The Indy Author Podcast

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.

Fantasy author and Content Manager for Kindlepreneur Jason Hamilton discusses Kindle Vella, Amazon's new platform for serialized fiction. We discuss the opportunity Vella provides for authors to earn money, to interact with readers, and to gain input and insights from their readership, with the caveat that material on Vella needs to be as carefully polished as on any other platform. We discuss the importance of experimentation, and of recognizing that the Vella platform, its readership, and its terms and conditions will change as Amazon expands and tweaks it based on customer feedback. And we speculate about where Amazon might take Vella from here. 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). Jason Hamilton is a fantasy author and Content Manager for Kindlepreneur. He has a particular love of mythology, history, and geek culture. When he's not writing, his favorite hobbies include hiking, Netflix, chilling with his wife, spouting nonsense words at his baby daughter, and developing his website MythBank.com.

Erin Wright of Wide for the Win talks about some of the criteria that indy authors should consider when selecting your distribution platforms, using PublishDrive as an example. She talks about the dangers of putting all your eggs in one distribution basket, and the fact that an author can't really claim to be wide if they rely on one distribution platform for their author business. Erin shares some insights into the choice of IngramSpark or the Draft2Digital print beta as a distribution option for your print books. And she also talks about how her experiment with being a creator on the road in her RV worked out for her and her husband, and the importance of the lesson that your creative adventures might take a different direction than you think they're going to when you start out. 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). USA Today Bestselling author Erin Wright has worked as a library director, barista, teacher, website designer, and ranch hand helping brand cattle, before settling into the career she's always dreamed about: Author. As she's also paying it forward to the author community as the founder and admin of the Wide for the Win Facebook Group.

L.E. DeLano talks about WHAT AUTHORS CAN LEARN FROM THEATER, including how her theater experience helped her as an introvert in both her writing craft and her publishing voyage … the exercise of "losing the dialogue and finding the beats," including the importance of the quiet moment … the idea of "acting beyond the mask" as a way of exploring what secrets your characters are keeping … and how you can use editors and beta readers to gauge the reactions of your larger audience. 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). L.E. DeLano began her career as a blogger for Woman's Day Magazine and Mom's Magazine. After a foray into fan fiction, she began self-publishing romance in 2012 (under a different pen name), branched out to YA, and landed a traditional publishing deal with the novels TRAVELER and DREAMER. TRAVELER was selected as a Keystone To Reading Secondary Book Award finalist for 2018-19 and was also voted one of The 20 Most Beautiful Books in the World for 2017 by MTV UK. L.E.'s most recent work, the YA fantasy novel BLUE, was named a 2021 NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite in Young Adult Fiction. Though mostly raised in New Mexico, she now lives in Pennsylvania with two adventurous kids and two ridiculous cats.

In this week's episode of The Indy Author Podcast, Tiffany Yates Martin talks about how she was not willing to grant rights to her non-fiction book INTUITIVE EDITING, and how that differed for her fiction work. We talk about aspects of an author career over which you may have more control than you think, and aspects over which you may have less control. We talk about the importance, if you are granting rights to your work to a third party such as a publisher, of approaching it as a commodity, not as your baby. And Tiffany advises you not to write what you think others, such as publishers, want you to write, but to write what you love and then find a market for that. 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). Tiffany Yates Martin has spent nearly thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling, award-winning authors as well as newer writers. She is the author of the Amazon bestseller INTUITIVE EDITING: A CREATIVE AND PRACTICAL GUIDE TO REVISING YOUR WRITING. She's led workshops and seminars for conferences and writers' groups across the country and is a frequent contributor to writers' sites and publications. Under the pen name Phoebe Fox, she's the author of the Breakup Doctor series, including the most recent release, THE WAY WE WEREN'T.

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Jeff Elkins, the Dialogue Doctor, talks about USING ENGINES, ANCHORS, AND HAZARDS TO DEFINE CHARACTER VOICE. He talks about how words like hero and villain, while useful for assessing plot, are less useful for assessing character development, or how the character operates in culture and how he or she negotiates the relationships with the people around them. We delve into examples, including BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY, LORD OF THE RINGS, HARRY POTTER, and GAME OF THRONES, to understand how the characters surrounding the protagonist, or vehicle character, function as engines, anchors, or hazards to bring out the best or worst in that vehicle character. 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.

Sharlene Anders discusses MAKING MEANINGFUL CONNECTIONS THROUGH POWERFUL LANGUAGE. We discuss how writers can use tools like the free Advanced Marketing Institute Headline Analyzer to assess titles or subtitles for emails, events, and even books for Intellectual, Empathetic, and Spiritual potential. She discusses the importance of letting your first ideas rest for a bit before acting on them. And we talk about how Sharlene used that analysis to reverse engineer the topic of a summit in a way that she knew would be especially impactful to her desired audience. 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). As a Creativity Coach, Sharlene Anders helps artists unlock their potential with a hands-on philosophy based on the teachings of Julia Cameron in THE ARTIST'S WAY and Eric Maisel's FEARLESS CREATING.

M. K. Williams of Author Your Ambition describes some of the retailers that authors, especially in the US, might not think of, and the aggregators you can use to reach them … the importance of having a plan for your distribution strategy … and considerations for balancing the access and opportunities that going direct to the retail platforms provide against the time it takes to learn and optimize those platforms. M. K. cautions against feeling like you have to be everywhere as soon as possible, and advocates for picking monthly focus for your distribution planning. 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). M.K. Williams writes suspenseful literary fiction for the contemporary reader. Her fiction work includes NAILBITERS, an apocalyptic science-fiction thriller, ENEMIES OF PEACE, a cautionary tale of the American Dream gone awry, and THE INFINITE-INFINITE, the first in a series of sci-fi adventure books. Her non-fiction work includes writing and self-publishing guides, a budgeting and planning workbook, and THE FIOLOGY WORKBOOK: YOUR GUIDE TO FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE. She recently launched GOING WIDE: SELF-PUBLISHING YOUR BOOKS OUTSIDE THE AMAZON ECOSYSTEM (Author Your Ambition Book 4).