search for it, and plug it in, and it makes it super simple. Joanna: Yeah. Well, let's just stay on print for a minute, because this is…I think when I was listening to you on ‘Six-Figure Author Podcast,' that's when the penny dropped for me and I felt so stupid. I was like, ‘Seriously, how did I not know this?' Katie: Oh, same. I've had so many of those moments. Joanna: So, then, of course, I went to Lulu and they don't do the 5×8 size, which is what I use for most of my books. But I found someone else called Book Vault. So, bookvault.app. And they do the 5×8. So,I'm using a combination of both. I thought I'd mention that in case maybe other people listening do the 5×8. Did you have to change anything for Lulu? Katie: I just contacted my graphic designer and said, ‘Hey, when we do paperback, can you just do a 5×8 and a 6×9 version across the board?' And she's like, ‘Yeah, no problem.' For the novels that I published to both IngramSpark, and my website, and KDP for paperback, I have those both in 5×8 and 6×9. I just keep it all with Lulu xPress to keep it simple, but I love the 5×8. I think that's a better size. So, I would consider going to another printer that does that too. I think that's a great idea. Joanna: I'm just testing it at the moment. So as a customer, if I buy one that's with Lulu and one that's with Book Vault does that affect the shipping? I'm doing all this testing, and I'm trying to figure out, but, of course, I have so many backlist books, so just the thought of changing it all. So, I wanted to mention that for people listening. Okay. Well, let's just talk about the quality of the print too. If people were used to KDP Print, or IngramSpark, anything on Lulu that you wanted to mention? Katie: No. I mail books to myself all the time, whether I have a reader that writes in and they want it signed, then I just have them mail it to my P.O. box and I sign it and send it back. Or if I'm just ordering books for myself, I can't tell any difference. In fact, I think the cover quality might be a little bit better on Lulu xPress than I've seen on KDP because there have been a lot of times where I order books on KDP and I'm like, ‘This is supposed to be red. It looks pink.' And I'll contact them and they'll be like, ‘Well, that's within specifications. We're not going to do anything about it.' So, I have like 100 pink books that I can't do anything with. But I haven't done big orders over 50 or 100 books from Lulu. I haven't done big orders like that in a while. I've done those big orders on Amazon before. And those bigger orders seem to have just more issues with the covers, like they just never looked as vibrant. I haven't had any of those issues with Lulu on smaller orders, and the interior looks great. I've never had a single problem. There was one time a customer wrote in and said, ‘I ordered one of your books and I got one that's written in Indian, and it's definitely not yours.' It was this totally wrong book. I just contacted Lulu for my reader, and within 12 hours they had sent the appropriate book, and I think also gave a refund. So, they ended up getting a free book out of it. Joanna: And just to say, that happens with any of the print-on-demand services. Sometimes there'll be some random page or it'll be upside down. This does happen very occasionally on any service. So, that's definitely not just Lulu. I also wanted to ask about the shipping and the international side because, many people, if they order books from Amazon, will be on Prime, so they get free shipping. I wondered what your thoughts were on the shipping side and how that works, especially internationally. Katie: On Shopify, when you upload a paperback, there's going to be an area where you specify if it's a physical product and if you don't click that, then it's obviously just assumed it's digital. But once you click that, there's an area for specifications like country of origin and weight, and then your weight is what calculates your shipping. I believe there's a place in the settings on Shopify that you can say not to charge shipping, but then you have to pay for it. But I think that might have changed. It was a while ago that I could futz around with the shipping a bit more. Now I just have it set in the settings of Shopify on a pretty standard, like cheapest rate shipping, and then they get charged based on weight. For example, my mom is a craft person and she is able to do this. She has a sewing machine that does really cool embroidery. So, I opened up a product on Shopify for my readers to be able to buy shirts that have their names written on them with dragons that my mom then embroidered. So, we just put the weight on the shipping. And I have a bunch of international readers, and some people from, I believe, Wales and Australia were ordering these shirts. When I looked at the shipping, it was like $50 shipping just because it's so expensive to ship from the U.S. to anywhere right now. Shopify had automatically calculated those charges and charged it to the people that were ordering. I wasn't out 50 bucks when we went to ship this shirt to Australia. And it does the same thing for books. Books are like a pound, at most, probably closer to half a pound or eight ounces. I can't remember. I've weighed them before. You can just put that into Shopify, it calculates the shipping, and it pulls from the customer and not from you. Joanna:I'd also say that this Book Vault company is a brand for a UK printing that does the UK printing for Lulu. I found that out when I went to them. And I've ordered various books, and the ones from Lulu also come from this same plant. So, hopefully, that's the team for Australia. And the same with IngramSpark, they have different printing plants, different places. Hopefully, the shipping will also depend on that version. Katie: Yes. Especially if they have printing factories, or plants, or whatever they are within that country, then they seem to ship faster. Don't quote me on this for sure, but I'm pretty sure Lulu, like you said, has a place in the UK because I ordered a book for reader in the UK and it shipped, like I got the notification that it shipped the next day, and he got it two days later. So, I was like, ‘That has to be in the UK for that to happen.' I believe that there are places local to different countries that Lulu has printers. Joanna: Have customers said anything about the print costs because they can get it for free on Amazon Prime? Katie: I have spent a lot of time and a lot of energy training my readers not to buy me from Amazon. Almost no one even mentions Amazon to me. So, no one has complained about it. That doesn't mean that's not an issue. They may just not be saying it, right? So, they might not buy from me, but I still have paperback sales on Amazon because they want that free shipping. It's just never been something that's come up in conversation between me and my readers. Joanna: No, that's great. Okay. Let's just talk about the digital. If people are going to sell e-books and audiobooks on Shopify, how do they get delivered? Katie: BookFunnel. BookFunnel is amazing. It delivers e-books and audiobooks, and it has so many amazing integrations set up to kind of help make that easy. They have something that's called Direct Actions, which you can set up link to your Shopify account so that as soon as someone buys a book from your Shopify store, BookFunnel is pinged by that SKU, and then it will send an email that delivers the link. I have BookFunnel deliver links, and I have email set up through my email service provider, ActiveCampaign, to deliver links to get things downloaded. [Note from Joanna: You can integrate lots of email services with Shopify. I use ConvertKit and it works well.] And then BookFunnel also has this amazing customer support. So, whenever your reader has an issue, they can just email BookFunnel directly. Or sometimes readers will email me and I'll say, ‘You know what? I have a friend over at BookFunnel that will get you hooked up.' And I'll just loop BookFunnel in. If you guys are on BookFunnel, then Jamie is always the customer service rep. So, every time I email, I'm like, ‘Hey, Jamie, here's my reader. They need a little help.' And then Jamie responds to everyone. It's actually several people, but they found out that readers really like having the same name, like it feels familiar. If you ever use BookFunnel and you use BookFunnel support, then just address them as Jamie, and then they help deal with the problems. So, you don't have to walk your reader through how to sideload to their Kindle, or this isn't working. They do all of that for you. I think they take a really heavy burden of customer support away. And on the audiobooks, something that's really cool is they have it set up so that when you've bought it, if you bought it from an email address, that's the same on your BookFunnel account as Shopify, the audiobooks will just automatically load in your BookFunnel app. So, you can buy it, wait like five minutes, pull open BookFunnel, and the audiobook should be there. Joanna: I've just been testing that, and the integration is great. You mentioned SKU. If people don't know, that's S-K-U. And you can just set it up, whatever you want, right? So, I just put Your Author Business Plan e-book. That was my SKU. You don't have to keep a list of numbers or anything. Katie: All of my SKUs are just letters of my books. I'm writing War of the Gods right now. It's WOTG. And that's just the SKU for War of the Gods. So, anytime someone purchases the War of the Gods te-book, that SKU goes to my email service provider and to BookFunnel. And then to keep it really easy, I do AB for audiobook. So, for my War of the Gods audiobook, the SKU is WOTGAB. And then it's just really easy to remember. And it keeps it as system so that if you ever have people start to work for you, it's really easy for them to know what to expect for SKUs, and you can look at something and know right away what's going on with SKUs that are built around a system that way. Joanna: Absolutely. Coming back to another high level, it is complicated in a way. I feel like Shopify is actually… As you talked about at the beginning about being an entrepreneur and a mindset shift, I've been using Payhip and it's super easy, but it doesn't have all this functionality. What needs to be the attitude going into Shopify? Katie: I think just an openness to change. And figuring things out. When it comes to direct sales, and you're starting your Shopify store, and you're trying to get all the details worked out, there's going to be moments where you're overwhelmed and you want to give it up, or things seem really hard or whatever. I would just sort of step back, give yourself a break, and come at it again fresh because direct sales is so new. I'm on the pioneering edge with a bunch of other authors that are trying this out as a business model to make it work, but we're still learning. There's still a lot to do. And if you're starting the direct sales game or have been doing it for a long time, like you, then I just think you need a lot more flexibility and patience because you have to figure it out. There's not always a set path. If you're going into Amazon, there's oftentimes just a set path that you follow and you just keep doing that. But when you enter the direct sales game, you might actually have to be making your own path. And that's really hard. So, I would keep that in mind as you start your Shopify store, and know that just because other people are doing it, you can do it differently and it might be more successful. Joanna: How many books do you think you need to bother doing it? Because there are, obviously, set up costs and time, and in order to make good money. How many books do you think people should have before considering Shopify? Katie: Let's bring a little math here for those that are listening. So, assuming you have 1 book, it's $29 a month for Shopify. Shopify doesn't pull from your sales, it's just $29 a month to have an active Shopify store with the most basic theme. And then it's a couple thousand, so you don't need a higher theme. So, your bare minimum to start into direct sales is Shopify…well, not Shopify. Like you said, you use Payhip. I've also used other places, I can't remember off the top of my head. But if you're going to start with Shopify, which is the most versatile, then I would say you need $29 a month for Shopify and then BookFunnel. And if you even only had 1 book, you could do the $20 a month BookFunnel. So that's $49 a month. And if you even did $50 a month worth of sales on your website, then you would have made it back and anything over that would be a profit. I think this is a great question because it kind of begs the idea of, ‘How many do I need before I can do this?' But I don't like to put a number to this because, frankly, you might kick it out of the park on your first book, and you might be able to pull in $300 on your direct sales store that people come over to you instead of Amazon. You might be launching your first book and you have a bunch of people that want to support you, then you can have them go buy on your direct sales store where you get 94% royalties. I think if you're wanting to make an income that you feed your kids, or your dogs, or your spouse, or yourself off of, then the more books, the better. But to get started, I would say, don't wait. If you have one book, get your store started and get things set up, and you can just start playing with it and figuring out what works and what doesn't work. There's also a setting on Shopify that instead of paying the $29 a month, you can take the store off of live, but you don't have to cancel the store. They call it the Builder Plan for $9 a month. Let's say your listeners are going to launch their first book in September, and they want to try direct sales but they don't want to pay for Shopify and BookFunnel up until September, they could do a builder plan and just be building their store for $9 a month, and then go full live with it in September to kind of save that money. So, you have a lot of options. I think those who have not ever done direct sales and are just starting to publish or only have a few books are in a unique position to train their readers from the beginning to buy from them. From the beginning, you're teaching people to land on your website and buy from them. I think that's a really powerful spot to be. Joanna: Yes. I've done the digital direct sales for many years, and it is definitely a mindset shift because, of course, there's no bestseller list. No one sees these sales, but, of course, it's in your bank account. You mentioned 94% royalties there. And, of course, that might vary by a few percent, depending on which payment method and some various fees. You don't need to give any numbers, of course, but sort of financially better off. How have you felt that your business has benefited from this? Katie: One of the things that frustrated me before I started the direct sales game and that helped pull me into direct sales is cash in hand. So, when you're running a business and you're looking at Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, you're trying to figure out profit and loss, where money worked, where it didn't. When you're starting to really get into those numbers and look at that stuff, it's really hard when you have a 60-day delay. You'll do stuff on Amazon and you're like, ‘Yeah, it was a great month. I had a launch.' But you're not going to know really for a while what those numbers actually look like and it's two months later. I was always really frustrated with that. I had something happen in my life, and I needed some more cash in hand to pay for a doctor's bill or something else, but I couldn't get it because my money was tied up for 60 days. So, one really great benefit of direct sales is that within 48 hours, I have cash in hand. I can run a big sale, and then the Shopify automatically deposits the money into your bank account every 24 to 48 hours. You can actually see it building on the side, and then I'll go to my account and it'll show up there. If your lifestyle is such that you need a little more control over cash in hand, or whatever it is you're doing, that's a really nice benefit, is to be able to actually look at, ‘We did this. This was the result. I have cash in hand. The numbers are here.' I think that was a big benefit in my business from going to direct sales, being able to more directly track cash flow, and profit and loss, that kind of stuff. The second one is just the control over what people are seeing when they land on my book page. I always got really frustrated on either BookBub, or Amazon, or Kobo, or even Pinterest, when you're trying to get someone's attention on your book, there's so many other things pulling that attention. It is really powerful for your company when someone lands on a landing page that only features you, and it's clean, and it's crisp, and through testing, you can figure out what draws people in so that they know they're in the right spot. That changes your return on investment for any advertising exponentially. Anyone that's listening that runs traffic ads from Facebook to Amazon pages, that also has the links that show what people buy after clicking on your link, like affiliate. It's so frustrating, right? I would send traffic to Amazon and people were buying adult diapers and all this other stuff. They weren't even buying my book. They were buying all these other things, and that was extremely frustrating to me. I'm not paying Facebook all this money for these people to go buy a different author's books. I want them to land online and know whether it's a fit or not. So, that was another really great change. And then numbers-wise, it looks like I do 70% of revenue through direct sales and then 30% from all the other retailers. And depending on my model around direct sales, I can say that's super consistent. I started direct sales at the end of 2019 into 2020, and I'm still doing it today and I will forever. That's a pretty consistent number, 70% direct, 30% from the others. That may go up or down a little bit. Amazon is my second-biggest seller, and Draft2Digital and all of the retailers that's on is my third. And then the others kind of dwindle from there into numbers that aren't really even comprehensible. So, that' what it looks like for me. I enjoy that because those numbers lend to a great deal more stability. If Amazon woke up and one of their bots decided that I violated their terms of service that I didn't even know existed, they could pull me down and 70% of my sales would still be unaffected. So, that security is really powerful. Joanna: You mentioned Facebook ads there. I feel like a lot of people worry because, of course, if their book is on Amazon, or Apple, or Kobo, whatever, then there's some built-in marketing. Or you can pay for ads, and there's established marketing routes for these stores. How are you marketing and getting readers to your Shopify store? Katie: That's a golden question. And that's actually what I'm trying to figure out. In 2020, 2021, I ran a lot paid advertising, whether it was Pinterest, Facebook. I didn't really do BookBub. I tried Amazon for like five days and realized that that wasn't a good fit for me. This year, decided to change my business model and I stopped all paid advertising. And the gaping question was, so, how do I drive traffic? If I'm not doing paid advertising, how do I drive traffic? A lot of it comes down to your basics. Email list is king. I have a really healthy size email list after all of that advertising, but I think the most important thing is I focus on my readers, and then through my readers, I come up with different ways to reach other readers. It's a really actually collaborative approach now where I talk to my readers and I say, ‘Hey, where did you find me? Where do you go when you're not here? And how can we get more people to find these books?' Because we know that they need them. And right now that's driving it. The strategies, the actual marketing strategies to drive people to my pages are kind of up in the air. Right now, for Q1 and Q2, I've been throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Whether it's author newsletters, or BookFunnel promos, or just talking to readers, like whatever it is, we're trying a lot of different things to say, ‘Can this replace paid marketing and still keep my lights on?' And a lot of it is just genuine organic relationships with readers. Joanna: Let's talk about the email marketing there because this is what excites me. I have this vision of being able to go away. I'm walking this pilgrimage in September, so I'm going to be away for three weeks. And I have not been able to, since I started my business, I have literally not been able to have more than a couple of days off, which sounds terrible, but there's always emails. There's always something. I have this vision of if I can set up a Shopify store and I have automated email sequences that sell people into other products and things within the whole ecosystem, and obviously, I need a help desk person. So, I wondered about your email automation. Is it possible to automate this whole business? And can you tag people who buy stuff, and how are you managing all that? Katie: Oh, absolutely. Email is king. That still hasn't died. I think so much of my sales are driven from my email list and my established readers, and then the gathering of new ones. I have fantastic email automations that over time I've tested, and tweaked, and proved to the audience that I want. What I have is I use ActiveCampaign. I love ActiveCampaign. I've done a lot of others. I've done MailChimp, I've done Drip. I've done ActiveCampaign twice and I've been with them for a while now, second time. And then I've looked into Clavio. I think they're all really great for different reasons, but for my intents, I like ActiveCampaign the best. I've spoken extensively with Clavio, and with my business goals and model, even the Clavio rep was like, ‘Yeah, you're probably best with ActiveCampaign.' They have landing pages that you can use within ActiveCampaign. So, what I've done is I've created two, and it's the first book of like 30 or 40 that I want readers to land on. I have one for e-book and one for audio, and they just have a link. And what I do is I have my readers share that link, or I share that link, or I have social media posts that I schedule that share that link that will then gather people. So, if someone subscribes to get my e-book for free, they enter automation that's like six emails in several weeks where I'm just nurturing a relationship with them. And we're talking about dragons and fantasy books, and where I'm checking in to see if they like the book. There's like various things that I've tried in there and tested to get the best open rates and the best click rates and people actually reading. And so, that takes up three to four weeks. Honestly, Jo, you could schedule some social media posts, have some podcasts or other authors sharing the newsletters right before you start your pilgrimage, and you could come back and your email sequence could have nurtured that relationship with those people, and sent money to your Shopify store without you having to even touch it. Automation is the name of this game. The more you can automate with sincerity and genuineness, the more you can scale your business higher to see your profits and your ROI increase. Joanna: Well, this is the thing. And I use ConvertKit. I did actually use ActiveCampaign a while back and I moved over to ConvertKit, which does have tagging as well, but it feels like this is possible because you control the store. I feel like the whole automation just doesn't network with all the other stores because there are so many variables, and so many other things that they can do, and so many different links. Whereas if you are just doing everything through your store, it just simplifies the automation, right? Katie: Absolutely. You could have an automation when a new subscriber gets your book, and then they buy the second book. And once that SKU goes to your email, like your email service provider maybe you have it set up so that they get a tag, and they're sent into another automation that then sells the third book in five days. And if they finish in that time and they want the third book, then they buy from there. All the while, you're on your pilgrimage. Because you're able to tag and move people around, based on the customer journey that you've come to know really well through direct sales because you can see the data coming in, you're able to really customize and say, ‘I've noticed that about day three is when people buy the second book.' So, at day two, you're going to send the link to buy it so that you're ahead of them, and then they can get tagged a certain way and that tag can push them onto a different journey within your email service provider to optimize your sales. You don't have that feedback from Amazon, or Kobo, or anywhere else. Joanna: Yes. And we should just reiterate this. You do not have your customer data on any other store, right? You only get your email and unless people sign up for your email list, but you don't know what they've bought. This is literally the only way to have the customer data. Katie: Exactly. And that's kind of a sensitive subject, that if you're going into direct sales, just be aware this isn't data that you're using. You're not going to go sell these names. It's just when we say data, it means you have a direct relationship with them through their email, you know what they're buying, and by knowing what they're buying, you kind of know what they like and you're able to send them more of what they like. That's really what that is. And that's the control over the business that I wanted to have so I could actually make decisions based on what people were doing on my website. Joanna: Yes. And, of course, with email list management and all this, we're abiding by GDPR, and anti-spam, and CAN-SPAM, and all the different things that we have to do. We're being responsible, of course. [Check out a free webinar on GDPR here.] Katie: Yes, definitely. Joanna: Let's just talk a bit about technicality. You have katiecrossbooks.com. And so, I wanted to ask about that. Is that a Shopify theme? Katie: Yes. You can actually buy a domain through Shopify. I have katiecrossbooks.com, but I log into Shopify to get to that website. On Shopify, there's an area under settings that says Domain, they are your host, and it's $19 a year. That's it. You just pay it, it will automatically charge you again whenever you buy it a year later for 19 bucks, and you can choose your domain based on what's available. So, that's all Shopify. That's not WordPress. That's not Wix. That's not anyone else. That's just Shopify. And it's the basic theme that was there when I started. I liked the layout. I liked it. So, all of that is run by Shopify. Joanna: And you also have katiecrossromance.com. Katie: I actually just closed that two days ago. Joanna: Oh, okay. Right. Katie: My readers were like, ‘Why do you have two websites?' I had two websites because I used to run Facebook ads to both of them. So, I needed separate pixels. But since I don't run Facebook ads anymore, I was like, ‘That's a great question.' I found that a lot of my really hardcore readers wanted to read anything that I had. So, they were like, ‘Why don't you just put out Katie Cross Books?' So, I kind of asked around, I talked to a lot of people and they were like, ‘Yeah, I think it's really dumb you have two.' So, I was like, ‘Oh, wait.' Two days ago, I finished pulling everything from Katie Cross Romance over, and I just closed it. So, if you go to katiecrossromance.com, it's going to pop up with like a domain error, I think. Joanna: Brilliant. Because this is my question. Obviously, I've got Joanna Penn with my nonfiction, and J. F. Penn with my fiction. And most people on this channel, on The Creative Penn know I do fiction. So, some people go through. But J. F. Penn is very focused on the fiction side. Now, you don't do any non-fiction. I wondered what are your thoughts on keeping those separate if you're trying to manage your brand separately because you need a whole new Shopify account, don't you? You can't do multiple things on one account. Katie: That's a great question. I think it comes down to your business goals and plans. For you, where you have a non-fiction that is really far apart from your fiction, in your spot, I would probably just want a separate domain. The audience is separate. At least mine are similar in that they're all fiction. I just have all of my fiction on katiecrossbooks.com. It is two separate stores. I don't think the management was more difficult because what I did on one, I just mimicked on the other. You're still managing the same SKUs, it's the same sort of theme and buildout. It'll be a little more time if you're building two separate Shopify stores, but it's not going to be that much more than building on the same store because no matter what, you're going to have to put the products on both stores. And that sort of time would be the same, whether it's between two. So it just depends on how separate you want to keep your audiences. If you pulled your nonfiction into your fiction store, would that confuse people or would it just drive more traffic? I think that's a great question. Joanna: I don't know yet what I'm going to do. As we talk at the beginning of June 2022, I'm still building it out. So, people can have a look if they're listening in a few months' time. Katie: For sure. It's a good question. Joanna: Some other slightly technical thing. When you talked earlier, you mentioned the app store within Shopify is the thing that really, as you say, enables you to do so many things. Obviously, there are lots of different ones, but anything that you're particularly like, ‘Yes, that. Definitely get that.' Are there a few apps that you recommend people definitely get? Katie: I've tested a bunch of upsell apps, and upsell apps are just apps that you can integrate to your Shopify store that help you sell more books. So, whether that's when people go to purchase, a screen pops up and says, ‘You want to add this for 10% off,' or whatever else that is, I've loved Frequently Bought Together. Another one that other people that I know are doing direct sales have liked is Zipify. I didn't like Zipify as well. It was a little bit harder for me to figure out. And I really liked Frequently Bought Together. With Frequently Bought Together, you can create bundles because there's a lot of power in bundles. And you can customize every product. ‘Miss Mabel's School for Girls' is one of my flagship novels, then Frequently Bought Together puts ‘Alkarra Awakening' and ‘The High Priest's Daughter,' which are books two and three on that product page, and says you can buy all three for this price. And all they do is hit Buy, and then all three of them go to their cart instead of just one. It's really easy to use, really easy to customize. It's really straightforward. I've really liked Frequently Bought Together. Another one is Judge.me. It allows for product reviews and it has stars and ratings. I've really liked Judge.me. It's really easy for my readers to use. I actually had a VA set that one up, but I've never had to like tweak anything after we got it initially set up. That one's been really good. It will also allow you to import reviews from other stores, but that requires some knowledge of web crawling to be able to extract the data from like Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, or wherever you're doing it. My former VA, her husband is this really big tech guy. So, he was really nice. He's like, ‘Well, I'll do the web crawling for you.' And I was like, ‘Whoa, that's awesome. Thanks.' So, he crawled Amazon and was able to pull our reviews over because Judge.me allows that. I couldn't tell you how to do it. That was great because it kind of was able to…allowed me to boost some of those reviews when we initially set it up. So, Judge.me, Frequently Bought Together, those are my favorites. And then there should be apps that allow you to import and integrate your email service provider or the social media sites. There's an app for ActiveCampaign that allows it to integrate seamlessly. There's one for Facebook and Pinterest. The Facebook and Pinterest integrations are really nice because you can choose if you want to publish a new product to Facebook or Pinterest. I have a launch coming up in July that has a secret novella that launches with it that people will only get the link to at the end of my novel. So, it's really secret. The title is kind of a spoiler, and it answers a bunch of questions. I don't want anyone to know exists, so I can turn it off so that that product doesn't go to Facebook or Pinterest. Or if that's on, as soon as I publish a new product, then Shopify sends that link to Facebook and Pinterest and puts it in my store, and creates a post over it. Yesterday I had a reader email me and say, ‘Is this real? Because I just saw this come across my news feed for a second time, and I'm worried that someone's hacked your store.' And it was a new pre-order that I'd put up. She really wanted it to be real, but she didn't know. And I was like, ‘Oh, no, that's real. I just put that up.' And she's like, ‘Oh, good. I bought it.' I've had it where I'll put a new product out, and then I'll navigate back to my main store, and it sold like 5 copies within 10 minutes and I hadn't even told anyone. And then it's just because it automatically goes to Facebook, and people see it and just start buying. So, that's really cool functionality. Joanna: That is really cool because I do have a store on my Facebook page, but it's really crap and I haven't updated it for years. I think I'm just going to go through and delete everything. Katie: Yes. It just integrates with Shopify. So, I never have to do anything on Facebook with my store, unless it flags it as not publishable or something. Joanna: Yeah. That is just fantastic. Coming back to the pre-order, how do you do a pre-order on Shopify? Katie: It's so easy. I just put two audiobooks and two e-books up two days ago, and all I have it set for is as soon as they buy it, then my email service provider puts a very specific tag on and then they get an email that says, ‘Thank you so much for pre-ordering Litta. And you'll get it on its launch date, which is this day.' Then I just send them into my email list. So then the night before I launch a book, like tonight… I'm launching a book tomorrow, actually. So, tonight I schedule all these emails and anyone with that pre-order tag, I then send an email, like the fulfillment email. I send an email that says, ‘You pre-ordered Litta. Here's the link, click here to grab it.' And it just takes them right to the BookFunnel download page. I send three of those fulfillment emails because sometimes the email doesn't go through, or whatever else. So, I send three, each one six hours after the other one, just to make sure they get that email. And that's all that there is to it. Honestly, I love pre-orders. I have a book I put up for pre-order in April. And I literally said, ‘I don't know when this will launch, but I know people are really excited about it. I'll let you know more when it happens, but you can go ahead and pre-order it.' I get sales from that all the time. I don't have a date. I told them, I was like, ‘I don't know. It'll probably be 2023.' But people are so excited. They're buying it anyway. So, I get that cash in hand in advance, and it keeps me top of mind. And then that reader might forget me, but then come January or whenever I fulfill that, they get an email with a new book, they start reading, remember me again, and then they're back at it to activity. So, pre-orders are a huge strategy that direct sales enables in a really big way. Joanna: And what about pre-ordering print? Because I did see that there was a schedule button on one of the…maybe it was Lulu, maybe it was Book Vault. Do you do any print pre-orders? Katie: That must be on Book Vault because I don't have pre-orders for print that I'm aware of through Lulu. They may have that functionality. If they do, it's not super obvious. So, I just release the paperback the night before, and then usually my readers just know if they want it in paperback, they can just order it on launch day. So, I get a slew of paperback orders on launch day usually. Joanna: That's fantastic. Now, tax is something that everyone worries about. I have always used services like Payhip, for example, that deals with all the tax for me. So, for example, the EU Digital VAT, the VAT is…there's a zero threshold, and it's different for every European country that the customer is in. So, it's a complete nightmare. Obviously, it's different per jurisdiction, but any thoughts on that? How does the tax side work? Katie: That was one of the things I worried about the most, but ended up just really not being that big of a deal. There's a button on your product where you can tell Shopify to charge tax on this product so that it will charge tax and take it from it. And then if you have to report sales tax in the…I'm in the U.S., then you can just pay that out later. I work with my accountant on this and she helps me to keep track of it. So, every quarter, I just send her a certain report that I pull from Shopify for taxes, and then I send it to her and then she says, ‘We've kind of hit the threshold in this state. We should pay, or we should do this.' Like you said, it really depends on where you are. It wasn't as big a deal as I expected it to be. From what I understand and what my accountant and I do, I pay sales tax in places where I have a physical business presence. I live in Montana in the U.S. and they actually don't charge sales tax here. So, I don't have to charge sales tax. But when I lived in Colorado, they did charge sales tax. So, I'd signed up with the Colorado. I had a sales tax account, and then every quarter we would just pull how many sales that we'd had in Colorado. I had it set so that Shopify pulled sales tax from people that bought out of Colorado, and then I would just pay whatever sales tax I owed at the end of the quarter, and that was all fine. For a while, I had a business present in Colorado, Idaho, and Montana. So, I was doing the same in Idaho and Colorado, but now I just have a business presence in Montana, so I don't. So, it's all a little nebulous. And I would say just talk to whoever, like a professional to kind of nail down what you should be doing. It's something that I visit at the end of every quarter, and that my accountant I do together and we pay sales tax where it's applicable. I don't think I've ever had to like really mess with the VAT tax, or EU, or any of that kind of stuff that I'm aware of. Hopefully, I wasn't supposed to be this whole time. Now when I have my accountant helping me out, and then I have a tax accountant that I work with to do taxes, it's always washed out and been just fine. And my tax lady has always been like, ‘Yup. You paid the right amount. This looks good here.' Joanna: I think the principle there is, look, yes, you have to deal with this stuff, but it's not that complicated. And you only have to do it every quarter, whatever. Plus, you can find an accountant to help you. I have an accountant, and I've asked them and they're like, ‘Yes, we can help with that.' So, it's a kind of the fear is greater than the practicality of it. And it's like, put on your big girl pants and just deal with it. Katie: I know. I think tax is where people fall into my traps faster. So, if you're feeling afraid of what you're about to do or overwhelmed, I feel like a lot of authors that come to me are like, ‘I just don't want to deal with the taxes, so I'm not doing this.' And I just want to gently point out, but you're missing out on so much else. If you could just do some research or talk to an accountant, you would figure out that this isn't that big a deal. So, if anyone that's listening is sort of caught in a mindset spiral of that, ‘I just don't want to worry about that. It's too scary,' then I would just challenge you to look a little deeper and see if there's something else you're running away from here that you can figure out, and then move forward into something really awesome. Joanna: Yes. And that's exactly the point. And that's where, when I learned about Lulu and Book Vault…in fact, Book Vault was at London Book Fair. They've only just launched. I walked through London Book Fair, and I saw them, and went to talk to them, and I was like, ‘Okay, this is possible.' And now it's worth me dealing with the tax side. If I can do print as well, it is worth it for me. And that's the question at the end, isn't it? Is it worth it for you? What kind of business do you want, and are you willing to put in some work to kind of change your business model completely, really? Katie: Yes. And only you can answer that, right? But I think you owe it to yourself to figure out what you're afraid of and then tackle that first, and then go into the direct sales game. Because it'll be a lot easier. Joanna: For sure. Right. Well, we're almost out of time. Any other lessons learned, or tips, or thoughts before we finish? Katie: The final thing that I like to tell people when they ask me about direct sales is I just tell them, be ready for the long game. This certainly can be a means to fast cash and a lot of money, but more than likely, it's going to involve time, and patience, and forging your own path, because you have to train readers to buy from you. You have to show them that you're trustworthy. You have to prove that you're here to write more books and that you're going to write books, and you're not going to make them wait for years on end to get the next book. So, I think if you're here for the long game and you keep that mindset, then you're going to stick with it longer because you know that you're training people to buy from you. With more books comes more royalties, and more power, and more presence, and all of that stuff. And that is the right mindset to approach this, so that you're ready for the big opportunities and the big ideas when they come so that you can pivot and do it really quickly. Joanna: Fantastic. Where can we find you and your books online? Katie: katiecrossbooks.com is the fastest way to find me. And I'm sure it might be a good idea for a lot of you to just go there and look at the way I have it structured, look at the way I have it ordered, and see if you like it, right? See if that appeals to you, if that sort of a store is something that you'd want to run, and just check it out there. And we have merchandise, we have t-shirts, we have books, and audiobooks, and paperback, and there's lots there for you. Most of my novels are also on all of the other retailers too. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Katie. That was great. Katie: Thanks for having me. This was so fun.The post Selling Books Direct on Shopify with Katie Cross first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you manage a successful Kickstarter campaign without burning out? How can you expand into multiple streams of income? Bryan Cohen talks about crowdfunding, changes in his business model, and more. In the intro, 10th year of double-digit audiobook growth [Publishing Perspectives]; Spotify's plans for audiobook expansion [Spotify]; Free webinars for audiobook month [FindawayVoices]; Val Kilmer's AI voice in Top Gun Maverick [Fortune]; Transitions, Endings, and New Beginnings [Ask ALLi]; The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. 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.  Bryan Cohen is the author of non-fiction and superhero fiction, and the co-host of the ‘Sell More Books Show.' He's also the founder of Best Page Forward, which writes book descriptions for authors, and he teaches authors how to use Amazon ads more effectively. 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 Advantages of Kickstarter — for fans and your bank accountChallenges and lessons learned from Bryan's first Kickstarter — and what he'll do differently next timeIdeas for backer rewards and extrasTiming issues for fulfillment and managing backer expectationsWhy indies are moving toward selling direct, before publishing to storesHow Bryan went from books into multiple streams of incomeScaling a business and tips for hiring freelancersHow podcasting plays a part in his business You can find links to everything Bryan does at BryanCohen.com and his next Kickstarter campaign at KickYourEmail.com and on Twitter @bryancohenbooks Transcript of Interview with Bryan Cohen Joanna: Bryan Cohen is the author of non-fiction and superhero fiction, and the co-host of the ‘Sell More Books Show.' He's also the founder of Best Page Forward, which writes book descriptions for authors, and he teaches authors how to use Amazon ads more effectively. Welcome back to the show, Bryan. Bryan: Thank you for having me, Jo. I was looking. It's been five years, and I'm happy to be back. Joanna: Time flies, doesn't it? Bryan: It does. Joanna: Today we're going to focus on your multiple streams of income, because I definitely think you are an author-entrepreneur, and I want to talk about a lot of that. Let's start with the Kickstarter. I hit you up with an email and was like, ‘I need to know about your Kickstarter.' So, we're going to talk about that first. You did this Kickstarter. It was on self-publishing with Amazon ads, which funded at over $20,000, amazing, and over 600 backers. Tell us about the project, and why did you go with Kickstarter? Bryan: I've always really liked Kickstarter as a backer. I've funded multiple projects, multiple books, entertainment projects, and I've just really liked this idea that you can throw in perks, because I think that, as authors, we really get focused on this $2.99, $3.99 book, and yes, we can sell enough copies of that to live on, but we need to sell a lot of copies. This opportunity to reward your readers by giving them these extras is a really fun opportunity, first and foremost, but it also allows you, hey, to maybe pocket a little extra cash than you would have when you are just launching a low-priced book. From a money-in-money-out perspective, it's really nice to, within the end of the funding of a Kickstarter, a week or two, you actually have some money, rather than waiting 60 days and change for Amazon and the other retailers to pay you. Joanna: Right. So, that's one, the money side, and, two, you can give something extra. You can come up with extras. How did the project go? What were your lessons learned? Bryan: There is a lot that goes into a Kickstarter, and I know you've spoken with Monica Leonelle (episode 614), I think, and Russell Nohelty about the Kickstarters, and there's just a lot of planning. There's a lot of marketing that goes into this. And even though I knew it would be a lot, even though I knew there would be hours and hours of time that I needed to pour into this, I did not really budget for it. And I think you and I have that in common sometimes, of just, we leap before we look, and then, oh, my goodness. One of the biggest issues was just a lot of time had to go into making it the right kind of campaign at the beginning, and then at the end, and we're still kind of in the end, is actually fulfilling all of those things that you promised to the backers. There's a lot of work on the front end, a lot of work on the back end, and then, of course, in the middle, you have to get people to actually back the project. Joanna: Let's talk about two specific things then. First of all, these extras that you use in the campaign as the different reward levels. What are some of the things that you did in those extras? And why did that add time as well? Bryan: One of the things that you know about from your early days of publishing is you've got to print out some books on your own, through a fulfillment service of some kind, rather than Amazon. You don't have to do that, certainly. I wanted to make sure my backers received a book before anybody else in the world could. And so, you could certainly get it printed on KDP Print or Ingram. I ended up going with a smaller company, Mixam, that was recommended to me by Monica. And they've been really great. It's my first time ever printing out things from not from a fulfillment, not from a retailer, but from an actual printer. And so, there were time constraints to think about in there. I also offered an audiobook, and I know you. This is all just the, ‘I should have listened to Jo and thought about episodes of “The Creative Penn,” and said, “Oh, maybe I shouldn't record my own audiobook. Oh, maybe I should plan more ahead.”‘ [Note from Joanna: I narrate my own audiobooks! Lots more tips in Audio for Authors] Audiobook, the printing, there are all these personal rewards I kind of threw in there, like phone call with Bryan, or a video from Bryan. And I thought that just by saying, ‘I'm going to give these to these people' that it would give me the extra motivation to pull it off, but I'm already busy and already tired, so, it was a struggle. It has been a struggle to get everything out to the people, with all of those bonuses. I think every Kickstarter creator should consider these things when setting up the campaign initially. Joanna: That's the thing, that special print run, it's both a really special thing, because it's a special print run, but equally, like you said, we haven't really done it before. I was looking to work with a partner on that, but, in the end, I just felt like the amount of work was too much for me. I also didn't want to do this spike marketing thing, which I'm uncomfortable with. So I wanted to ask you about that too. There is this period, there's the pre-marketing. You have to tell people you're going to do a Kickstarter, and get them to sign up for this pre-launch page. And then you have the campaign. What were the things that you did during that spike marketing phase? Bryan: I didn't even think that that was what it was called, but it absolutely is a spike marketing phase. So, I definitely let my email list know about it. I created a Facebook group related to the campaign, and all of the channels that I already do have on social media, on Facebook, on TikTok, I certainly let them all know about it. I think a lot of it does come back to email, since that's the percentage…you're going to get the best bang for your buck letting your email list know about it. I let both my email list know about it, and I made sure to run some targeted Facebook ads, where I was targeting my own email list. And a lot of that was the build-up to the campaign. But I always made sure to go back to what has always worked best for me. I am a performer by nature, former improv comedian, and so I made sure to do a couple of webinars. And I did a big webinar to kick everything off. I didn't push the actual launch campaign button until the moment I launched the campaign on the webinar, so that it could get people excited while they were talking to me, while they were listening to me, and get them to actually take the action. So, I made sure there was something that fit with my strengths, in order to get folks in the door. Joanna: I know you can really bring the energy when you're up for it. Bryan: Exactly. Joanna: Like you said, that's your performance side of things. You can bring it. I see your videos sometimes. I'm like, ‘Well, Bryan is so good at that stuff.' Bryan: Thank you. Joanna: And again, that's something I'm definitely not strong on. And, of course, people can do it in different ways. We're not saying that people have to do it your way or Monica's way. You can do it however you like, but obviously, that project is over, but you're going to do another one. So, presumably, it wasn't that bad. Tell us about the next one. What will you do differently next time, or how will you improve your experience of it? Bryan: I definitely did learn a lot. And despite all of the craziness, yes, I did decide to do another one, launching on June 2nd. And so it's already launched by this point, the magic of podcasting. It is a new book for authors, called Self-Publishing and Email Marketing. It is essentially the book and the training on the email side of things, on how to build up that email list, grow subscribers, get more reviewers from that. And so, the campaign, I definitely didn't want to do certain things from the first time. I almost treated the first campaign as, ‘Hey, I have these disparate things. I have the ad training for Amazon ads. I have sales page improvements for Best Page Forward and Best Page Forward Plus. Let's just throw all of that in there at different levels.' One of the things I learned from Monica and Russell was that if I was going to be promoting this thing based around a certain topic, it made sense for not just one funding level, not just a few funding levels, but all funding levels, to actually fit with that theme. So one thing I'm doing differently this time is every level is related to email. I'm not throwing in things related to the Amazon ads. I'm not throwing in things related to the other stuff I do. It's totally focused on email, and the theme is pervasive throughout. So, that's absolutely one of the major things that I'm doing. Joanna: One of the fears, and I have heard from several people that their projects, they didn't even make money. Maybe they broke even. Sometimes they were even out of pocket. And so this is another question. Did you find anything cost much more than you expected? Because those print books, right? You can't do the print run until you've finalized the project or sold out of that reward level. And that's costing that we don't really understand, and then there's shipping, which can change. There's a whole load of costs that are not under your control. Obviously, your time is your time, but you just keep working more. Were there any costs that ended up being higher than you expected? Bryan: I do think that the monetary costs, when it comes to print, when it comes to hardcover, I did expect that going in. I knew that it wasn't going to be like getting a proof from KDP Print, where it might work out to a few dollars each. I knew it was going to be higher than that. I think my actual printing costs ended up being for, I think we printed 250 books for paperback, and it was about $8.33 for each one, which I thought wasn't terrible. And the shipping, we actually did not include shipping. People had to enter an additional amount if they wanted to do the paperback or hardcovers. So, if you plan ahead, if you have that people can pay for shipping up front, because you can do it so people don't pay for shipping until after the project, but then people feel blindsided with this extra cost. I don't think you want to do that to people. You want to be very upfront with it. But I really think, beyond any monetary thing, the time and energy costs involved with the campaign, like recording my first audiobook, which I honestly just finished yesterday, and I'm very happy with it, but it was a lot of energy, and then, certain things that I had a lot of trouble getting fit into my schedule, those were the hardest parts. If you are as busy as me or Jo, you definitely need to think about how can you conserve your energy? How can you give a lot of value in your funding levels, but also make it easier on you? And that is something I would definitely consider whenever creating a campaign. Joanna: You have to say when is this expected, don't you? I wonder if the answer is to just move your… You think, ‘Oh, I can do this by next month. If it's launching in June, July, I'll deliver in August.' And that's kind of how we're used to doing things as indie authors, because we're like, ‘Oh, well, I'll just upload the book and it's available tomorrow,' or, ‘The e-book's available now.' I almost wonder whether with these Kickstarters it's better to add on a month or even two months, to make sure that you've got enough time to deliver things according to people's expectations. I've funded projects that haven't arrived for a year. Bryan: Right. And a lot of backers expect that at this point, Kickstarter-specific folks. They know they're not necessarily going to get things right away. It's readers who you're introducing to the platform, who might think differently. I think the advice that Russell Nohelty gave me, that I'm following this time, is to have the book finished before you launch the campaign. And this time around, I'm 11 out of 12 chapters in, as we're recording this, but by the time we launch the campaign, the book will be finished, and I'm going to put it in the hands of folks right at the conclusion. Even though we ran our campaign in November 2021, and I said, ‘We will deliver the book by February,' I still did not meet that. I ended up having to email everyone and say, ‘Sorry. It's going to be an extra month.' And it was only an extra month, for the e-book. I had always said the paperback wasn't going to be until a couple months later. I knew because of paper shortages that not everything was going to be in my control. But nobody minded. In fact, and my team really helped me out with this, they said, ‘Bryan, if you say that you were tired and tried your best and didn't quite get the deadline, these wonderful authors who follow you will empathize.' And they did. Joanna: Oh, yeah. I backed it. And as far as I'm concerned, that happens generally anyway, so I think that's really good that you just gave yourself permission to do that, and will do it differently next time. What I love about this model, and I may do one at some point, but I love the fact that you've now done this, but it's not the end. You now have another asset. What happens with the book next? Are you just going to publish everywhere else now? Bryan: You're absolutely right. I think this is what people are missing, is that, okay, let's say I put a book out on Kickstarter, and you make a modest amount, like, $300. Well, that's probably more than you would have gotten in 60 days if you'd launched it just onto Amazon or onto Amazon and the other retailers, but now you get to sell it to other people afterwards. So, you bank that $300, and you get to sell it elsewhere. And not just on the other retailers. I am very, very interested in the direct sales model. I've been really studying some folks and what they've been doing with platforms like Shopify, and I am starting to wonder, and this is, you know, kind of me spilling the beans on what I've been thinking about lately. You do a Kickstarter, you launch the book and all these extras, and you have to create these extras, but once they're made, they're made, and then you certainly launch the book on Amazon, Apple, Kobo, etc. But now you have all these extras, and you can use Kickstarter's platform. Well, it's a Kickstarter… I can't think of the right words. Joanna: Accessory. Bryan: Accessory. Yes. A Kickstarter accessory Backer Kit, where you can actually sell those extras after the Kickstarter is over, but then you could also sell those extras, and the book directly, on your website or on your Shopify store. So, it's almost like Kickstarter ends up being this almost loan. It's almost like you're getting investor seed money at the beginning, to sell a project that you can sell significantly more copies of later on. Joanna: I'm totally with you. I've been selling digitally direct, since 2008, courses and e-books and audio, but I'm also looking at Shopify for the print, because they have these plugins, with Lulu and other printers, where you can do print direct. I'm thinking of moving there. And similarly to you, I'm starting to think about doing standalone audio… I don't want to call them lectures, but just standalone audio things on different topics that I would put up and sell as… It would be no book. It would just be a sort of audio extra, me talking about particular topics, and, not a course, but just back to the days of when we used to do this audio-only product. And so, yeah, I feel the same way. And actually, I'm planning on releasing mine without the Kickstarter, but selling direct only, for maybe two weeks or even a month before I put it anywhere else as well, in order to get upfront sales. I think we're all starting to change our mindset, aren't we? To sort of, ‘Let's take the chunk of sales ourselves before we put it out onto the stores.' Bryan: Right. I think what people also don't realize is, let's say you're planning to sell the book exclusively on Kindle Unlimited. If you do what you're doing, Jo, and you sell it direct before anywhere else, you might be able to bank some wide-ish sales by having it sell directly on any platform, Amazon-agnostic, and then you eventually do launch it on Kindle Direct. You can have both. You can have everything. You can have your cake and eat it too. It's a really great opportunity for people. Joanna: I really think that's where we're going. And it's funny, because when I first came into this space, and you were only a few years behind me, but when I started with the blogging in 2008, 2007, this is what people were doing. This was before KDP, so that's what we did. We all sold PDFs and everything like that direct from our websites. And then, of course, Amazon and Kobo and Apple, and they all launched their bookstores, and then people started buying. But that brought down the price so much, whereas before those stores, we actually sold for decent amounts. It is interesting that that's coming round again these days. As you said, we could have our cake and eat it too, but there is a little bit of the cake that I think might be impacted. You teach Amazon ads, and you understand how the algorithms work. One of the things we do is we talk about the also-boughts, and we talk about how it's important to target your books to people who buy other books like yours. And in that way, it helps the algorithm know who your readers are and all of that. If we are creaming off a percentage of our existing readers, our target audience, how will that impact Amazon ads, for example, if we've taken away this bulk of initial sales? Bryan: That is definitely something that needs to be considered. I think that when you do skim off the top a little bit with these other sales methods, it is something that you will not have, that flood of initial buyers from your email list first, your own followers, and then eventually, the people who just find out about it in launch week, you won't necessarily have that, which could affect your also-boughts, which could affect things initially. But, at the same time, we cannot just assume Amazon is going to solve all of our problems. I like Amazon. I'm glad that we've had all these wonderful opportunities through the KDP platform, and through Amazon ads, but we have to be open to the future, as you're always talking about, the future of this industry. I think that it is not necessarily going to be just selling the bulk of our books on one platform. In order to make sure you still get the most out of your Amazon ads, you just need to get all your ducks in a row, sales page, the cover, the title, the book description, subtitle, everything, needs to be very clear. Yes, this is for this particular sub-genre. If you read this sub-genre, you'll like it, and you want to do everything you can with your seven KDP keywords, the categories you choose, and you can still ask your readers to go and leave a review on the book on Amazon when it launches, even if they happen to read it not on Amazon. So, you still have some things in your control to steer the algorithm in your direction. Joanna: At the end of the day, to me, it's like you mentioned briefly. When we sell direct, when I sell direct, even right now, the money's in my bank account within minutes. I much prefer money in my bank account within minutes than anything I do with the algorithm later. So, I think the selling direct is, in these times of inflation and we all need the cash flow. Who knows how much that money will be worth in 60 to 90 days? Bryan: Exactly. Joanna: Let's talk about some of your other streams of income. We met almost a decade ago. It must have been around then, and you've pivoted a number of times along the way, and you had a daughter as well, which kept you busy, for sure. What I think's important, so often, there's a discussion in the author community about books being the main thing and the only thing. But, of course, many of us choose other things. So, like, this podcast, for me, is an income stream as well as book marketing. Tell us about some of the other aspects of your business, and why you decided to expand beyond books. Bryan: In the beginning, like you said, it was pretty much just books. I had my non-fiction books and some fiction books, and I really did think that maybe this could be enough, but the ups and downs of book sales, even back in 2012, 2013, it made me realize there had to be other options. So, originally, I was doing freelance. I was doing freelance on the side. I even scored a fun gig doing freelance, pretending to be ghost writing these CEO articles for ‘Forbes,' and ‘Fast Company' and whatnot, and that was a lot of fun. But that eventually pivoted into something where I had more control over it. So, that became the Best Page Forward book description business, as we talked about back in 2015 on this show. And that business turned into helping authors with other service areas. Service is definitely one thing you can provide. We were writing book descriptions. Now we're also doing the category and keyword research, the metadata, and book covers. We're doing all of that now with Best Page Forward Plus. That's the service side. There's also the course side. You can have a course. And long ago, I had the course ‘Selling for Authors,' which was great and covered a lot of different things, but ended up niching down to the Amazon ads, and now we have the Author Ad School, teaching ads. And so, we have the course side of things. If you know how to do something well, you can create a course around it. Number three is the coaching. I think that these are the three main areas I tend to think of as side income. Coaching allows you to, one-on-one or you to a group of people, to teach even deeper, and to help guide people through challenges they might not have been able to do on their own. We have this ongoing, every quarter, Mastermind that we do through the Author Ad School. Originally, it was all me. Eventually, I did hire three wonderful folks to take over the coaching side for me. And that was really hard, to give that up, because I really do love coaching, but it was time for money. That is one of the challenges with all of this stuff is can you make it so that you aren't just working for $10 an hour, $20 an hour, $30 an hour? Can you have some things where you are not spending all of your time to make them work? And a lot of that has to do with hiring and outsourcing and delegating, and that is a huge part of having multiple streams of income, so that you aren't watching each individual one like a hawk. Joanna: I know that you've struggled with this over the years, and I've struggled with it and have stepped back from it. You've struggled with it and stepped into it. Bryan: Yes. Joanna: So, basically, you have scaled your businesses. You have a team of copywriters at Best Page Forward as well, right? You don't personally write everyone's descriptions. Bryan: I used to. Joanna: I know you did. I guess this is my question, and I really do have this question because I have failed at it, which is, if we want to scale our income, as you say, past a certain point, you have to hire people. What were some of your biggest challenges with hiring, and finding the right people? How did you make it through those initial feelings of, ‘Oh, I can just do it better?' Bryan: Absolutely. At first, I hired friends, and I think there were positives and negatives to that. A couple of those friends are still with my company four or five years later, so, it certainly wasn't all bad. I didn't follow the advice of never hire your friends, because it actually did work out, and being kind to them and being understanding to them is always a good way of making that work. Then I did start to try to hire people who I was not familiar with. I accepted resumes, and did interviews, and asked questions, and I definitely got it, not wrong per se, but I didn't find the perfect fit at first with that process, because I had to get better at it. I had to get better at hiring. You're not automatically going to be able to hire someone who is an expert and who fits perfectly with you. You need to work on it. I actually think that one of my levels for the email marketing Kickstarter is going to be specifically about hiring someone to run your emails, because that is something that I think every author wants, and very few authors know how to do. A lot of that comes down to not just asking people questions and hoping you're a good fit. I've had people do personality tests, Myers-Briggs, and the Clifton StrengthsFinder. I've had people do sample tasks before I hire. I will have multiple people do a sample task, so that I can see their work in action. And before I did that, it was just hoping for the best. But once I started to really refine my hiring process, it became a lot easier. The last thing I want to put out here, and this one I don't hear talked about very often, but I have really loved this idea of looking at my fans, and my people who are advocates for me, and folks who just really love the courses and services I offer, and maybe have bought those courses and services in the past, asking them if they want to work with me. And that has been my best option. The people who are already on board with the message and the mission of the business, because they're a part of it from the customer side, they have loved being a part of the actual business, and I think that people who I've hired through that way… I've had an 80% to 90% retention rate on those folks for years, and I love working with them, and we have a great time, and then they learn, actually, even better by being on the inside. So, that, I think, is my best tip. Joanna: Yes. That's how I found Alexandra Amor, who's my virtual assistant, and has been for, goodness eight years or something at this point. Bryan: Nice. Joanna: I totally agree there. Are these people on your payroll, or is it freelance? Bryan: All freelance right now. Everyone is a part-time person, part-time contractor, and there's definitely labor laws that you need to follow, making sure that people are paid for meetings. You need to certainly make sure everything is done right with your accountant. I did not always have an accountant. I'm glad that I got one for this sort of thing. And you just need to make sure everything is above board, and that you're doing everything the right way. I don't think I worried about it as much when I had one person, but now that I have about 25 people, I do need to pay attention to making sure I'm doing everything correct on that side. Joanna: And then, of course, you're also the co-host of the ‘Sell More Books Show,' but you're the primary host, really, because you did it with Jim Kukral since 2014. Claire Taylor is your co-host now. Bryan: Yes. Joanna: So, you've got the podcast, and you're still weekly. You do a great job. Podcasting takes a lot of time, and it's obviously great for marketing. You mentioned there building a community, and it's great for community, and it can be for income as well. What part does the Sell More Books Show podcast play for you in your business? Bryan: We did have a Patreon. I think I might have followed the lead of you and Mark Dawson and some other folks wading into Patreon. And it was going well for us. We were paying for our show notes person, Roland. We were paying him through the Patreon, and everything was going well with it. But we didn't feel like everyone was getting as much value as I really want to be able to give. And I didn't feel like we were able to work it into me and Claire's schedule to help the patrons. I know that you do your Q&As, and you give these wonderful things to your patrons. I didn't feel great about it. So, that was the main direct way we were making money from ‘Sell More Books Show,' and we took it down. I'm pleased with that decision, because I feel really good about now, I don't have this thing where people have bought a thing from me and aren't getting value. The value thing is very, very important to me. Now, the ways that we get value out of the podcast are all indirect. New people finding out about us, people finding out about if Claire has a new offer for some of her craft writing stuff through her company, FFS Media. And if I have a new thing or a new webinar, I can talk about it on the show. And for our show, we don't really do ad reads very long. We just say, ‘Hey, we have a thing,' and then we move into the content. But I think that we don't always have to get the direct actual ads from the show. I think you certainly can, certainly if you have a large enough audience, but it's totally okay to just get the indirect benefits from something as well, to have something that it makes you present in the community. For me it would be easy to just be in my high tower, as CEO of Best Page Forward, and not pay attention to what's going on in the industry. ‘Sell More Books Show' forces me, every week, to know what's going on, so that I am able to be in touch with the struggles that beginner authors are facing, and that value, that intangible value of the knowledge, is huge for me. Joanna: It's also our interest, isn't it? Because I'm the same. I just like knowing what's going on, and I'm interested in the news and things, although I don't cover the news that you do, because I feel like we serve a similar niche, but I cover a different angle. I wanted to circle back to your fiction and your comedy, because I feel like the Bryan I first met a decade ago, I don't think you were married. You certainly didn't have a baby, who's now a child, and you've moved house, I think. You moved across the country. There's been a lot of change in your personal life, and I feel like you kind of had to accelerate your business because you had a lot of life going on as well. Bryan: Yes. Joanna: So, that fiction side of you, the comedy side of you, I almost feel like you've put that aside for a lot of the business stuff. How are you still serving that part of you, or is it put aside for now, and it's something you're going to come back to? Bryan: One of the ways I've tried to still use this, and I think it's been a few years, certainly, since I've really done any specific comedy, but the ways I'm trying to scratch that itch, I decided, early on in the process for that ‘Self-Publishing and Amazon Ads' book, and now that's kind of part of a series with these self-publishing books, I decided they weren't just going to be like one of my old books, where I just had a little bit of comedy mixed in with the education. I decided I was going to use half of the book to tell an almost allegorical story, in fiction style, a narrative style, with essentially me working with a student, helping them through the challenges. I have that in ‘Self-Publishing with Amazon Ads.' I have that in the new ‘Self-Publishing and Email Marketing' book, where I'm working with a student, and I get to have fun conversations with this student as the author, and I get a lot of comedy out of that. In the first book, the student thinks I'm full of crap. It's really fun to have that kind of banter in this, yes, non-fiction book. I get to scratch that comedy itch that way. And then the other way, it's silly, but TikTok @bryancohen. I'm doing TikToks. I'm recording them. Joanna: That's perfect for you, though. Bryan: I know. Joanna: That's perfect. Bryan: I'm doing the edutainment, of the education and the entertainment there on TikTok, doing about three a day while we're recording this one. And so, I do have my fun a little bit with that. Joanna: Oh, that's good. And it does really suit you as a platform, and with the comedy and the performance side. It totally does not suit me at all, so I just haven't got anywhere near it, but it was made for you. So, that's brilliant. I'm not going to have a look, because I don't even have TikTok, but I'm sure lots of other people will. Bryan: Fair enough. Joanna: Tell us where can people find you and everything you do, including the new Kickstarter? Bryan: The new Kickstarter, it will be at kickyouremail.com. So, if you go to kickyouremail.com prior to June 30th 2022, you will be able to back the campaign and get the self-publishing and email marketing book, with all of the really fun extra perks that go in there, including an email challenge, because I love challenges. And so, that is the Kickstarter. You can certainly listen to me and Claire every week for the ‘Sell More Books Show' podcast at sellmorebooksshow.com and wherever you listen to that sort of stuff. And I've still got my quarterly ad challenges for Amazon ads over at authorsadvertise.com. And you can check that out. The next one will be in July 2022. And so, lot of stuff going on, but thank you again, Jo. I hope it's not another five years, but if it is, that's okay. I'm very happy to be on your show. Joanna: Thanks so much, Bryan. That was great.The post Kickstarter And Multiple Streams Of Non-Fiction Income With Bryan Cohen first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you make your self-published books available to libraries in every format? How can you pitch librarians so they are interested in ordering your books? Eric Otis Simmons explains how he successfully pitches and sells to libraries throughout the USA. In the intro, Books2Read is useful for sharing wide links; Lindsay Buroker gives long term career advice [Twitter thread]; Pics from Rhodes, Instagram @jfpennauthor; Into The Briny Deep, short stories set in the sea with all kinds of monsters, includes my short story, The Dark Queen; Abba Voyage with the augmented reality Abba-tars; Thoughts on visiting the USA again post-pandemic [Books and Travel] Today's show is sponsored by IngramSpark, who I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 39,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries and more. It's your content—do more with it through IngramSpark.com. Eric Otis Simmons is the author of the memoir, Not Far From The Tree, and books for authors, including Getting Your Book Into Libraries. He's the CEO of ESE, Inc., which builds custom websites, and he's also a speaker on diversity, equity, and inclusion. 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 authors should consider having their books in librariesWhat services can you use to reach libraries with ebook, print, and audio?How do libraries find books to buy?How to pitch your book to librariesResources available to assist getting your book into libraries You can find Eric Simmons at www.eseinc1.com/library-marketing-services and on Twitter @eseinc1 Transcript of Interview with Eric Simmons Joanna Penn: Eric Otis Simmons is the author of the memoir, Not Far From The Tree, and books for authors, including Getting Your Book Into Libraries. He's the CEO of ESE, Inc., which builds custom websites, and he's also a speaker on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Welcome to the show, Eric. Eric Simmons: Joanna, thank you so much for having me today. Joanna Penn: I'm excited to talk to you about this. Before we get into libraries, tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Eric Simmons: It's an interesting story, Joanna. I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Montgomery, Alabama, which I view as two of the leading civil rights hotbeds here in America. So most of my schooling, I was a year or two away from schools being integrated. In addition to that, when I joined corporate America, where I spent 30 years in sales and sales management for some of the most admired companies in the world, such as IBM, AT&T, GE, and others, I generally was the first black male to work in the positions that I was in. At NCI, I also sold internationally where I closed in Brussels a $1 million sale, in Paris, a $500,000 sale, and in Hong Kong, a $25 million sale. So, when I would share snippets of information with co-workers, and family, and friends about my life, I would constantly get feedback that, ‘Hey, you've gotta write a book.' So after 12 years of procrastination, I finally sat down and wrote my memoir, Not Far From The Tree, and I self-published it. So it was the encouragement of others that led me to get into writing. Joanna Penn: When did you self-publish that? Eric Simmons: I released my memoir in May of 2017. So this is its fifth year anniversary. Joanna Penn: That's brilliant. Do you mind me asking what age bracket you are just so people get that? Eric Simmons: Oh, that's fine. I'm in my early 60s. Joanna Penn: I think just to get the timeframe because you mentioned there being involved in civil rights and obviously, still critically important area, but equally, like you said so many years in corporate America. I said to you before we started recording, you're so organized. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because you've been super organized about marketing to libraries and getting your book into libraries and helping authors with that. So, let's get into libraries. First of all, why should authors even consider thinking about getting their books into libraries? Why is it important? Eric Simmons: There are a number of factors, Joanna, that go beyond just the prestige of getting one's book into a library. For me as a self-publisher, getting my book into library serves as validation that I've written a quality piece of work. But in addition to that, because of my corporate background, I'm into numbers, I'm into data that can confirm things for me. When I look at the library market, there are over 2.6 million libraries worldwide, and they spend about $31 billion annually. In addition to that, of that $31 billion, about $1.4 billion is spent on books. So, that represents a significant market for all of us as self-publishing houses and self-publishers. Another area that's important I believe that our listeners should consider is libraries are excellent references for other libraries. What I mean by that, if you're able to get your book into one library and you let another library know about it, your chances go up, I believe dramatically, in terms of being able to get your book into follow on libraries. There's statistics that show that every happy reader of a book in a library tells five other people. That's another consideration. Then when you look at the different age brackets, anywhere from millennials to baby boomers, no matter what age brackets you look at, if you can get your book into a library, there's a good chance that that reader is going to buy that book. And in addition, if you have multiple books as an author in libraries, millennials are more than 70% likely to buy your follow-on books. So, there's just a number of reasons and data supports it, in my opinion, for us to all consider libraries as a very viable market for our self-published works. Joanna Penn: Absolutely. And then I want to add the accessibility angle as well. As we are discussing this in May 2022, there's inflation, the cost of living is increasing. And I think people will be needing libraries more than ever. It's not just print books, is it? It's eBooks, it's audiobooks that people can get from their libraries online, as well as in person. My mum was a single mum and we were on benefits for a while and I grew up in the library. That's where I got books from. So I almost feel like it's important that we pay it forward to people and have our books available to those readers who just can't get them any other way. What do you think about that? Eric Simmons: I totally agree with you. And even with the pandemic, it doesn't look like the library traffic has slowed down. During the height of the pandemic, libraries were still offering services and they began to use tools like Zoom to provide, they call them programming. I view those as just events that are offered by libraries. I totally agree with you wholeheartedly Joanna. Joanna Penn: Actually, that's a really good point because one of the issues that people have with libraries is, oh, they want me to go and do an event in person, but I have to travel and I won't get paid and it will be too expensive. But if you are doing something over Zoom, then actually more authors can probably get involved with those types of programming for different libraries, right? That's what a lot of children's authors are doing too in schools. So probably the same with libraries. Eric Simmons: Right. Actually, when libraries shut down across the globe during the height of the pandemic, one of my strategies was actually reaching out to libraries and say, ‘Hey, as a part of your programming to continue to provide services to your patrons, I'm willing to offer at no charge a Zoom video conference to share how I self-publish my book where I could talk about my memoir.' During the pandemic, I actually did a reading of my memoir. First time I'd ever done one ever. Not even in person had I done one. I did it via Zoom. It went over incredibly well. Then I talked about self-publishing with several other libraries. So I was staying busy with my library marketing during the height of the pandemic. And I was getting my books in the libraries during that time. Joanna Penn: I actually think you probably stand out more than a load of authors who just exist as books because once you are a real person, and they see you, and they listen to you, and they're like, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that author, I'll recommend the book more,' right? Eric Simmons: That's a great point. You're right. You're absolutely right. And it's so funny during one of my Zoom conferences with a library in Pennsylvania, the librarian told the audience, there were about 20 people on the Zoom conference, and he said, ‘The reason why I bought Eric's book was I noticed another library that I'm familiar with and I figured if they bought it, well, then it's good enough for me.' So libraries make for good references to my earlier point. Joanna Penn: Very good. In that case, librarians, if you are listening, you can get either Eric or me to speak virtually at your library! Eric Simmons: Exactly. Joanna Penn: I think that's a really good point. I hadn't even thought about that. Circling back, you mentioned $1.4 billion spent by librarians on books. So, let's talk about how as self-published authors, we can make our books available to libraries. The librarian doesn't go on Amazon and buy a book, do they? How do they find the different books? Eric Simmons: That's a great point. When I first started marketing to libraries, I couldn't figure out why I wasn't getting my foot into the door. And to your point, not a lot of libraries buy from Amazon. And that surprised me with Amazon being the world's largest online bookstore. What I came to learn, libraries use other sources to acquire their books. One of which, and probably the leading source is Ingram, and Ingram has a platform similar to KDP and it's called IngramSpark. And then there are other distributors that libraries buy from for paperbacks, such as Blurb. Well, Blurb actually distributes through Ingram. So, those are two that I use for my paperbacks, Ingram and Blurb. And then for my eBooks, I've seen librarians buy from Draft2Digital, Smashwords, StreetLib, and PublishDrive. Now, PublishDrive is interesting because they're using a company called Hoopla. And Hoopla is a competitor of OverDrive, which for years has been the primary eBook source for libraries. But what's important about Hoopla, I kind of view them as the Netflix of libraries because they offer video, audio, as well as eBooks. Hoopla uses a different model. They're using something called a pay per checkout model, which means, Joanna, for your listeners, is that let's say your book is selling for $10. Well, instead of the library buying that book at the retail or at a discounted price, they are paying when you check out the book, when one of their patrons checks out the book. So if it's a $10 book, you might get paid one 10th of that or $1 for that checkout. And that counts as a library sale. So they're using a little bit different model, but there are other companies out there that libraries look at much more so than they do Amazon to acquire their books. Joanna Penn: Absolutely. And just to add there, so Draft2Digital also distribute to Hoopla. So there's definitely overlap in all these services. Smashwords is now owned by Draft2Digital, or they merged. OverDrive is also owned by the sister company to Kobo. So if you go direct to Kobo Writing Life, you'll also be in OverDrive. So what I tend to think is just overlap them because… Eric Simmons: Yeah, correct. Joanna Penn: Although if you try and figure out how to just not avoid uploading twice, it doesn't work. I upload to a lot of these services and end up on all of them somehow. But as you say, what happens is…well, how I believe it happens is either the librarian will find out in some way and we'll talk about marketing, but also a library patron can suggest a book and that will be ordered into the ebook catalog or the print catalog or the audio catalog. That's another thing, isn't it, is to ask our readers to request our books in libraries. Eric Simmons: That's a great point, Joanna, because librarians weigh heavily their patrons, in particular books. That's great point that you make. So, you're right. I would encourage us to have patrons recommend our books to libraries. That's a great point. Joanna Penn: And as you mentioned, we still get paid. So the reader gets it for free and we still get paid, either because the library bought it or because they have a pay-per-checkout. To me, it's amazing. So that's eBooks and print books and, of course, authors can get their audiobooks into libraries through Findaway Voices, who also have a similar thing where you can get paid per checkout or the library can buy the audiobooks. Basically, you can get into libraries with all these different formats, but, of course, just because things are available, it doesn't mean that the library does know it exists. What are some ways that you've been pitching libraries with your books? Eric Simmons: Several ways. As I mentioned earlier, Zoom video conferencing, but the primary method, Joanna, I've been using has been email. When I first started out, I was calling libraries by phone. I had a little plan that I had put together and I had my little voice script. And after about three telephone calls, librarians kept telling me, ‘Please send me some information over. Your book sounds great, but I'd like to learn more.' And so that's when I decided to go the email route. One of the things strategically that I knew or I felt would be important was I didn't want to send spam-like emails. I didn't want to send flyers. So what I ended up doing was constructing customized emails where I include not only the librarian's name, but the library, perhaps in the body of the document, and then that email document became what I call sales sheet. It was informational from the standpoint that it had the ISBN of my book or books. It had my book cover. It had a synopsis or a description about the book and it had who you could buy the book from. It was a document, but technically if you peel back the onion, it was really my metadata. I just learned how to construct it in a way that I felt would be reader-friendly that a librarian could pick up and get most of the information that they would need to make an informed decision as to whether or not they wanted to buy the book. I also spent anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes trying to construct my subject line. So I put almost as much time into the subject line to get the librarian to open up the email as I spent developing of the internal email itself. Joanna Penn: Did you send that as like an attachment, because attachments get lost in spam a lot? Or did you put it all in the body? Eric Simmons: Just in the body. I never sent attachments, to your point, because a librarian is getting a strange email and with an attachment. Well, a lot of people might think an attachment would create spam or a virus. So no, I do not use attachments at all. Joanna Penn: I think that's a really good point. So, when you are pitching your book, so it's mainly your memoir, Not Far From The Tree, so what… Eric Simmons: Well, actually, I have four other titles, but I really only pitched the three others. And one would be Getting Your Book Into Libraries, and then I have two other books, one on self-publishing and then a combination book that includes how to get started at self-publishing and then here's a market that you can go to, which are libraries. So, I combined two books into one. When you asked me about my marketing, this was a marketing and a strategic idea that I had. With the pandemic, there was information coming out that librarians' budgets would be cut. And so I said, ‘Well, they might not be able to afford two of my books separately, so why not combine them into one?‘ And that's what I did. Joanna Penn: I think that's really interesting. And so, you are putting all of that in the email and you're putting the name of the librarian and the particular library. So this is where your incredible sales background comes in. How did you find the information on the librarian and the names of people, particularly? Eric Simmons: That's a great question. It was manual. If you were to Google top 100 libraries in the United States, the American Library Association will have a listing. I took that listing, copy and pasted it into an Excel spreadsheet, which became my library contacts database, which now has thousands of librarian contacts. And then I had to go and search each library and try to find what I thought was their highest level decision-makers. In some libraries, if they are very large, I went directly after the CEO. I was mailing to the CEO of the Atlanta Public Library here in Atlanta. And so that's how I went about it. I also discovered there are some states that actually have lists that are in Excel spreadsheets. And so I was able to use those. Most were outdated. So I had to do some updating. And then the third area was some libraries have PDFs of their librarians. And that's more of a nightmare because you're copying and pasting, and it takes forever to do. But honestly, that's how I did it because I was so determined to get my books into libraries, I felt I needed a resource that I could pull from so that I could be able to send custom emails to 100 librarians if I wanted to, or to 300. I never do more than 300 because then it begins to become unwieldly. Subsequently, through the course of a year and email libraries quarterly, and I'm constantly keeping my books in front of librarians and I'm constantly generating sales that way. Joanna Penn: I love that. I think it's so brilliant. We'll talk about your resources in a minute. Obviously, you are in the USA and you are American, but what about international libraries? Because, of course, like we mentioned OverDrive, for example, they have libraries all over the world. Have you thought about the international side? Eric Simmons: Yeah, I actually have, Joanna. I try to incorporate the similar Google search strategy that I did here in the U.S. to look for a list of librarians that I could mail. And when I did that, I didn't know the international market well enough to begin to figure out, okay, how can I do a Google search to maybe find similar lists? But I actually did make that attempt. My thought process is if someone were to use the tools that I've developed and if they were just to spend a little bit of time, I believe something similar can be done in the UK or internationally, but I did make an attempt, but I just wasn't able to replicate internationally what I've been able to do here in the U.S. Joanna Penn: I certainly think this is something that is worth doing, especially coming back to the Zoom programming because when I said to you when we got on the phone, ‘I love your voice.' And part of the reason I love your voice and part of the reason Americans always say to me, ‘Oh, I love your voice' is because they're different from our voices. If you speak to an audience in the UK as an American, you are fundamentally more interesting than someone who's got an accent like mine. And the same, if I speak to a library in Atlanta, for example, I bet you I'm more interesting because they're like, ‘Oh, I love listening to your voice.' Eric Simmons: That's a great point, Joanna. Yeah. So, actually, as I think through that question, if any of your listeners on this podcast would want to try to begin developing library contacts database for international use, I'd be more than willing to invest a little time with that person or persons to see if we can't come up with something similar because it would be beneficial to us all, I believe. Joanna Penn: Tell us about your resources that you have available to people. Eric Simmons: I use a number of resources. And let me tell you what my resources are kind of geared to do. Each library has what's called a collection development policy, and those are the rules and guidelines by which libraries acquire books. So, I'm trying to gear my books towards those interest areas, if you will, that libraries have in their guidelines that patrons will come in and subsequently check out a book on. I'm using resources to support that endeavor. I use very heavily this database, this Excel spreadsheet that I've created called my library contacts database. I also use the methodology that I've written down in my book, Getting Your Book Into Libraries. That's a resource for your podcast listeners. You've also posted two of my articles, ‘How to get your book in the libraries' and ‘Get your book in the libraries.' Those are additional resources for others, but I've used those resources myself because I guess I created them. Other things I do, I use Google to do research on topics that I feel might be of interest to librarians. As an example, I recently did a mailing to promote my self-publishing works and I found some interesting data that self-publishing has grown 275% over the last 5 years. I input little bullet points that I found about the growth of self-publishing into the body of my email to try to create and generate interest. I also use WorldCat as a resource to determine which libraries have purchased my book. WorldCat is the world's largest online catalog where members of a group called the Online Computing Center, which supports WorldCat… These are librarians that when your book goes into a library, they add it. 30% of my library sales are in WorldCat. So I go onto WorldCat, which is www.worldcat.org as a resource. I use libraries' websites as resources to update my database when there's a new head librarian that may come in or one has retired. Another resource that I use are distributor sales reports. I use Amazon, Ingram, and those sales reports to give me ideas about my library sales following one of my email campaigns. What I do is I have an idea about how much I sell through Amazon monthly. I have an idea of what I've got coming through IngramSpark as an example. When I see spikes in sales right after an email campaign, I'm about 80%… 80% of the time they're library sales. I use KDP sales reports as well. So these are just some of the resources that I use to help me in my library marketing endeavors. Joanna Penn: People can buy these resources from you, right? Eric Simmons: That is correct. They can buy them through my website. The books are available through Amazon and over 50 other booksellers, but that is correct, Joanna. Joanna Penn: I think that's amazing. You mentioned there finding things that the librarians would be interested in, news, items about self-publishing, for example, and that to me is exactly what you would do with the press release. One of the fundamental problems with many authors is they think writing a book is news, but it's not. It needs to be related to what the target market wants. What you've done with that pitch email is you haven't just said, ‘Hey, here's my book.' What you've said is, ‘This is why you are interested and my book answers that question,' right? Eric Simmons: That's perfect, Joanna. That's right. The way I view it is before I send out that email, I'm trying to put myself in the librarian's seat. That I think is critical when you're marketing anything to someone that doesn't know you or is unfamiliar with your product. What I'm trying to do, and I read my emails before I send them out, I'm trying to put myself in that librarian's seat. So if it's you, Joanna, when I finish writing this customized email, I'm trying to envision myself as Joanna. And I'm saying, ‘Okay, I'm Joanna, I'm reading this from an unknown person. Let me read this and let me see what he's saying here.' I'm trying to ensure or I'm doing my best to try to cause that reader to want to buy because my saying is, ‘I've got one opportunity to impress and I need my email to be such that the librarian will say yes.' Joanna Penn: How do you pitch your memoir because non-fiction books on a useful topic I feel are much easier to pitch? How are you pitching your memoir? Eric Simmons: That's a great question. What I try to do again, I'm thinking about where the book might fit, either with their patrons or in a library, but particularly with their patrons. So, what I would pitch Not Far From The Tree for is a library's sociology section. And then I may mention diversity and inclusion as my book would be a great resource for that should your patrons have an interest. And then also, Joanna, I also ask for the business in my emails. I would say something like, ‘Miss Penn, it would be a tremendous honor to have Not Far From The Tree added to your library's collection.' And then at the end of my email, I would say, ‘I look forward to your prospective order.‘ Joanna Penn: Oh, nice. Eric Simmons: I do a soft ask for the business. I think that's where a lot of people may miss the mark. They may put together a good document for the librarian to read, but they're not asking for the business. But a soft ask is okay. I don't do a hard ask. I don't say, ‘You absolutely have to buy my book. It's the best in the world.' I don't do that. It's a very soft ask for the business. And I think that's an approach for your audience to consider, ask for the business, but ask for it softly. Joanna Penn: As we said, you have decades of sales experience. So this is all brilliant stuff, actually. I feel like this is one of the issues we have, and I also feel like so much of book marketing now, we're just talking about ads on Amazon and click this link. What you are doing is actually really different to what most people are doing now. Eric Simmons: I'm being proactive, Joanna. I didn't mean to cut you off. I'm being proactive. I did not want to pay $450 for ‘Kirkus Reviews' and libraries like to have reviews if they can find them from ‘Library Journal,' ‘Kirkus,' ‘Publishers Weekly,' and the like. So I really stepped out on a limb because I had so much confidence that I believed I had written a quality piece of work. I felt I could get my foot in the door if I marketed my book professionally to a librarian. I took a chance and the chance paid off. Joanna Penn: And then, of course, as you said, it spills into other sales as readers discover you. Libraries are incredible ecosystems really. I think they're becoming more ecosystems for writers' groups and different readers' groups and crafting things and children's stuff. I think we've got to think far more broadly about what the library is. It's almost like a community hub in a lot of places. To come back to the different types of pitching though because many listeners, including myself as fiction authors, I always feel like with fiction, it's a much harder pitch because, look, let's face it, libraries are going to order the top books from the top-selling authors on ‘The New York Times' list. That's what people are going to pre-order in their library. How do we break through that as independent fiction authors? Eric Simmons: Here's what I did. I picked randomly 10 libraries and I went through and I read their collection development policies. And from that, one of the policies that I kept seeing over and over, must be of interest. And so I said, ‘Okay, how do I prove my book is of interest.' One of the ways I've done that is through library references. I referenced other libraries that have purchased my book. But the other thing that I've done is I include some of my Amazon sales data to show how well my book is doing in the retail market because my thought process there is, ‘Okay, Miss Penn, librarian, you're unfamiliar with me. Here's where I believe my fictional book will fit in your library and would be of interest to your patrons. And in addition, here's how well my book is doing in the retail space with Amazon.' Because that idea is that if my book is doing well on Amazon, they're patrons too. Some of these people may be coming into your library. So I'm trying to make that connection whereby if the book is doing well in this space, I believe it will do well in your library space as well. That's how I'm marketing my nonfiction and that's how I believe you can market your fiction book. Joanna Penn: I think also perhaps we need to pick the nonfiction topics that are in the fiction. So if your YA book talks about bullying, for example, then maybe you say my novel tackles the issues of bullying, or like you mentioned, with civil rights, maybe my novel tackles issues of racism in society, or I've got one, Desecration, which is about the history of anatomy. Well, it's not about it. That's one of the underlying themes. Maybe I could pitch libraries that have more medical books or university libraries, or I don't know, maybe that's another angle. Eric Simmons: That's a great idea. I think it's brilliant, actually, Joanna. And then here's something that a librarian, a college librarian told me, and this was for academic libraries. He said, ‘What you want to do is you want to show the librarian where your book fits in their library. So if it has some sociology orientation, you want to show that.' If it's, to your point, a fiction book, and you've got something in there about bullying, you want to put it in that category. I've actually applied that to both academic and public libraries. I think you touch on a good point, Joanna. If your audience for their fiction books can identify a segment that would be of interest to a librarian, in this case, I'll go back to using bullying as an example, that's what you want to pitch and show it where it would fit in the library. It would be in your fictional area that may deal with books on bullying, or it could be in your sociology book because bullying has to deal with some impacts of sociology. But that's where, I think the author has to try to make some decisions as to how they can align that book with the library's collection development policies because the closer you can make that alignment, the better your chances are of getting in, I feel. Joanna Penn: You're sparking lots of ideas now, for me, certainly. What we're basically talking about now is pitching librarians as an industry. And I presume they have librarian conferences or they have librarian trade journals. Have you considered advertising or speaking at those types of events? Eric Simmons: I haven't, Joanna, because the pandemic interrupted a lot of that and that's starting to ramp back up. But before, I had not seriously considered that, but that is a great way to get in front of a large audience. And that's something that I probably will consider going forward. Joanna Penn: I was just thinking it might be cheaper to put a quarter-page ad in a trade journal for librarians, which there must be such a thing. Eric Simmons: No, you're right. There are. It's just not something that I've considered. One of my big things is I've been trying to get my books to profitability and believe it or not, libraries, and then subsequent offspring business that I've created has helped me to get my books into the black. I'm running at about a 40.2% profitability with my library book business now. So I think in terms of, okay, where can I invest my dollars to get the greatest impact? Early on, advertising was just not a part of my budget, but I'm at a point now where I can begin to consider such, Joanna. Joanna Penn: If you ever think about doing a service for authors, you could have like a pitching service with all the different books that people want to pitch libraries. Eric Simmons: Actually, I have a consulting service available on my website. Joanna Penn: That's brilliant. Eric Simmons: I've actually had people ask me that. And yes, now, I offer that as a part of my library marketing services. And that was the offshoot business that I mentioned. And here's what's interesting about that. I got that idea from you. Joanna Penn: Oh, good. Eric Simmons: Two ideas that I've got from you that have proven big. One was going wide with my books and not being solely reliant on Amazon. The other was looking for ways to enhance your books beyond selling the books directly. I noticed you had begun to do audiobooks. You had expanded in the podcast. And so I asked myself, ‘What could I expand into?' When I wrote Getting Your Book Into Libraries, I said, well, you know, some people might like the book but they may have questions why don't I offer my services for what I feel would be a reasonable fee and I'll get on the phone or a Zoom conference with prospective authors and we can go through how I pitch my books and develop individual strategies for those offers. So, I've created a business off of that. And that's what has caused me to become profitable because I'm helping people either via Zoom video conferencing or helping them develop strategies on how to market their books to libraries. Joanna Penn: That is brilliant. I'm so pleased you're doing that because I feel this is such an underserved niche and yet such an important niche. So I love that you're doing that. We'll link to that obviously in the show notes. Tell everyone where they can find you, and your website, and your books, and everything you do online. Eric Simmons: You can go to www.eseinc1.com/library-marketing-services. And there, all of my services and books are available. Joanna Penn: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Eric. That was great. Eric Simmons: Oh, Joanna, it's been immense pleasure. I hope it's been beneficial to your audience. And it's just been great to finally meet you and to be a part of what you're trying to do to help others in the self-publishing arena.The post How To Get Your Self-Published Book Into Libraries With Eric Otis Simmons first appeared on The Creative Penn.