The Indy Author Podcast

Bryan Collins discusses THE SEVEN MOST COMMON MISTAKES OF NON-FICTION AUTHORS … AND HOW TO AVOID THEM. He talks about writing different things at once ... not organizing the ideas ... waiting for passion or inspiration to strike ... writing only on the weekends ... writing and editing at the same time ... believing that working harder will make it happen ... and waiting until it's perfect For a transcript of this interview and links to more information, go to https://www.theindyauthor.com/podcast.html. Did you find the information in this video useful? Please consider supporting my work at The Indy Author via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor) or Buy Me a Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple). After attempts at careers as a journalist and short story writer, Bryan Collins spent a year as a stay-at-home dad. Broke, lacking self-belief and feeling a lack of purpose, Bryan decided to go back into writing, but this time focused on learning skills like copywriting and content marketing. He launched ‘Become a Writer Today’ which has racked up millions of views, and has written for LIFEHACKER, FASTCOMPANY, COPYBLOGGER, and FORBES. He’s a podcaster and the author THE ART OF WRITING A NON-FICTION BOOK, THE POWER OF CREATIVITY, and YES, YOU CAN WRITE.

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Tara Cremin of Kobo Writing Life discusses SUBSCRIPTION MODELS, including Kobo Plus. She talks about the rise of subscription models ... what sets subscription readers apart ... how authors get paid in subscription models, and why Kobo chose minutes read as the measure of reader engagement ... and Kobo's “globally local” approach. She also discusses how authors can reach libraries through Kobo. Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out my new YouTube playlist, 2 Minutes of Indy (https://bit.ly/2MinutesOfIndy), where you can find a brief video clip from the interview on each of those topics! For a transcript of this interview and links to more information, go to https://www.theindyauthor.com/podcast.html. Did you find the information in this video useful? Please consider supporting my work at The Indy Author via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor) or Buy Me a Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple). Tara Cremin is the Director of Kobo Writing Life, Kobo’s independent publishing platform. As a subject matter expert in all aspects of indie publishing, her aim is to make KWL the greatest and most user-friendly self-publishing platform available, and she’s and always looking for ways for indies to reach a new audience of readers. Tara hosts KWL’s monthly live events with author and industry experts and you can sometimes hear her as a guest host on the Kobo Writing Life Podcast. 

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Jacob Hess discusses BUILDING ENGAGING WORLDS. He talks about: - The importance of building a consistent world - How much is too much - Genre-specific considerations - Using backstory as a reader magnet - The importance of taking the same care in building your characters' interior worlds as you do in building their exterior world Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out my new YouTube playlist, 2 Minutes of Indy (https://bit.ly/2MinutesOfIndy), where you can find a brief video clip from the interview on each of those topics! For a transcript of this interview and links to more information, go to https://www.theindyauthor.com/podcast.html. Did you find the information in this video useful? Please consider supporting my work at The Indy Author via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor) or Buy Me a Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple). Jacob Hess grew up in Oregon and received a Master of Divinity from Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon. He and his wife now live in Seattle, where he works as a minister in their local church. Jacob has always had a love for stories, whether they're told with pen and page or the rhythms and rhymes of song. He agrees with J. R. R. Tolkien, who said, “the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty." As humans we simply cannot escape a need to tell stories as a way to reach beyond ourselves and connect to the deeper truths of who we are and what it means to live a life of meaning.

Nat Connors of Kindletrends discusses USING DATA TO GUIDE YOUR CRAFT, including how authors can assess whether their covers, blurbs, content, and mechanics (such as release schedule and price) attract browsers, impact readers, and set the stage for a book’s sales. He discusses the importance of having a consistent throughline across the cover, blurb, and content. And he talks about how being market-aware doesn't mean following market trends slavishly, but rather developing an understanding of genre expectations and how you can fulfill them in a way that’s right for your own style and writing goals. For a transcript of this interview and links to more information, go to https://www.theindyauthor.com/podcast.html. Did you find the information in this video useful? Please consider supporting my work at The Indy Author via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor) or Buy Me a Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple). Nat Connors is a romantic comedy writer, medical scientist, and dance teacher, and creator of the Kindletrends newsletter for genre fiction authors. Nat created Kindletrends when he got fed up with trying to make sense of the Kindle store and wanted a no-nonsense summary of the most important information. As an indy author himself, Nat understands the need for focused, relevant, and actionable information with which to make decisions.

In this week's episode of The Indy Author Podcast, Edwin Hill discusses STORY STRUCTURE AND CHARACTER MOTIVATION. We discuss the motivational continuum, and how you can move from depicting the everyday world of expectation to the world of dreams and dreads, which is where the most engaging stories take place. We discuss where the key turning points in a work of fiction occur, and how you can use them to decide where your story may need to be expanded or tightened up. And we look at movies, including THE WIZARD OF OZ and FATAL ATTRACTION, as examples of works that build tension and support character motivation through their structure. For a transcript of this interview and links to more information, go to https://www.theindyauthor.com/podcast.html. Did you find the information in this video useful? Please consider supporting my work at The Indy Author via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor) or Buy Me a Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple). Edwin Hill’s critically acclaimed crime novels include the standalone thriller, The Secrets We Share, and three novels featuring Hester Thursby: Watch Her, The Missing Ones, and Little Comfort. He has been nominated for Edgar and Agatha Awards, featured in Us Magazine, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal, and was recognized as one of “Six Crime Writers to Watch” in Mystery Scene magazine. He lives in Roslindale, Massachusetts with his partner Michael and his favorite reviewer, their lab Edith Ann, who likes his first drafts enough to eat them.

Kris Austin, the CEO of Draft2Digital, discusses D2D's recent acquisition of Smashwords. We discuss the companies' similar philosophies, and how the combination of their different strengths will create better tools for indy authors. We discuss Smashwords’ authors biggest concerns—regarding money and the Meatgrinder—and how the path forward will address those concerns. And we discuss what steps authors don’t need to take to prepare for the transition. Kris also provides an update on the D2D Print beta, including the last piece of functionality he wants to finalize before a full rollout, and a comparison of how D2D Print compares with IngramSpark, now and into the future. For a transcript of this interview and links to more information, go to https://www.theindyauthor.com/podcast.html. Did you find the information in this video useful? Please consider supporting my work at The Indy Author via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor) or Buy Me a Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple). Kris Austin is the CEO and co-founder of Draft2Digital, a company offering online, author-assistance tools to enhance the business of publishing. Before taking this post with Draft2Digital, Kris worked for a private information technologies firm, where he managed the IT departments of dozens of Oklahoma City businesses. He received a B. S., Computer Science from Oklahoma Christian University in 2004.

Kathy Meis of Bublish discusses METADATA IS YOUR BRAND. We discuss how the real marketing begins in the manuscript ... the role metadata, including a book’s cover, plays in a discovery process that increasingly takes place online ... the ways that different platforms, such as Amazon and Google, use metadata ... and how good metadata is a service not only to the author but also to the reader. For a transcript of this interview and links to more information, go to https://www.theindyauthor.com/podcast.html. Did you find the information in this video useful? Please consider supporting my work at The Indy Author via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor) or Buy Me a Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple). Kathy Meis is the founder and CEO of Bublish, a complete one-stop publishing solution for today’s independent author. With more than 30 years of experience in the media and publishing industries, Kathy has served in a wide variety of editorial and management positions at some of the industry’s leading companies. She has worked as a television reporter for CBS, was a founding editor of Forbes MediaCritic, and was a founding partner of PubSmart, an author-centric publishing conference held in Charleston, South Carolina. Kathy speaks and blogs regularly about book promotion, author branding, social marketing and discoverability. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

Alan Baxter discusses THE MARTIAL ART OF WRITING. focusing on the lessons we as writers can take from the martial arts, of which Alan is a practitioner. He talks about the danger of reading about how to do something but not doing it, the fact that the journey to mastery will never end but that the only failure is quitting, that the only competition is against ourselves, and the only goal to be a better writer than you were the day before. You all know of my love of the nautical metaphor, so I was especially happy when Alan talked about the importance of having a mindset that a rising tide lifts all boats and that as writers, we might be in different boats, but we're all in the same storm, so we need to look out for each other. For a transcript of this interview and links to more information, go to https://www.theindyauthor.com/podcast.html. Did you find the information in this video useful? Please consider supporting my work at The Indy Author via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor) or Buy Me a Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple). Alan Baxter is a British-Australian multi-award-winning author of horror, supernatural thrillers, and dark fantasy, with more than twenty books including novels, novellas, and short story collections. He’s also a whisky-soaked swear monkey and dog lover. He creates dark, weird stories among dairy paddocks on the beautiful south coast of New South Wales, Australia, where he lives with his wife, son, hound, and other creatures.

Philippa Werner discusses the key pieces of sales and income data that an indy author should be collecting and tracking; the fact that consolidated sales and earnings reporting is a good reminder of how much of an indy author’s income may not (should not) come from Amazon; and how familiarity with this data can make you more nimble and responsive to marketing and promotion opportunities. For a transcript of this interview and links to more information, go to https://www.theindyauthor.com/podcast.html. Did you find the information in this video useful? Please consider supporting my work at The Indy Author via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor) or Buy Me a Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple). Philippa Werner is the public face of ScribeCount, overseeing the customer interaction, content, and overall service side of the company. Holding a Bachelor of Arts in Economics with a minor in Mathematics, she brings analytic skills and creative abilities to her work at ScribeCount. With 19 novels to her name, including 2 USA Today Bestsellers, Philippa speaks the complicated language of indie-author very well.

In this inbetweenisode of The Indy Author Podcast, I pose a question to fellow podcaster Jeff Elkins about what he's getting from The Dialogue Doctor podcast, both for himself and in terms of his goals related to helping other authors, that's different after over 70 episodes than he expected when he did his first episode. As is often the case when I speak with Jeff, he took that question in a truly wonderful direction. He talked about the importance to him of building community, and how that differs from podcasters like me whose primary goal is to provide content (and he illustrated the difference with examples of several other podcasters whose names you’ll recognize). He talked about factoring in where your energy comes from in a way that’s much more useful than the usual introvert / extrovert model, and about how we can change the story we tell ourselves to achieve the results we are aiming for. And he offered some great insights about serving one’s community while also enlisting the support of that community in keeping a creative endeavor going. In fact, I was inspired by my conversation with Jeff to update The Indy Author patronage program, as I describe after the conversation with Jeff. For a transcript of this interview and links to more information, go to https://www.theindyauthor.com/podcast.html. Did you find the information in this video useful? Please consider supporting my work at The Indy Author via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor) or Buy Me a Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple). Jeff Elkins is a novelist, ghostwriter, and editor with more than 10 novels on the market. During the day, he leads the writing team for a company that simulates difficult conversations for professionals to practice. He also helps authors improve their dialogue to engage readers more fully through one-on-one consulting and through his podcast The Dialogue Doctor.