“I wanted to try and write something more fun and more upbeat.” In this Waterstones interview, Alex Michaelides talks about the spontaneous and playful experience of writing his latest novel, The Fury (Celadon, 2024), and how both his upbringing in Cyprus and career in Hollywood shaped his thrilling story.
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Author: bphi
For one year, fans of Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl enjoyed watching him fly freely around New York City and become, for many city dwellers, a feathered symbol of liberation. Released from his cage at the Central Park Zoo by a vandal, zoo officials were initially concerned for his survival, but Flaco quickly learned to hunt prey and move about the city. His fans grew, and for them, Flaco began to represent resilience and the ability to embark on a new chapter of life, a gesture at the potential of rewilding. Sadly, Flaco died in February after apparently striking a building on the Upper West Side. This week, write a poem that incorporates a subject that signifies qualities of freedom and hope for you personally. Consider strengths and weaknesses, and address both in your poem.
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Author: Writing Prompter
In this Green Apple Books event, Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures (Scribner, 2024), and Cindy Juyoung Ok, author of Ward Toward (Yale University Press, 2024), read from their poetry collections and join Aracelis Girmay for a conversation. Ok is featured in an installation of our Ten Questions series and Nguyen’s Root Fractures is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Author: bphi
Get ready, because I’ve got something exciting to share with you!
This winter, I’ve been working on a new resource for all of you. I’ve been diving once again into the world of archetypes, exploring the psychology of shadows, and studying character transformations—all of my favorite things!
And now, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of my eight-week on-demand email course Shadow Archetypes: Writing Complex Characters.
I know many of you have been waiting for this, and I can’t wait to take this journey with you! If you’ve already explored my book Writing Archetypal Character Arcs: The Hero’s Journey and Beyond, this course takes the exploration even deeper. We’ll dive into how each pair of shadow archetypes plays a crucial role in helping the primary archetypes (Maiden, Hero, Queen, etc.) overcome weaknesses and temptations on their way to fully transforming into their next iteration of empowerment.
Explore the intricate world of character development with Shadow Archetypes: Building Complex Fictional Characters, an eight-week email course.
Delve into the psychological journey and inner conflict of the six archetypal arcs, from the Maiden to the Mage. Discover the profound interplay between each archetype’s passive and aggressive shadows, and how each archetypal arc is about overcoming the cowardice of its passive shadow while resisting the temptation of its aggressive shadow in order to integrate a new level of true power.
This course is ideal for aspiring authors, fiction writers, creative storytellers, and screenwriters wanting to master the art of crafting compelling characters who add depth to their narratives. Whether you’re a seasoned writer or just beginning your literary journey, this in-depth approach to character arcs will transform your storytelling abilities, providing you with practical applications for various fiction formats, from novels to screenplays.
The course is structured into eight comprehensive lessons, each one intentionally designed to impart the wisdom of storytelling through the lens of shadow archetypes. Every week, you will receive an email with new resources and insights to elevate your storytelling and bring your characters to life in ways you never thought possible. You can also access the lessons as they become available in your account dashboard.
Ready to start shadow walking? 
Learn more about the twelve shadow archetypes right here.
These in-depth weekly text lessons, delivered straight to your inbox, will offer you:
Archetypes are symbols representing specific experiences that are recognized as culturally or even universally potent. Archetypal character arcs explore transformational periods within the human life. Specifically, I teach a cycle of six important archetypal character arcs, alternating between feminine and masculine and chronologically advancing through the human life.
These archetypes are Maiden and Hero (the archetypal journeys of youth, concerned with individuation and independence), Queen and King (the archetypal journeys of maturity, concerned with power and responsibility), and Crone and Mage (the archetypal journeys of elderhood, concerned with the mysteries of life and death). Each archetypal journey represents a crucial initiation within the human experience.
Shadow archetypes, based on Carl Jung’s psychological theories, represent the darker, unconscious facets of a character’s personality that are often denied or rejected. In storytelling, these archetypes are powerful tools for character development and conflict, driving a character’s inner struggles and influencing their actions and choices, thus contributing to a transformational arc.
For instance, a Hero character will grapple with both the passive shadow of the Coward and the aggressive shadow of the Bully. These reflect both the potential for fear and the misuse of power, which the character must confront and integrate to realize full heroic potential. The exploration of this inner conflict results in multi-dimensional characters that are more realistic and relatable, providing opportunities for dramatic tension and plot development.
Any and all genres! Even though the symbolic language of archetypes often evokes the fantasy genre, these archetypes show up in all stories of all types, just as they also show up in all of our personal lives. Examples from many different types of stories are listed throughout the course.
Each archetypal study will offer a concise beat sheet you can use for guidance in crafting your own arc. These beat sheets can be used to bring further nuance to the beat sheets offered in my book Writing Archetypal Character Arcs, which focused more on the external conflict with antagonists. The beat sheets provided in the course show how your characters’ inner relationship to the shadow archetypes may evolve over the course of their character arcs.
This is an email course. It will be delivered to your email (the address you use when checking out) once a week. The first lesson will arrive shortly after checkout and subsequent lessons will arrive on the same day of the week in the future.
You will also have access to the course material in your account dashboard. Lessons will become available there at the same time you receive a new email.
Yes! You can access the course whenever you like.
The course lasts eight weeks. Each lesson provides a lengthy text for you to read and study at your own pace.
Absolutely! Just hit reply on any email you receive and ask me your question.
Not at all. Although you can think of this course as Archetypes Level 2, since it builds upon the theories and system I’ve discussed previously in my blog series and my book Writing Archetypal Character Arcs, the course is structured to be accessible and enlightening to both seasoned writers and those new to the craft. Your passion for storytelling is the only prerequisite! If you haven’t read anything about archetypes before this, don’t worry. The first lesson will cover the necessary basics to help you access all the juiciness in the subsequent lessons.
Absolutely! The themes and principles covered within the Shadow Archetypes Course transcend the scope of writing to offer valuable lessons and introspective tools for personal development.
As you progress through each lesson, honing your skills, you will steadily grow your ability to craft deeply resonant psychological journeys for your characters. You’ll acquire a profound understanding of their emotions, motivations, and inner struggles, enabling you to create narratives that captivate and engage readers.
Ready to start shadow walking? Learn more about the twelve shadow archetypes right here.
Of course, what would be a launch without a prize giveaway? Today, I am giving away a reMarkable 2 tablet* (value $279). According to their site:
Replace your notebooks and printouts with the only tablet that feels like paper. All your handwritten notes, to-dos, PDFs, and ebooks, perfectly organized and in one place.
I asked you all to tell me what prize you’d like me to give away for this launch, and quite a few of you wanted me to give away another reMarkable 2 tablet! Good luck to you all!
*The refurbished model, in support of circular economies.
Contest will end Sunday, March 17th, and winners will be announced Monday, March 18th. Enter below! (Note: no purchase is necessary to enter.)
Finally, I must send out a huge thank you to my beta testers: Cain Gonzales, Christopher Pridgen, Laura Kathryn McRae, Julie Packer Samms, Sue Davis, KJ A. Lewis. Thank you!
Good luck to everyone in the drawing, have fun, and thank you for helping me celebrate the launch of the Shadow Archetypes course!
Happy writing!
Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Spotify).
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The post Announcing the Shadow Archetypes Course! (+Giveaway) appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.
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Author: K.M. Weiland | @KMWeiland
There are more options for publishing and reaching readers than ever before, and the indie author business models are splintering and diverging, so how do we know which path to follow?
How do we deal with the changes due to generative AI, and how do we manage the grief and anxiety about these shifts? Becca Syme gives her perspective.
In the intro, Kobo Plus launches in Ireland and South Africa [KWL]; Authors Equity [Publishing Perspectives]; Selling direct insights [Kindlepreneur]; Claude 3 [Anthropic]; Spear of Destiny.
This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.
Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of The Better-Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small-town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the ‘Dear Writer’ series of non-fiction books.
You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
You can find Becca at BetterFasterAcademy.com.
Joanna: Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of The Better-Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small-town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the ‘Dear Writer’ series of non-fiction books. So welcome back to the show, Becca.
Becca: Thank you for having me, again. I love being here.
Joanna: Now, you’ve been on the show a few times. So we’re just going to jump into the topics today, as we’ve got so much to talk about now.
I’ve really wanted to talk to you about some of the things I’m seeing in the community right now. You’re so wise, and I think people need help and guidance. Sometimes I’m just a little bit blunt about stuff, and you have a different manner.
So the first thing I want to talk about is a shift in the business model for indie authors. You and I were both at the last 20Books Vegas, the last ever one. It feels like what used to be one clear path is splintering into all different things.
Becca: The upside, I think, of some of the changes is that we’re seeing a real trend away from this expectation of as many books as you can possibly produce — because we’ve hit the saturation point, basically, everywhere.
There are always going to be these niche genres that pop up that aren’t fully saturated yet, but they get to a saturation point pretty quickly. So when the whole of the industry is saturated, that changes the problems that readers have.
So when readers were having a problem in 2012, there just weren’t enough books. Like there weren’t enough books for them to choose from, and New York sort of kept it that way on purpose, right. They kept the water blue on purpose.
Now that we don’t have that problem anymore and readers have different problems, then the way you solve them as a writer is different. So it becomes more and more important to find the people who are going to be your people that you’re going to write for and to try to maintain some sense of having people that you are pleasing.
Not that you have to write to market, not that you have to write for anyone but yourself, but we’ve lost this sense in the industry, I think, of like all you have to do is publish a book and it’s going to sell.
By the way, again, I always like to remind people that still wasn’t the case, even in the Gold Rush. There still were plenty of books that weren’t selling.
We’re facing that more now than we ever have because there are so many people who are having the experience of like, “Well, I came in and tried to do this model, and it’s not working for me, and so now I have to think of something different.”
The indicators are all there that the problems readers are having are different. So there’s no more expectation, in my opinion. It’s only grown over the last four or five years that what we’re seeing are people who are writing fewer books a year and who are selling more.
The faster and faster and faster you write, you have to know you can produce a product that people want to read if you’re going to write that fast. Otherwise, writing that fast is not the way to go.
Joanna: It’s funny, I’m actually, as we record this, next week I’m speaking in Seville. I’ve kind of put a sort of tongue-in-cheek title on one of my slides, which is—“1BookTo50K,” instead of, “20BooksTo50K.” Do you agree with that?
Becca: Oh, yes. I mean, I would say the problems that readers have are always the things that dictate the market, like the way the markets going to function.
When there’s too many books in the market—which obviously we’re going to talk about that later on in this session as well—but when there’s too many books in the market for readers to choose from, they have different problems.
This becomes curation, right? Like, how do I find the books that are going to be the best for me to read?
So putting more and more and more books and just not caring whether they meet reader expectations, not caring whether readers want them or not, that’s not the way to solve the problem of curation.
So I really believe that despite all the things that are happening in the industry, that for writers who want to write books, craft is going to become more important.
Storytelling and pacing are going to become more important.
There’s going to be this resurgence almost of like, well, okay, now the pendulum has swung all the way to one side, in terms of like just creating anything just to put things out in the market, and we’re recognizing that that’s just not what readers want from us right now.
Readers want better. They want books that they want to read, and however you personally can produce that is the model. Again, I would argue that has always been the model.
Like the model for, let’s say, 20BooksTo50K. For the people who can produce a lot of books, then that was the model. But for people who couldn’t, there were still people who were only producing one, two, and three books a year, who were making a living writing, even during the gold rush.
Joanna: Like me!
Becca: Yes, like, it’s always been that way. However you can produce a book people want to read is how you should produce it, and not pay attention to what other people are doing.
Again, in an industry that’s very competitive, it’s hard to have that certainty about your own process. So I guess that’s always what I’m hoping that I can do is to help people increase their certainty in their own process.
Joanna: So I guess that’s one thing, is the writing a lot of books. Especially, and we’ll come back to AI, but there’s a lot of ways to produce a lot of books very fast. So we can’t compete on being a machine in terms of production.
Another change, I think, is that the focus up until reasonably recently, I guess, was Amazon. Then, of course, there was KU plus ads, that digital-first model.
Then even authors who go wide were focusing very much on retailers in general. It seems like there’s also the shift into the selling direct model in different ways.
Becca: I mean, I would agree with all of those, just in terms of the more reader-focused that we can become. I think the more we can think about how to solve the problems that readers are actually having, the more likely we are to maintain sustainability long-term.
If what readers want is more of your world, then you giving them more of your world via something like Patreon, or doing Kickstarter or something like that, is going to be what will keep them invested in your platform, over choosing to go to other people’s platforms.
So there’s this element for me of when the world shifts, we can’t control what happens in the world, so you can either react to it or not.
When the world shifts, and we move towards that people want curation, people want more good books, people want to go deeper into the things that they really like, they want more community, like those are problems that we can solve for them.
Again, like not everybody’s a community builder, I get that, but those are problems that we can solve for them.
Joanna: Well, can I just ask you then on the psychology side, because you’re really good at this stuff, and there is a big ego shift when you move to selling direct. Like your Kickstarter, Shopify stores, Patreon, Ream, any of this stuff, there is no bestseller list, no one else can see how much money you’re making.
In one way it’s freeing and in another way, well, no one can see your sales. Like most of my sales are now no longer tracked by any industry metric. They’re kind of invisible.
There’s this invisibleness of selling direct.
Which on the one hand, as I said, is great, and on the other hand, the ego sort of is blasted by this. A lot of people ask me this, they say, “But you can’t hit a bestseller list this way.”
Becca: I mean, I do think if you’re a person who needs to be seen in that way, and that is genuinely something that you would say, “You know, I’ve never hit this list before, and I want to hit this list.” I would say it’s fine to go ahead and do that.
You just need to know that that is a model that’s not necessarily moving forward in the future, especially as a lot of places are starting to get rid of their bestseller lists.
Like we’re not 100% sure that the USA Today list is going to last forever. We don’t know what’s going to happen with the New York Times list in the future. There’s so much of that that we don’t have control over.
When I coach people individually about this kind of stuff, I’m super clear. Like there are still a lot of people who would benefit from being in trad publishing. There are still a lot of people who would benefit from doing the sort of older model of trying to hit a list because that’s something that really is a marker for them, it’s something they’ve always wanted.
Similarly to, you know, talking about other topics that we’re going to talk about, there’s a level of grief of, well, that industry doesn’t exist anymore. Like the industry that we had in 2012 and 2014, or in 2016, that doesn’t exist anymore.
So we can either be really frustrated by that and be caught up in this, “but I need it, but I need it,” or—
Just on a side note, because so much of this psychologically is when it meets an ego need for you, is it actually meeting a beneficial need? Or are you in survival mode when you think about not getting that thing, and you don’t realize it?
This is part of why I’m encouraging people to read Claire Taylor’s books about the Enneagram because she deals a lot with that subconscious fear that’s underneath. Like, what happens if I don’t get what I want?
I think a lot of us are caught up in ego stroking that is not coming from, let’s say, a strengths place. There are some strengths that do need to be seen as being successful, and that’s a beneficial thing because it motivates them and makes them successful.
When it’s coming from a place of fear, like I won’t be okay if I can’t prove to other people how much I’m selling, then that’s a really different conversation from like, no, seeing those markers motivates me and helps me to compete with my peers and stuff like that. Those are two super different conversations.
If I’m coaching someone and it’s very clear that this doesn’t feel beneficial, like this feels like a fear-based thing, I usually will refer them to Claire’s book.
Joanna: Well, Claire will be coming on the show soon. I haven’t spoken to her yet, but—
Becca: Yay.
Joanna: On that, this is something I have been thinking about. There has been some things happening in the community where I’ve been then questioning, what if I let this go, this podcast go, and I let go my desire and the status I do get from being visible in the author community?
Sometimes it’s very difficult, as you know, because you’re in a similar situation. Sometimes I just think, well, could I be just a writer and shut up and stop talking about it and just do it?
I do question, like, is it coming from a place of fear? Like, could I survive that way? Or is it that, actually, I do want to be part of a community, I want to help people.
It’s something I struggle with all the time. I mean, how do you deal with that?
Becca: I have similar questions, too. Like, is it coming from a beneficial place for me? Here’s how I internalize it, because I know you also have futuristic as one of the Clifton Strengths, right?
I’m constantly imagining my paths forward and then living in that future of like, what would it feel like to exist as a writer, as a novelist, in an industry where I do have so much knowledge about how this works, and I have so much context about what success and failure looks like, and how to help people, could I sit back and watch people struggle?
I’m never going to not be in community with writers if I’m a writer. I’m always going to be at conferences, I’m always going to be talking to people. Could I sit there and watch people struggle and know that I could be helpful and not help? Like, is that possible for me to do?
When I imagine that future, I think, no. Like, I don’t think I could do that. But what is it about my current situation that I don’t like?
What I’ve done in my nonfiction career is I’ve inadvertently built a house that I can’t live in. It takes too much personal connection for me, it takes too much of my time, etc.
So as a futuristic, what I’m trying to do is think about where is the level of energy that I’m willing to give to this business and this industry that is sustainable for me? And then how do I get from where I am now down to that place? That’s what I’m navigating currently, and then what I’ll do when I get there.
I have some like metrics for my hours per month. How much time do I want to spend coaching? How much time do I want to spend writing? How much time do I want to spend on nonfiction content?
Once I get to those numbers, then I’m going to stop and reevaluate and be like, okay, is this a house I can live in in terms of if I stay in the industry and I’m less visible than I used to be, can I imagine myself forward from that place?
I do feel like the future changes so much from different vantage points. So I may not be able to tell, if I quit completely, if I’m going to be okay 10 years from now, but I can tell better if I minimize what I’m doing. Then I can pause in a year or pause in eight months, and say, okay, now am I okay? Then I’ll ask that question differently at the end of 2024.
If I were to say, zero is not possible. Otherwise, I’d have to stop writing if I was going to do zero nonfiction work at this point. So for me, I’m constantly thinking about, if I was doing it this way for the next 10 years solid, would I be able to maintain that? Then that’s kind of how I set my expectations.
Joanna: Yes, and I think for both of us, so people listening know, neither of us are going anywhere.
It is interesting, this future-casting. As you say, both of us have futuristic in our Clifton Strengths, but a lot of people don’t.
I feel like this splintering of the business models—I mean, I get emails every day right now, and I’m sure you do too, where people say, “I’ve heard that I can’t just publish on Amazon and sell a book anymore. So what do I do? Like you’re talking about Shopify and Kickstarter, but I don’t have an audience.”
Someone talks about Ream, or Patreon, or Substack, or now someone’s doing a trade show or whatever. Like, how do people deal with the uncertainty? And it’s, like you said, building for 10 years’ time, because that’s what I say.
It’s like, well, if you started now on whatever path, in 10 years’ time, you’re going be somewhere. So which path do you want to do?
I mean, there is no single formula anymore, in terms of self-publishing, or marketing, or any of these things. There are so many choices.
Becca: That is a great question. So I have a couple of different answers.
The first is, any person who cannot commit the time or feels just really insecure about doing all of the direct sales and all of the in-person events and things like that, there still are a portion of people who are selling well on the retailers alone.
It’s harder to do that. It’s much, much harder to get just your ads to deliver and to just sell ebooks only and to make a living doing that, but it’s not that no one is doing it. It’s just that it’s much more difficult than it’s ever been before.
So I would say, if you know that that’s the only thing that you can handle, then you want to set your expectations for that. You’ve got to think, well, I have got to do something to make sure that I am pleasing my audience.
Whether that’s writing the best book for me, like making me perfectly happy, or writing to market or whatever it is that you’re doing —
So whatever path I choose, I’m basically choosing the hard that I want to continue to replicate.
So if it’s too hard for me to imagine having enough self-confidence to do direct sales, to put myself out at a trade show or something like that, then I’m choosing a different version of hard, but it’s still going to be hard.
I’ve been doing a lot of listening to athletes and actors, just like interviews recently, trying to find these little snippets of conversation about things like luck and timing and hard work and talent. Like how do we balance all of the things that are necessary, and how do we increase resilience?
If what we’re expecting is that there’s an easy button to hit, or there’s an easy path, or a path that will not be difficult, then we should not be doing this job because that is definitely not the case.
I mean, I don’t think it was ever the case. I just think there are people who like hard work more than others, and so it seems easier for them because they really enjoy the hard work. For those of us who don’t like hard work, we have to know that the path is going to be difficult.
So that’s kind of the one thing I want to start off with is there are still people who can sell on retailers only, but then you have to make the decisions that are the best for those retailers.
So if you’re going to go into KU, you have to make decisions that align well with KU. If you’re going to be wide, you have to make decisions that align well with wide.
This is the second thing I would say about the potential choosing of the path. It is so unlikely in this industry that you’re going to have success, period. Like, it’s just so unlikely that you’re going to hit full-time author income that there needs to be some level of resilience in that space.
So if you’re going to work until you hit that, that you know that it’s possible to not sell, and not sell, and not sell, and not sell, and then sell. So the commitment to just doing whatever it takes to hit that space is what I think is the missing piece for an awful lot of where I’m seeing the industry going right now.
There are a lot of people who came in with the belief that it should be easy because the way that it was often talked about was how easy it was. I just think it’s never actually been easy, though.
I think we have to understand how much hard work is going to be involved in it, and we have to be willing to do that if what we want is that outcome.
Of course, and I’m sure Claire will talk about this when she comes on, but not everyone should be shooting for full-time income. That’s not what’s going to make everyone the happiest, especially because—and I talk about this from a strengths perspective a lot—especially because trying to write full time for some brain wirings is actually not beneficial.
For some people, putting the amount of pressure on yourself where you’re tying your stability and security to your creativity is going to make your creativity go away. It’s going to become harder and harder to produce, the more difficult the sales become.
So there are a lot of people in this industry who, for reasons of safety and security being the number one goal, need to have at least a part-time job bringing in money so that writing never becomes the thing they rely on to pay their mortgage.
If not, eventually the creativity is going to become inaccessible because the pressure will get to be too big.
That’s something we don’t talk about a lot because it’s not sexy. You’re not going to make a class talking about how you shouldn’t quit your day job.
Joanna: Yes. I mean, I’ve always talked about multiple streams of income.
I do make good money from book sales alone, but like you, I have other forms of income. This podcast is one of them. I like having that. It makes me feel more secure.
I love how you talk about choosing the hard you want.
Because I also still see people who are like, “Oh, well, you know, it’s easy to self-publish, and that’s what makes it like almost worthless. Whereas getting a traditional publishing deal is hard.”
You’re completely right, like—
Becca: It’s a different kind of hard.
Joanna: Yes, and it’s so funny because at the moment some of the emails I get, I’m like, look, I think you should just go and pitch a publisher.
I mean, do you find yourself saying that now? It’s so weird. I haven’t done that for a long time.
Becca: Yes, and in fact, I regularly still have coaching calls where I’ll say to someone, “I do think trad is a better fit for you.” Especially the people who are not in a place emotionally where they can handle a lot of attention.
As an indie, you have to be your own salesperson. There are a lot of people who cannot do that for themselves because they just don’t have the emotional tools for that right now.
I have a Patreon/BeccaSyme where I write blog posts every once in a while, and I’m constantly saying in my Patreon, we need to increase our emotional resilience skills if we’re going to remain indie.
There’s always going to be pain and difficulty, and you’re going to get into fight or flight mode about things.
If you don’t have the capacity to regulate yourself, like your own nervous system, then you’re not going to survive in this industry because it’s so competitive, and it’s so painful.
Even in the places where it’s like, “Oh my gosh, yes, it’s so supportive and we’re all talking about how supportive it is,” and by the way, if you have to talk about how supportive it is, I question how supportive it is.
We’re constantly having these conversations about like, yes, where there are these supportive corners. And yet, if you’re talking just to individual authors, we know how difficult this job is.
People who are trying to get into this job need to understand, like, I have to have emotional resilience, I have to be able to put myself out there in front of people.
That might mean there’s a skill that is not being executed in my brain right now that I might have to work on. I might have to reparent myself, so that I can have a better chance at doing well at this job.
There’s nothing shameful about that. That is actually really excellent self-management and self-leadership in knowing, you know what, I’m not great with criticism, so I’m going to go work on getting better at criticism because I want to write better books.
Right now, every time my editor sends me feedback, I get triggered so bad, I can’t read the feedback and work on the book. I have to put the book away.
Then I’m like, great, let’s work on some emotional resilience skills there then, so that you can take that criticism so that you can continue to grow and get better.
Joanna: Oh, so much there. Well, talking about resilience then, another big impact right now is the discussions around generative AI.
I mean, you and I have been around this industry a while. We’ve dealt with some of the big waves of war within the community. I mean, there’s been a number of these.
There’s also been some kind of real hate at different points around various people’s choices. And a lot of, again, splintering. I feel like it’s quite a relevant word around people’s attitudes around generative AI.
I mean, my listeners are at least AI-curious, or AI-positive. The anti-AI ones have gone away, generally, by now. So we sit in between the thing, but a lot of people are going through a difficult time.
We mentioned grief earlier. I do want to come back to that because I feel like I faced some of these existential questions around AI a year or so ago. I feel like I’ve been through some of this, and there’s a recalibration of what it means to be an author and why we write.
There’s this focus on craft and the process, rather than the outcome. Can a machine do this better than us? I mean, these are some big questions.
Becca: I mean, there is so much grief around this process because, of course, so many of us grew up with these dreams of having a room of one’s own and writing full time, right? Like so many of us grew up with these very vivid pictures.
So when we hear about something like AI, and we think about the shift in the market, or even just you hear me talk about saturation in the market, and it’s like, oh, there’s this piece in my head, that’s like, am I going to have this outcome?
I would say, the important thing about this industry is that it goes through changes all the time, and no one is ever 100% correct about what’s going to happen.
If you are sort of struggling with this, I would read the book, Same as Ever by Morgan Housel. He goes through these really brilliant examples after examples of the things that change the most are the things that surprise us. It’s never the stuff that we are prepared for that is what we really need to practice resilience for.
This is what I would say to people. The changes that we know for sure are coming, in terms of we know there are going to be splinters right in the industry—okay, great—
I can’t change how other people feel or think on either side of this debate, pro AI or anti AI.
I can’t change how people think, and I can’t change how people are going to act. The only thing I can change is myself.
So I need to deal very quickly with whatever grief I’m having about whatever picture I had in my head about what the future would look like because the faster I can get to acceptance, and the faster I can recalibrate what my future could now look like, the better for me.
So thinking about the larger industry—not from a Joanna and Becca perspective, but from like an individual author perspective—if I can’t affect change in the larger industry, then I have to be willing to deal with whatever happens.
That means I have to increase my ability to do emotionally resilient things. I have to increase my ability to feel successful no matter what happens.
I have to increase my ability to be able to pivot quickly and release the future that I thought was coming, without releasing my hope for the future.
Regardless of what happens in the industry, people are always going to want to read books, people are always going to want to write books. Like people people, not just machines, but people.
So as long as I know that I’m always going to write no matter what happens, even if that means I have to get a day job to support it, even if that means that I have to change my expectations about the future in order to support it, I know I want to keep writing.
Fixating on whether or not I can have this very specific picture of what I think the future should look like, that’s only going to make it harder for me to adapt to the industry. It doesn’t mean that I have to release any expectation of how I will feel because that’s usually what the picture is going to produce for us.
The picture produces freedom, or the picture produces gratitude, or it produces security, and there are other ways to find that other than the very specific picture that I have in my head.
That’s what I would say is I want us to all be as quick to accept and pivot as we can, and then as quick to provide ourselves with the needs that we have, rather than waiting for the industry to change back or waiting for the industry to catch up.
Joanna: Absolutely. It’s interesting, I mean, just in terms of practical steps. I mean, I’m an input person as well, so I input a lot on all of this stuff, and even I get overwhelmed sometimes.
So my two things are I get off social media and the internet in general, go for a walk or something, and then also, I write. As in, I create. I find joy in the process of writing.
If the whole world loses their jobs to AI, everyone will be on universal basic income, and we’ll still write. I think it’s like, okay, this is actually amazing. It could be really amazing. So just thinking about it that way.
I wanted to ask you about social media because we talked earlier about finding the people who are your people, finding readers. A lot of people are having to step off social media right now—
Becca: I would say every avenue that’s open to you, I would use it as strategically as possible. So for instance, make sure that it is exceptionally clear how people get on your newsletter in every single book that you publish. Make sure that your funnel is super, super intact.
I’m not talking about the 45 steps of creating a perfect funnel, I literally just mean if someone picks your book up, and they want more from you, is it easy for them to figure out how to get on your mailing list and how to get more from you?
This is maybe the bigger piece for me about longevity and sustainability, is —
It’s possible that me getting a BookBub every once in a while, and me running some ads, and me sort of chugging along in my book sales, and then building my newsletter organically, or building my community or my Patreon organically, is going to be the way that I’m going to function the best because it allows me to not be as present on social media, if that’s what I need to do.
Then what I want to make sure that I do for myself, again, I need to practice agency with my own feelings and not allow myself to feel preyed upon by whatever is happening in the larger industry. That is where the most unhappiness and ineffectiveness comes from is where I get stuck in a space where I miss the fact that I can choose to do something different.
I can choose to feel different. I can choose to look at different data. I can choose to not be present in some of those groups. I can choose to not listen to some of those people who are creating a lot of fear in me. I have agency over my own story.
That’s what I want us to remember. As long as I don’t quit, as long as I don’t give up, there’s always more possibility in the future for me to grow more, to put more books out, to have more readers to make more money. There’s always a possibility for that, but I have to be willing to do whatever it takes and not give up.
Joanna: Yes, and it just comes back to what we love about this process.
Like we talked about earlier, you and I back away sometimes, but we come back to this because we really do love it. We love the writing, we love the community. So yes, people listening, we’re not going anywhere.
You’ve mentioned sustainability and resilience a few times, and—
Becca: Yes, we’re going to do something a little different in this digital con. We’re going to have a couple of days of presentations on the first weekend. It is going to be the second week in May is when we’re going to start. Then we’re going to give you a week off to go and do some homework. Then we’re going to come back for a day and half on the second side.
So the conference dates—and when you see the website, you’ll see what I mean—but the conference dates are going to say something different. The goal is we want to give you a chance to put some of this into practice and to go and do some of the analysis, in terms of like my own stability, my own skills.
What am I expecting from myself that I can’t continue to produce for forever? How can I build a sustainable business? It is basically the question: how do I build a house that I can live in?
So that’s the big question for me in this conference. We call it the QTP Con, The Question The Premise Con. Basically, our goal this year is to talk about building sustainable author businesses.
Joanna: Brilliant.
Becca: BetterFasterAcademy, all one word. BetterFasterAcademy.com. All of that should be in various places on that front page.
Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Becca. That was great.
Becca: Thanks for having me.
The post Dealing With Change And How To Build Resilience As An Author With Becca Syme first appeared on The Creative Penn.
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Author: Joanna Penn
“It’s an opportunity for a character, whose story could not have been told by [Mark] Twain, to have his story told.” In this short video, Percival Everett speaks about his new novel, James (Doubleday, 2024), a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.
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Author: jkashiwabara
Rebecca Makkai discusses her newest novel, I Have Some Questions for You (Viking, 2023), and talks about spectacles of violence in media and what makes a good mystery in a conversation with journalist Rachael Brown for this 2023 Wheeler Centre event in Melbourne, including an introductory reading by playwright and novelist Suzie Miller.
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Author: bphi
A new immersive installation by artist Cauleen Smith uses scent, sight, and sound to explore the work of the late poet Wanda Coleman, widely considered the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles. Smith turned to Coleman’s work to help reacquaint her with the city after a sixteen-year absence. “L.A. is a shy one, a real one, and a terrible beauty,” Smith writes in the liner notes to an EP in the listening room of the exhibit. “You can’t really see how gorgeous it is in a drive-by, you have to sit with the banality, the horrors, the wildness of the city until it begins to become legible.” Select a poet who writes about your town, city, or region, and write a personal essay that reflects on their perspectives and your own. How can reading another writer’s observations and emotions about your hometown provide a refreshing lens to what might otherwise seem familiar?
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In this video from The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Amanda Gorman reads her poem “What We Carry,” which appears in her debut collection, Call Us What We Carry (Viking, 2021), set to world-renowned cellist Jan Vogler’s performance of “Suite for Violoncello No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007: I. Prélude” by Johann Sebastian Bach.
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Author: jkashiwabara
How can you create more beautiful print books — and make more money with your products by selling direct? Alex Smith explains how BookVault can help with various options as well as helpful resources.
In the intro, audiobooks and AI [Frankfurt Bookmesse]; Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Virtual Worlds by Joanna Penn; Google’s woke AI Gemini [The Verge]; AI solving humanity’s hardest problems [NY Times]; Demis Hassabis on Hard Fork [NY Times]; Finding my voice in the AI wars [Talena Winters].
Plus, Author Blueprint (2024) is now in print (or get the ebook here); Spear of Destiny prelaunch page.
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
Alex Smith is the technical lead of Bookvault.app, the independent printer that I use for the books I sell direct on Shopify, as well as for my Kickstarters.
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
Find out more about Alex Smith and Bookvault at Bookvault.app, which fulfils the print editions of my books at CreativePennBooks.com, and JFPennBooks.com.
Joanna: Alex Smith is the technical lead of Bookvault.app, the independent printer that I use for the books I sell direct on Shopify, as well as for my Kickstarters. So welcome to the show, Alex.
Alex: Thank you so much for having us on.
Joanna: I’m excited to talk to you. So first up, just—
And also how its parent company has been around much longer than people might think, given you kind of came out of nowhere a couple of years ago.
Alex: Yes, so Bookvault is part of a large company called Print On Demand Worldwide. So we’ve been going for just shy of 29 years now. So, longer than me.
Joanna: That’s really funny. Wait, how old are you?
Alex: I’m 24, nearly 25.
Joanna: That’s a great line. Okay, just so people know, you don’t own the company, right? You’re the technical lead, and you help all of us authors with all our stuff. Sorry, carry on about Print on Demand Worldwide.
Alex: Yes, so we have our own production facility in the UK based in Peterborough, so 70 miles north of London. From there, we’ve done short run printing for that length of period.
It was about 2009 that we launched Bookvault, and that was to serve our traditional publishers that we’d been working with, mainly in the academic sector.
So they had a need to print single books on demand and in kind of a simple ordering process. So Bookvault was always kind of fenced off for them. It was an invite-only kind of system.
When COVID struck, pretty much as everyone did, we sat back and evaluated our business. It gave us a real good time to kind of see where we’re going. So we took those two years to completely redevelop the system, moving it more to kind of a self-sign-up approach and target the indie author market as well.
So we relaunched it around late 2021. That’s when we popped up on the scene. I think we then met you at London Book Fair in ’22, and that’s where we’ve been going since.
Joanna: Yes, and as we speak, you’re at another conference, and you’re at a lot of the conferences. So hopefully, some of the people listening might have met you or Curtis or one of the team. Just in case people don’t know—
Alex: So our big focus is to deliver high-quality books to help our authors earn more.
So we’ve got a wide variety of print options. So we currently offer six stocks. So that ranges everything from the kind of similar stuff that you get from KDP and Ingram with those traditional trade papers.
Equally, we offer some more kinds of different papers. So a really nice, coated paper for children’s books and things like that. So that’s something we really focus on.
Equally, we’ve got six different bindings as well. So that allows you to get your traditional paperback or printed case bound.
We also offer linen wrap with foiling and a jacket. We offer spiral and wire bound, so they’re kind of lay-flat books. As well as saddle stitch as well, so that’s where you’ve got a staple in the middle, and that kind of pamphlet thing.
So in terms of sizings as well, we don’t have specific sizing. So you can upload a book of any size from A6 all the way to 297×297 millimeters. So it’s a really big range, and that’s in all those different bindings as well.
Equally, a big thing for us as well is we offer split color. So if you’ve got a 100-page book and only one-color page, we’ll only charge you for that one color page. That is a really big thing for us.
One thing to note as well with Bookvault is that we do have an upload fee. That does stop the mass uploads. So when we initially relaunched it, it was a bit of naivety from us, we had someone in a weekend upload 20,000 books, all with different kittens on.
So that completely ground the system to a halt and realized we had to do something. I mean, I like kittens, but not that many kittens. So we had to put that upload fee in place.
We do work with organizations, such as the Alliance of Independent Authors, and every Alliance of Independent Authors member gets unlimited free title uploads each month. So it’s not there as a barrier, it’s just there to make sure that we’ve got genuine people wanting to make genuine money for selling their books.
Joanna: We know how important that is. I actually think some of these other places are going to put in some kind of nominal fee because it is kind of getting a bit crazy.
Let’s come back to a few of the books. So amusingly, because of the sizing, this is what’s so funny. You remember it, right, we met at London Book Fair, and I said, “Can I upload my five by eight files, the ones that I’d already got for KDP?”
Lulu, the kind of other main one that people were using for things like Kickstarter and all of that, they didn’t offer a five by eight. So that was the moment I was like, “Great. I can just upload the same file.”
So I wanted to point that out to people is the files that you might have done for KDP, you can upload to Bookvault. The upload is pretty easy, but just tell people—
Alex: Yes, certainly I think using a template or getting your sizing right is the most important one.
We have a few set sizes that people generally use there, as well as a custom one. There’s a size called “standard,” and quite a lot of people seem to tick that one no matter what size their file is and think that they’re going to produce a standard book with whatever you upload.
So it’s really important to make sure your sizing is exactly correct. We do have online validation. So as soon as you upload a file, it’ll automatically go through and ticket, and then it’ll be straight away ready to order. So it’s kind of worth doing that.
Then once you have uploaded, make sure to download the files and do a virtual proof and check that they look okay as well.
I think you probably agree, the most important thing we see what people don’t do is order a proof when you’ve uploaded it. So you can just order a single copy to yourself.
We’ve had people upload a title and then do a Kickstarter run of 500 books, and as soon as it comes off the end of the line, it gets warped because it doesn’t look right. It’s always a pretty nerve-wracking experience.
Joanna: Yes, I mean that it’s just crazy. A couple of things there, one is—and amusingly, I said five by eight there, which is in inches if people don’t know—and I think you’ve now added a toggle, haven’t you, so that it’s centimeters and inches.
Alex: Yes, millimeters and inches. We’ve had people trying to upload a book that was five millimeters by eight millimeters. So they ran into a few issues there.
Joanna: That’s so funny.
Alex: Being a UK company, even myself, trying to get my head around inches and millimeters, I need a little pocket calculator to quickly do it. But yes, you can toggle between it.
Joanna: Also, so people know, because I did this the other day, you can upload an interior file and then download a template for the cover, can’t you?
Alex: Yes. So that’s something we’ve worked on, and we’re looking to enhance it even further.
Even before you’ve made a title, you can go onto our quoting tool, put the sizes in and specifications, and then you can download both an interior template and a cover template. As well as if you want to upload a jacket as well, you can download a jacket template.
Joanna: So then the other thing is, I think many of us want to do more and more higher quality print books. You mentioned six stocks and special paper, you mentioned six bindings and lots of different types of things.
I know in terms of the covers, you can have different colored covers and materials. Like I did a ribbon, and there’s all this different foil, and it’s almost like there are so many options now.
How do they know what to even think about asking for or trying out?
Alex: So something we really pride ourselves on is customer service. So that’s something we’ve noticed as we’ve grown, we’re expanding with customer service because we really want to make sure that we can offer a really high level of service to everyone.
So I think we’ve got two new people starting this week. So we’re growing quite, quite big there. So one thing I would always suggest is on our contact page, you can book a call with someone. So you can book a call with one of our print experts to kind of talk through your options.
They can show you on a video of what you might be looking at as well. So that’s free of charge. Quite a lot of our customer service people come from the print floor, so they will have a very detailed knowledge of how it all works.
Joanna: That’s good. I mean, I take lots of pictures of books, like at London Book Fair, where I’ll see you in a couple of weeks’ time. It’s like, okay, I really like that, I don’t know what it’s called, but if I show that picture to you, you’ll know what it’s called.
Alex: Yes. We have been stumped a couple of times because the obscurity, especially some books coming out of China, there’s things we’ve never seen. Generally, there’s at least someone in the office that knows what it is.
Joanna: Yes, exactly. So a couple of things that people might have heard of that may be coming. I mean, like you did ribbons for me.
Alex: That’s ready to go. So it’ll be launching very imminently, probably in the next couple of weeks. It’s something that we want to make sure, again, that we’ve got the level of customer service that we need for when they launch. We feel there’s going to be a few questions.
So we’ve got quite a big event block at the moment, but as soon as that’s kind of finished the end of March time, they’ll be coming out live on the portal for anyone to order.
Joanna: Oh, okay. Then what about foil? Because Sacha Black right now is doing an amazing cover with rainbow foil. Like, I’m a bit jealous because I had really beautiful gold foil on Writing the Shadow, but now I’m like, rainbow foil, I didn’t even know rainbow foil was a thing!
Alex: So as I say, we’re kind of taking it back as a company. Our owner, Andy Cork, he’s always been a yes-man. So whenever the publishers come up to him asking for something, he would always say yes. It’ll be one of the things where when he walks in the office, we’re always worried about what he’s agreed to next.
So as a company, we like to be able to do things that maybe other POD printers can’t do. So we’re introducing foiling. So that’ll be the case that you supply an additional file with a black outline of what you want foiling.
Effectively, once we’ve printed the cover, the jacket, we can then put it through the foiling machine and it will print the foil on top as well. So we’ve got gold, silver, the holographic rainbowy silver, as well as a green, I believe. We’ll kind of be expanding that along with these new changes with ribbons, as well as head and tail bands and endpapers as well.
Joanna: Oh, endpapers.
Because that was on my list.
Alex: So printed endpapers, for those that don’t know, is when you open the hardback of a book, usually with POD printing it will be either white or cream printed on the inside of the case. So printed endpapers are effectively similar to an interior page where we would print in color kind of another full spread image across it. So it creates a really nice high-quality finish.
Again, with Sacha Black’s most recent Kickstarter, we printed some lips on the inside. So yes, you’ll be able to upload an additional file on both the front and back of the hardback book, which will be a completely printed endpaper.
Joanna: Will the texture be different? Or is it just like normal paper?
Alex: It is a slightly thicker paper. It’s 170 GSM. So it’s kind of the same thickness as a jacket.
Joanna: Okay, cool. I should say, Sacha’s are not just lips, they’re vampire lips with fangs. People can have a look at that on her Kickstarter, which I’ll link. It might have finished by the time this goes out, but the pictures will still be on the Kickstarter. So I think this is really, really cool.
So let’s go through some of the other things that might be coming in this year that people might be interested in.
Alex: The biggest thing that I’m most excited about, and I guess it’s something we haven’t talked about too much.
I think the recent kind of delivery date we’ve been given is July.
So that will land in the facility in July, and we’ve already done the code for it. So as soon as it’s kind of there, we’ll be able to drop it straight onto the site. So on a single copy basis you can do sprayed edges books as well. I’m really excited about that.
Joanna: On a single copy. So that’ll be print on demand?
Alex: Yes. All print on demand.
Joanna: Wow. Okay. So if people don’t know—
Alex: So on both paperback and hardback, if you’ve got a book block, you normally kind of just see the white or the cream of the paper on the edge of the book itself. So you’ll be able to print a fully digital image on that.
So we’ve seen some really cool ones where the front cover wraps all the way round to the back and again, so it’s like a complete 360-degree picture. Or people have done really nice patterns and stuff like that. So yes, it’s really exciting.
Joanna: So just to be clear, if people are holding a book in their hand with the spine against their palm, kind of the edges of the pages if they hold it towards them normally look white or cream, as you say. This will be that you can actually have a pattern on there or, like you say, a cover. So it means you can just put a lot more art on your book, right?
Alex: Yes. I think it’s one of those where you look at Kickstarter and someone is selling their kind of traditional book there for 10 or 15 pounds, or with sprayed edges it is 60 or 70 pounds. So it just makes so much more of a premium product.
It’s one of those that probably you won’t traditionally do it for every book you sell. You kind of sell to those superfans, this special edition, and really on a higher markup. It is just great at the end of it.
Joanna: Well, that is cool because my next Kickstarter, Spear of Destiny, will happen in June. So that might be possible, right?
Alex: Yes, I would imagine so. That’ll be really exciting.
Joanna: That will be. What I like I think about doing the, as you say, it could be print on demand, but I actually really like doing the special editions for the Kickstarters. Like Sacha’s doing, too. Obviously, signing them and all that kind of thing.
So it is interesting to consider what we can do as print on demand, and then what we keep as special, I guess. Are there any things that you do that would have to be a special run?
Alex: No. So I guess our business model has always been print on demand, because at the end of the day, you would also want to see a proof. So we just like to set ourselves up as anything we can do as print on demand.
I mean, certainly with these bespoke things, it won’t be as you expect with Amazon and Ingram where they come in a couple of days. It will take slightly longer. I think that’s something you can—if you’re selling direct—you can deal with by messaging and say it’s bespoke, and it’s being handmade, etc. So, yes, that’s kind of the route we’re taking.
Joanna: Yes, we’ll come back to what’s different about selling direct, but just a few more things. So last summer, you made a box for a trilogy of mine.
Alex: Yes, they’re kind of all lined up with this launch, with ribbons, advanced foiling, and all of those things. So it’s going to be a very exciting release.
As I say, it’s something I think is going to completely change the way of our business, as well as kind of the way that authors have the ability to do stuff because there’s very little options out there, especially on a single copy basis, to do these special editions.
Joanna: Okay, and so on that, the box would be different for every single person’s books. It’s not a standard size. So it would get built to order.
Alex: Yes, so already on Bookvault, you can create a bundle. So effectively, you select a series of books that you want to be shipped together, and then that gives you a single ISBN or SKU. Then you can download a template for that to be able to generate a book box.
So we’re also working with Reedsy, we’re just working with some of their designers as well. So we have some designers on hand that we can point in the direction of to create that artwork box as well. It’s a bit different, I guess, to the traditional thing that you’d expect with a book.
Joanna: Yes, and this is really interesting because I do agree. I think the design has to be more than just what was on the cover, for example. So yes, there’s a lot more potential design work involved, which in itself is very exciting.
I guess for people listening, the reason we’re doing this is, one, because we all love books, and we really like beautiful objects. But also —
I think this is a way to set ourselves apart.
Also, we can make more money per copy. We’re not going to go into the finances of this, and obviously, these more special editions cost more money to print, but you can still make a good profit, as I know.
So just a few more things. So my next project after Spear of Destiny is going to be a high-quality photo coffee table book on Gothic Cathedrals.
Alex: So we offer two different print options at Bookvault. So we’ve got standard and premium. So our standard print is all done via an inkjet. So effectively, it’s a massive roll of paper on the end of a printer that kind of goes straight through and is chopped straight into a book. That works fantastically for, I’d say, 99% of all books.
We do also offer premium printing as well. So that comes out of a toner device. So it’s kind of your traditional printer of feeding in sheets and trimming them down from that.
So that’s perfect, as you mentioned, for the coffee table books and those side of things. So it’s really nice vibrant color on a glossy paper you would traditionally see with photo books or coffee table books.
The one thing I would mention, and it’s always good to be open with this caveat, is we are still a digital printer. So you won’t get those Pantone color matches that you might do with other arts printers or litho printers or things like that. We try to get the best color match for your file, but equally, there may be a slight deviation.
Joanna: Yes, okay. That’s great. I’ve written down here, “Kickstarter help.”
Alex: Yes.
Joanna: Because you and I have had emails going backwards and forwards with spreadsheets, and you guys have been so helpful to me. But obviously, if more and more authors do this, you can’t necessarily offer sort of individual help like you’ve given me.
Alex: As Kickstarters are growing more and more, myself, personally, yes, head banging against the wall with different data and kind of formats and stuff like that. So we’ve built in a bulk upload tool.
So again, this will be launching with all these ribbons. It’s going to be a big launch of kind of all the bespoke options and Kickstarter help.
So effectively, you’ll be able to upload your spreadsheet, that’s your kind of backer spreadsheet of Kickstarter, or a template one that you’ve created yourself. That sends the data fields to Bookvault, and then it will automatically import all those orders for you.
So the plan is, it’s very hands off. So certainly, it’s going to make our life easier, but also you can upload a bulk order in a matter of, I say, minutes. It’s still good to check all the data and make sure it’s come across as you’d expect.
We’ve seen, I don’t know why, just someone sent over a spreadsheet the other week that had obscure spaces, so it just made every space got replaced with a question mark or something like that. So it’s always good just to validate it, and if you have any issues reach out to us. But with 99% of people that should just be a case of uploading a file and it importing all the orders.
Joanna: Oh, I’m excited about that. So wait, that will be done by my next campaign?
Alex: Yes, it will be.
Joanna: Thank goodness for that. I think this is what’s exciting. One, thank you personally, because I very much value having someone who’s so enthusiastic about technology. Also, you have this great can-do attitude. I guess you mentioned Andy has that too, and the team generally does. It’s like, we’re going to make this happen.
So often with tech companies, having also worked for some myself, it’s, “No, you can’t do that. You have to do what our system tells you to do. We’re not going to build anything.” Whereas you’ll just be like, “No, we can do that,” and build something, which I love.
Alex: I think that’s obviously myself attending some of your events as well. I think the first one for me was 20Books Vegas where I was kind of taken a bit back. It was just me on a little table, and I basically lost all my material within the first hour.
So it was really fantastic speaking to authors and hearing what they want to do.
I think we’re looking at it, seeing the traditional players kind of saying you’ve got to adhere to exactly what they want to do, or you don’t do it at all. So yes, it’s certainly something we’re really pushing at as a business because we can and we want to.
Joanna: I mean, we’re indie authors, and you’re an indie printer. So, I mean, yes, that’s the idea, which I love. I also want people listening to keep this in mind.
I feel like, and I’m sure you guys do, people have a certain way of addressing KDP help or Ingram Spark help or some of the help desk for some of the big companies.
They might assume that you have warehouses and warehouses of staff, but you don’t, do you? It’s a small company.
Alex: So I mean, we are growing. So that’s one big thing for us is customer service. That’s why we just took on two new people, and it’s kind of an ever-growing thing.
We are a relatively small company. We still have room for growth and things like that. But, yes, there is always someone at the end of the phone or at the end of the email that is a nice person. So they’ll help you.
Joanna: Yes, so be nice. I do like that you now have a help desk ticket system. This is something of what was on my list for you like last year or whatever. It was like you need a ticket system. So now, once you’re a Bookvault customer, you can access this form, and you can raise a ticket.
I mean, obviously there are always—not always, not every single time—but I mean, I sell quite a lot of books, and a customer might email me and say, “Oh, this shipment didn’t arrive,” or something. I just go in, and I raise a ticket, and one of the team will look at it.
So I think it’s really good that you have that way of doing stuff. That’s important as well. It makes me feel happy that you’re dealing with it, and the team do that really quickly.
Alex: I think support is something we saw with our growth, we noticed a demand in. So we introduced a ticket system. We’ve also been kind of expanding our Help Center as well. Generally, if there’s something not on the Help Center, as they’re replying to an email, they’ll also add it on there as well. So that’s ever growing.
Also, we’re working with a creator as well to create some YouTube videos on the whole process of Bookvault, kind of step through how to do each thing as well. So that’s something that is ever growing for us as well.
Joanna: Okay, a couple more things. One is I am very lucky in that I can drive like three hours and can be at your factory, and that’s how we’ve done the signing for the book. Sacha lives in Peterborough, so she pops around to there too.
I mean, there is something called tip-ins. Is that a possibility? Or is it that people will have to ship books to themselves and then ship them on?
Alex: Yes, certainly that’s something we’re exploring. So we are, I guess, starting with the basic stuff with the kind of bespoke stuff, the ribbons and things like that.
Signing is something we’re addressing. I think the biggest concern for us is we obviously print in the UK and the US, but the US is not our facility. So we can’t just demand them to do certain things. So stuff like signed books would have to be done in the UK.
So we’re just kind of looking at the customs side of things of shipping paper over there for them to sign and then shipping it back. So we don’t have an estimate on it yet, but it’s certainly something we’re looking at. Because, again, a signed book is something you can add a lot more value to as well.
Joanna: Exactly. I mean, I love the fact that I’ve been an indie author for like 15 years now, and every year we have had more options for what we can do.
I mean, I remember back in the day, we weren’t even allowed to do pre-orders on Kindle, or as a non-American author, I couldn’t even publish on Kindle back in like 2008, whenever it was.
So it’s so brilliant to hear some of the things you’re bringing in. You know, we see pictures of Neil Gaiman who obviously is super famous, but he will sign front sheets. He doesn’t sign books, he’ll sign front sheets, and then they’ll get sent to the printer, and then they’ll get put in.
Let’s face it, there’s some indie authors with really big audiences who might be interested in doing that.
Alex: Yes, definitely. As you say, I think it’s interesting because —
I think that’s kind of where it’s heading, you know, it’s a lot more adaptable.
Whereas traditional publishers just think that they can stay with their traditional ways and do what they do, indie publishers are actually pushing forward and doing more interesting and exciting things as well.
Joanna: Yes, absolutely. Or, I guess, like we mentioned, it’s rare to see. Like at Christmas, I saw a couple of books with sprayed edges in Waterstones, I bought one for my niece, but they’re just not normal because they’re more expensive. Most books don’t get that treatment. So yes, I’m excited about that.
You mentioned the US printer. So talk about that, because obviously your Peterborough plant is in the UK.
Alex: So we have a partner facility based out of Ohio in Ashland through Baker and Taylor. So they’ve been in the printing game a long time as well. Our US expansion started last July when we started sending books over there, and it’s kind of continually going.
To be completely honest, we’ve been taken aback by the demand. So there’s been cases where things have moved a bit slower than we would like, but the great thing is we’ve always been able to back that up with our UK facility as well.
So whereas if something is out of capacity in the US, we’ve been able to ship from the UK in kind of the same time scales for our consolidated service, so that’s a positive.
So they offer kind of the base specs things. So they do the split color. They also do printed paperbacks and printed hardbacks in your kind of trade paper, so your cream and your white kind of textbook paper as such.
So yes, that’s all printed out of the US. The timescales are generally three to five days for a book. So, again, it’s nice and quick.
Joanna: Yes, and just to circle back to bundles because we glossed over that. It really is brilliant in that when you go to create a book, you can create a book, and then you can create a bundle and link them together.
So on my Shopify store, people can order, say, the first three of my ARKANE thrillers in print, and it goes through as one order as a bundle, and they get a special deal. It just makes it much more easier to price at the front end.
Also, then the order goes through, and then it’s three — or 12 — books. I have those going out almost every day in the US, which is pretty exciting. So yes, I do think that that bundle technology, which again, people can do it themselves. Like they don’t have to ask anyone, right? They just go in and set up another bundle.
Alex: Yes, and that’s what we generally do. We kind of start stuff off as a closed thing, so similar to what we’ve done with the bespoke options. We do it ourselves manually for a bit, just to try and iron out any kinks or work out what goes wrong.
We did that with bundles, and I know that got very tedious. So yes, we now have the option for someone just to log onto the Bookvault portal and set up bundles themselves and get it all going. So it’s really, really good.
Joanna: It is. Just for people, if you are selling direct, bundling print books is fantastic. It makes the deal look better, but you can also make good money. Whereas people are like, “Oh, you can just do that on Amazon.” Well, Amazon’s print prices, we make very little money from print on Amazon.
This is, again, why we’re all so excited. We can actually make decent money on print and print bundles. So I have bundles of three, and I have a 12-book bundle which also sells So yes, that’s exciting.
So I also wanted to ask about merchandise since you have a sister company that offers mugs and stuff like that. Many authors who have Shopify stores want to add this kind of thing.
Alex: Yes, so we have as part of the Print on Demand Worldwide umbrella, we also have a company called Photobubble. So that’s UK based, and that kind of focuses on the equivalent of Snapfish. So we do photo books, and as you say, mugs, tote bags, etc.
So that is something we’re planning to merge into the Bookvault system as well. So you can bundle things like a coffee mug with a book and do those kinds of upsell bundles as well.
For Kickstarters, you can do those reward tiers with different things. So again, they will be all print on demand and single copy. I need to get the habit of single copy for mugs, but single mugs. So they’ll all be done through the Bookvault portal, and we’re probably looking towards the middle of the year for that.
Joanna: Okay, and I mean, most authors are looking at bookmarks, and posters, cards, that kind of thing.
Alex: Yes. Again, that will kind of all be through that side of things as well. So you’ll be able to upload a leaflet that goes with every order, or you’ll be able to send yourself a boatload of leaflets, or bookmarks, etc.
So yes, that’s all exciting. I think that’s, again, something that with selling direct, people use apps like Printful, which is great, but then you’ve got to charge a customer twice for shipping because you’ve got the book coming from ourselves, and then the mug coming from Printful. So combining those together will be, I hope, a game changer.
Joanna: Exactly. I mean, I did enable some of this originally. Also, I was concerned about the quality. Not that the quality was bad, it’s just you really do have to check everything and test everything. I was like, look, I would much rather be able to know that my books are going out with the mug or whatever from you guys. So I turned off my other stuff, and I am waiting for the merch.
Alex: I need to stop going to all these conferences and be tanning myself on the beach!
Joanna: Do some work, Alex. You’re so lazy!
Alex: I know.
Joanna: By the way, everyone listening, this is a joke. I have had many emails from Alex at like 1 am or 2 am. I mean, you’ve worked so hard. Weekends. You barely ever have a day off. I appreciate all your hard work. I know how hard you work, and I really do appreciate it.
Okay, so let’s talk about something else, which is when authors do print on demand, usually with Amazon and with Ingram, it’s either free or there’s a small charge to upload, but then they get paid by that company. So if people use KDP print, Amazon will pay them for the books.
Alex: So direct selling is fantastic because you’re in control of your own business. So effectively you are the payment gateway. All we would do is take the print.
So effectively, if you had your own direct store, the customer would pay you for the print and shipping of the book. Then you would then just pay us for the print.
So you would kind of get everything there. So it’s a really highly profitable way of selling things.
We offer a range of apps for direct sale stores on Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, Zapier, and there’s a few other ones. I think TikTok Shop is in the works as well, which we’re really excited for.
Joanna: Payhip as well, I think.
Alex: Yes, Payhip as well. So it’s a really good way of kind of doing that as an automated way of the journey. I think it’s, for me, I feel like the way forward. It’s one of those things that you can’t jump into it too quickly, but equally, once you do jump into it and do it bit by bit, it works really well.
Joanna: I would totally agree with you. You and I, I mean, you are very technical, I am reasonably okay with some technical stuff. How technical do people have to be in order to implement Bookvault onto their WooCommerce, or their Wix, or their Shopify?
Alex: I think it all depends on the platform you use. So Shopify, we always tend to direct people to. It’s a really nice, simple platform. You can do more advanced things on it, but if you take the kind of baseline, it’s really simple.
WooCommerce is kind of a bit more technically minded. There might be plugin conflicts and things like that. So it’s always worth noting that.
In terms of the Bookvault app itself, we try and make things as easy as possible. So you effectively go to the systems App Store and install the Bookvault plugin. What that then does is you link up your account, and then you can also link up the titles.
So Bookvault will know that when that title is ordered on your store, it needs to fulfill this product. That works for both individual titles, but as you mentioned before, also bundles as well.
In terms of shipping, we’ve seen with other apps on the market, people kind of have to go in and do each shipping rate manually one by one and kind of work out. Our app sits in the middle and it will pull the most up to date pricing and serve it to the customer. The customer pays exactly what you would get charged.
That gets updated 24/7, and I think it uploads on Shopify just shy of 40,000 shipping rates. So if you had to do that manually yourself, you’d be there a very long time.
Then when the order comes through, it automatically picks up that order, sends it straight to Bookvault, and print and fulfills it directly to the customer from either the UK or US facility for you.
So the only thing you really need to do is if you’re not happy to link a payment card, go in and pay for that order. Or you can add a balance or link a payment card and it’ll automatically go through and process that for you.
Joanna: Yes, so just to reiterate, with this way of doing things, like you mentioned, so if someone orders a book on my Shopify store, they will pay, and if it’s PayPal, I’ll get the money like immediately, and if it’s Shopify pay I’ll get it within like 48 hours.
If the order goes through to Bookvault, and I have a balance there, and it comes off my balance. Or I could pay for it individually as it goes through, I’ve got a credit card on it.
So in terms of cash flow, you do have to be aware of that. Most orders it won’t be a problem because you’re not going to get like 30,000 orders in one day. So it’s more kind of spread out.
I did want to make it clear to people because I feel like some people are surprised that you’re not paying them.
Alex: Yes, and I think that it’s a different way of doing it. Again, it’s one of those that if you do have any questions, you can reach out to the team and they can talk you through the process. They’ve done it countless times. So yes, it’s really good.
Equally as a company as well, we do also offer the kind of distribution model as such. We call it more of a stepping stone to direct sales. So we have our own retailer called The Great British Bookshop, and as I say, that probably sits more as our store, but it also is kind of a direct sales stepping stone.
So we will actually only charge 10% royalties minus the print cost. So you retain 90% minus the print cost there. So that’s another way of earning kind of a higher margin than the likes of Amazon.
Also we pay out the royalties on the 14th of every month as well. So if you were to make a sale in March, we would then pay it out on the 14th of April or the closest working day.
Joanna: Which is quicker than Amazon and some of the others. Just on that, people tend to, including myself, we use Ingram Spark to go to their network of over 40,000 retailers.
So I use KDP print just for Amazon, then I use Ingram Spark for this wider, and then I use you guys for direct and Kickstarter. But as you mentioned, you do have distribution too.
Alex: No. So generally with distribution models, it always is generally who will win the buy box. So it can work with both ways. It’s always best to have a primary distributor. So that would kind of be whoever you wish to choose, but then you can also list with other distributors there.
Something exciting that we’re working on, it’s in a very closed beta at the moment, but it is something we’re hoping to launch in the next couple of months, I would say. It is more of an enhanced distribution model.
So currently, we distribute to Amazon retailers and a couple of others in the UK. We’re working with Baker and Taylor to cover the US distribution. We are also working with an Indian distributor to cover the Indian market, as well as the Brazilian market, and also the South African market.
So that will start to grow our distribution platform because we’ve always been generally UK focused. Now we’re thinking worldwide and kind of pushing out to those worldwide channels.
Joanna: I love it.
Alex: Yes. As I say, with traditional, it’s always been like, this is our job, and we need to do it. Whereas now we’ve got the avenues to, as I say, go worldwide.
Joanna: Yes, and there’s a lot of energy. I think that’s the other thing is there is a lot of good energy. Indie authors are so pleased to be like, “Ooh, you mean I can do foil? That’s amazing.”
Alex: I think that’s the thing, and that’s why I like going to the events so much. When you’re talking to people, not only are they giving us ideas as well and kind of helping us steer in the right direction, but we’re able to show what can be done.
I think when you go on a podcast and mention about foiling, it’s really hard to picture that. Whereas if you see us in person, you can really see those beautiful books.
So we did a talk at the Superstars of Writing, and we have the books all up on show, and I think we have to usher people out of the room in the end because they needed it for the next talk.
Joanna: That’s awesome. Also, you mentioned Reedsy earlier around designers maybe doing box sets and things like that and having a sort of referral process.
Is that something that you’ve mentioned to them? Because people must ask that all the time.
Alex: Yes, I think it’s a difficult one because there is the need to, say, if you’ve not got time to kind of work with someone. But equally, I think with direct sales, it’s so important to know your store and to be able to have a steer on it.
So we work with a company called Digital Authors Toolkit. Stuart there, he kind of focuses on Wix and does offer websites there. So if we do have people, we push them in that direction. He’s fantastic. He’s UK based, and he’s great. It is something I think there is a gap for and it needs to be grown on.
Joanna: Well, I think there’s a lot of exciting times ahead. Obviously, you and the team go to many of the author conferences, so people can certainly see you there or reach out to the team.
Alex: So online, we’ve got our website which is bookvault.app. There you can sign up to Bookvault portal, as well as get a quote before creating an account.
We also have our social platforms as well. So we’re on the kind of usual ones, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or X, I guess now, where we kind of run promotions as well as publish articles and things like that.
We’re trying to grow the YouTube channel a little bit as well, so that’ll provide kind of helpful videos, as I say, that we’re working on how to do little things.
Then also, primarily, we’re attending a lot of events as well. So we’re at 20Books Seville in a couple of weeks’ time, then London Book Fair. We’ve got an indie author conference in Huntington as well. Inkers Con, NINC, and then Author Nation as well, which we’re excited for at the end of the year.
Joanna: Oh, fantastic. Well, I will see you in Seville.
Alex: I’m looking forward to it.
Joanna: Great. Thanks so much for your time, Alex. That was great.
Alex: Thank you very much.
The post How To Create Beautiful Print Books And Sell Direct With Alex Smith From Bookvault first appeared on The Creative Penn.
Go to Source
Author: Joanna Penn
How can you write a memoir that is emotionally honest and revealing enough for readers to care, and cope with the inevitable fear of judgment that evokes? How can you write about real places and people in memoir?
Why is editing a memoir so challenging and what should you keep in mind around publishing and marketing choices? J.F. Penn gives her tips after writing her midlife solo travel memoir, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways.
Thanks to everyone who backed my Kickstarter for Pilgrimage, and to my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn, who help fund the extra time it takes to produce these solo episodes.
J.F. Penn is the Award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, and travel memoir. Jo lives in Bath, England with her husband and two British short-hair cats, and enjoys a nice G&T.
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.
You can buy Pilgrimage in all the usual formats from my store, JFPennBooks.com as well as the special hardback and paperback with photos from the trips. It’s also on all the usual stores in all the usual formats, or order from your library or local bookstore.
If you want to read about the day-by-day pilgrimages, and see photos from the routes — The Pilgrims Way and the St Cuthbert’s Way in the UK, and the Camino de Santiago Portuguese Coastal — go to
https://www.booksandtravel.page/pilgrimage-resources/ for all the links to my trips, gear list, questions to think about, and interviews.
You can find my lessons learned from the campaign and more tips for Kickstarter at https://www.thecreativepenn.com/selldirectresources/
If you want more interviews on writing memoir and book recommendations, go to https://www.thecreativepenn.com/writing-memoir/
I wrote this little book about writing travel memoir as a stretch goal for the Backers of my Pilgrimage Kickstarter in February, 2023. Thank you so much if you supported the campaign!
I thought I would turn these notes into a craft book at some point, but as I shared in the episode on my 15-year Creative Pivot, I have a lot of other projects on the go, and I wanted to share this information with my wider community in the hope that it will help you if you want to write memoir of any kind, or even just non-fiction with more personal elements.
It is designed to be read or listened to after the Pilgrimage book as there may be spoilers, and also it makes more sense to be read in context. You can buy Pilgrimage at my store, www.jfpennbooks.com and also on all the usual stores in all the usual formats, but hopefully the information is still useful even if you haven’t read the book.
If you feel the urge to write a memoir, it might still take some time to work out what the hell you’re writing!
I’ve been wanting to write a travel book for years, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to write. As a discovery writer, I figure out what I’m writing once I actually start writing it, so although I have written journals related to my travels for decades, nothing emerged as a coherent potential book.
To take a step back, I have a lot of potential ways into a travel book.
My mum took me and my brother to live in Malawi, Africa, in the early 1980s and my memories of going to school there are full of the wonder of being ‘somewhere else.’
I still remember looking out at the sunrise over the Sahara desert from the plane cockpit back in the days when they let kids go up there. Those were also the days when people still smoked on planes, and I remember how my mum made us breathe through handkerchiefs to save us breathing too much in.
Those early years may have triggered my wanderlust, and I started reading travel books in my teens. The Life of My Choice by Wilfred Thesiger, Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence, The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, and so many more. I wanted to be like them and travel the world, experiencing everything and writing about my adventures.
Fast forward more than thirty years and I was writing non-fiction for authors, and also fiction as J.F. Penn, incorporating my more recent travels into my stories. Morgan Sierra, in my ARKANE series in particular, is my alter-ego and her adventures and thoughts are often my own. Although of course, I am not ex-Israeli military; I don’t know Krav Maga, and I don’t chase bad guys!
But despite all my published work, I still had a desire to write travel, and so in 2019, I started BooksAndTravel.page, with articles and photos about travel and books, as well as a bi-monthly podcast.
The goal was to use the site to write memoir-style essays and create thematic episodes around my travels as well as interview other writers, and hopefully, figure out what I wanted to write in terms of a travel book, and build an audience along the way.
I did lots of solo episodes on my Books and Travel Podcast including why I travel, the importance of home in difficult times, the three trips that changed my life, Venice, scuba diving, Oxford, Australia, Bath, and more. [Episodes are linked on this page.]
I had ideas for starting a separate business around guided trips and retreats, as well as books and other travel-related products.
Then, in early 2020, the pandemic struck, and the world changed.
The travel industry changed too, and I also learned more about how the business side of it worked. The Books and Travel Podcast sustained me during the years of no travel, and slowly, I found examples of books that enabled me to see a path to writing my own.
At first, I thought I would write an A to B travel narrative with personal elements, like Alastair Humphreys’, My Midsummer Morning. [Interview with Alastair here.]
I thought I might have several such books, one per walk/solo trip, similar to Holly Worton’s Alone on the Ridgeway. [Interview with Holly here.]
But after walking the Pilgrims’ Way, I realized I didn’t want to write a book about individual routes. I didn’t have enough material to make it a worthwhile narrative, and it just didn’t feel right.
Also, if I started writing these kinds of books, then I would need to write them for each trip. I still wanted to write my other books, and I just couldn’t see how I would have time for it all.
Then I discovered travel books which are more a series of trips hung around thematic chapters, and that seemed like a better fit for my project.
Open Road: A Midlife Memoir of Travel Through the National Parks of the USA by Toby Neal was a great example [Interview with Toby here], as well as Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction by Roz Morris.[Interview with Roz here.]
Both have chapters about different places interspersed with the emotional aspects of memoir.
In addition, although not specifically travel, Rachael Herron’s A Life in Stitches is also similar as a series of emotionally resonant linked essays about knitted garments. Rachael also has a craft book, Fast Draft Your Memoir, which is useful for the writing craft aspect. [Interview with Rachael here.]
TIP: Find books that are similar to what you want to write and model them.
There are lots of different travel sub-genres, and Jeremy Bassetti has a great article about 10 different kinds on his site, Travel Writing World. They include the travelogue, the quest, the investigation, the big idea, the mode (e.g. cycling), and more. I discussed aspects of travel writing with Jeremy in this interview.
I found this to be a critical part of the writing process, as until I had a ‘model’ for my book, I struggled to structure it. Once I knew it would be thematic chapters with vignettes, it was easier to work out what the book might be.
“Writing the self is a tricky, slippery business.” Cathy Rentzenbrink, Write It All Down: How to Put Your Life on the Page
Before writing, I knew intellectually that memoir might take a lot more time than other kinds of writing, but truthfully, I didn’t expect it to be so for me.
After all, I’ve written over 40 books. I know what I’m doing!
My books usually take a few months to write once I knuckle down to the first draft, and I write pretty clean these days so my edits are not usually significant. I’m a binge writer, or a project-focused writer, which means I don’t write every day, but I work on one project at a time, and put that through to completion, before working on the next.
But it feels like I’ve been writing this memoir for decades — and realistically, I have been as there are elements of my earlier life included.
In an interview I did with Marion Roach Smith on memoir in July 2020, I said,
“I keep walking up to the idea of memoir and then walking away again.”
That’s how it’s been for a long time.
Threads of ideas in the book come from my teenage years, and the idea of walking the Camino itself comes from those early days of faith.
The words that eventually became Pilgrimage were mainly written from the early months of 2020 to the end of 2022, so that’s almost three years and most of those words were discarded, anyway.
I have never taken so long to write a book.
I have never discarded so many words.
I have never wrestled with the material so much as this.
I have never found it this hard to produce a finished book.
And I am so proud of the result.
This is not to suggest that memoir must take a lot of time, or that books written quickly are less worthy. It just demonstrates that memoir, in particular, is a messy process, and shaping a semblance of your life into a book that others might want to read is more challenging than expected.
Will I write another memoir?
I am 48 next month as I write this (March 2023), and hopefully, I have a lot of life left in me. I don’t expect to write another about pilgrimage or solo walking, but it is likely that at some point, I will write another memoir. But only when aspects of life shape themselves into a personal story worth telling, or another theme I want to address.
Until then, I will write more fiction and non-fiction/self-help books and aspects of my life and my personality and my thoughts will come through in those.
TIP: Let your memoir emerge.
It cannot be forced into being. It may take much longer than you expect to write — but it will be worth it.
“The truth of writing is the more specific we are, the more universal our experience becomes.”
Rachael Herron, author of Fast Draft Your Memoir, in an interview on memoir on The Creative Penn Podcast, Feb 2018.
I’m writing this in mid-February, 2023. My Pilgrimage Kickstarter finished last week. I sent the ebook and audiobook out yesterday and a few people also have printed copies.
I haven’t felt this level of fear about a book for a long time, but perhaps that’s what enables memoir to connect with people in a deeper way. We bare our hearts on the page.
Memoir requires emotional vulnerability and the sharing of personal stories and insights, and as such, requires more depth from the writer than other genres. I was absolutely intimidated by this, especially as my story has aspects of depression and suicidal thoughts that I haven’t shared before.
I’m also British and I’m not an over-sharer in general. I was taught to “pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again,” one of my mum’s favorite mantras when things were difficult. Don’t dwell on the past, just get on with whatever’s next.
But we are all broken, and the last few years of the pandemic have beaten everyone down, and if I didn’t share my difficulties, it would not be a memoir but a travelogue or a trip guide.
Memoir demands emotional depth, and so I included aspects of both physical pain, mental health problems, and even the hormonal rollercoaster of being a woman in midlife.
I questioned whether to include that section, but my depression and insomnia were so closely linked with my hormones, and were so quickly fixed by HRT, that I included it in the hope it would help someone else. And indeed, I have already received emails thanking me for that section.
There were things I edited out.
Things related to people I love that did not serve the story and, therefore, were unnecessary in this book. Other things that I have not processed enough to share at this point.
A finished and published memoir is not therapy. Once you shape it into the final form of a book, it is for others, not yourself.
TIP: Write it all down. Edit later. Be true to the story you want to tell.
From my interview with Alastair Humphreys about his travel memoirs,
“The way to do it well is to be as honest as you dare and as honest as you’re possibly comfortable with, and then a bit beyond. I think my book [My Midsummer Morning] got better the more honest and vulnerable I made myself, which is a difficult thing to do, but simply in terms of if you want to write a good book, then you just have to be honest, lay it on the line.
And you, as a reader, will know that yourself from reading books, the memoirs that grip you are the ones that really go deep, and honest, and vulnerable.”
If you want to write a travel memoir, you have to go on a trip, or more than one, in order to provide the raw material for your book. [You can find the day-by-day trip notes and photos here.]
I primarily use hand-written notes in a journal. For journal geeks, I prefer Leuchtturm A5 hardback with plain paper with a teal/blue/red cover. They are not cheap, but my words are worth it! I usually write with a plain black biro. I also take a lot of pictures with my iPhone.
I prepared for journaling on my pilgrimages by taking a list of questions to consider, because if you don’t help yourself with some prompts, it can be hard to pay attention to specific details. And the best travel books are very specific with details!
Examples include:
I printed the questions and stuck them into my journal as a reminder of what I wanted to think about. [The full list of questions are in Pilgrimage.]
I walked in the northern hemisphere autumn (Sept, Oct) for all three of my solo walking pilgrimages, so I woke before dawn most days. I also went to bed early, so I wrote every morning. I was usually too exhausted in the evenings, and the morning was better for writing my thoughts.
During the day, I added notes into my Things app on my phone as a reminder for what I wanted to write about later. Here are some of my notes:
You can find some more of my daily notes at: www.thecreativepenn.com/dailynotes
I also took a lot of pictures of different kinds:
I took many hundreds of photos, most of which I never shared, as they are more functional and for memory aids than beautiful. I was very glad of them later when it came to write about the trips.
I also had my maps and guidebooks, which I referred to before, during, and after each trip.
As a backup, I took pictures of my journal pages every night and synced it with Wi-Fi to my Apple Photos, so even if I lost the physical journal I’d still have my writing.
You could also use audio recording for voice dictation or to record sounds of a place, or to interview people. Or you could use video for personal recollection, or for social media, or to produce a finished product.
I didn’t use either of these, but many travel writers use them effectively. Check out Alastair Humphreys’ video about his Midsummer Morning trip on YouTube.
TIP: Capture more than you will ever need.
Minor things like the brand of beer, or the strange stile, or the person you met one morning may end up more important than you think in the finished book.
Each experience needs processing time in order to figure out any meaning or deeper layers.
I used my Books and Travel Podcast and website to document each of the routes, which meant I had to go through all of my photos and curate the best ones, as well as write about the day-to-day process. I did this within a month or so of each trip and this helped my initial thoughts to coalesce.
For reference, my daily posts are here: The Pilgrims’ Way, St Cuthbert’s Way, Camino de Santiago.
I also did some solo podcast episodes where I reflected more on the meaning of the walks for the Pilgrims’ Way, This Too Shall Pass, and the Camino, A Pilgrim in the Path of History.
Later, when I came to write the book, I used the transcripts from those episodes in my Scrivener project and excerpted aspects of them into the book.
From my interview with Alastair Humphreys in April 2019,
“When I get home, one of the first jobs I do is just type up the whole diary, which gradually starts to filter things in my head.”
TIP: Spend some time processing each experience soon after returning, writing something for publication on your blog, or in a podcast episode, or video.
Otherwise, it might be years before you revisit the trip and you may have ‘lost’ elements of meaning, or reframed them based on later experience. That doesn’t mean a book written much later is invalid, it just means it will be different — as you are different.
This is your story and, as such, is your perspective.
But there are always other sides to any story.
You don’t have to tell them in your book, but you have to understand that others may see a situation differently. If you write about real people in a way that hurts them in some way, or portrays them in a bad light, then there may be consequences.
Only you can decide if you want to go ahead, and obviously, I can’t advise on the legal ramifications.
This ALLi article might be useful around avoiding libel and defamation.
Personally, I suggest writing anything you like in the first draft. Let it rip.
You can’t hurt anyone in a first draft, so write as if no one will ever see it. Password protect the file if you need to! Whatever it takes for you to feel safe when you’re writing.
Then, when you’re ready, and have some distance, edit the manuscript with fresh eyes and a clear perspective.
If you don’t have distance and a clear perspective when you edit, if you still have an axe to grind, or you’re seeking revenge, or you’re trying to hurt someone with your words, then put the manuscript aside, get therapy or whatever you need to do, and come back to it when you are clear and can focus on what serves the book and the reader.
While I have written about Jonathan and my family in a limited way, my memoir is mainly about walking solo and my individual challenges, so I wasn’t worried about needing to change anything.
Jonathan and my mum read the book, but only when it was finished, and neither asked for any changes. They understand I am a writer, and I process my life through writing, and while they were sad that I had a difficult time, they also appreciated that I was out the other side by the time the book was done.
In terms of writing about real places, and using company names and place names, I have used them throughout and also listed places I visited. I also do this in my fiction. But as I mention the positive experiences and leave out the negative, there is never likely to be any problem.
TIP: Write for yourself, but edit for public consumption.
Don’t publish unless you have a clear perspective on your work. Memoir is not therapy.
“We’re not reading your story for what you did, we’re reading your story for what you did with it.”
Marion Roach Smith, in an interview about memoir on The Creative Penn Podcast, July 2020
There are different sub-genres within travel, many of which do not require a character arc. A travelogue about a particular journey or a route guide does not need a protagonist who experiences a transformation.
But a travel memoir, or indeed any kind of memoir, requires a character arc — and that character is you!
I didn’t even know what kind of book I was writing until I returned from my Camino and realised how much things had changed since I walked the Pilgrims’ Way two years before.
My mental and physical health were transformed, and I felt like I had come home to Jonathan and Bath. A month later, we adopted two cats, Cashew and Noisette (lots of pics on my Facebook and Instagram @jfpennauthor).
This might seem like a minor thing, but we last had a cat, Shmi, in Australia in 2011, so it’s been over a decade since I felt settled enough to commit to looking after animals again. I had turned a corner in my life and suddenly I saw how the book could end.
I had been through a transformational character arc without even realising it during the process, and perhaps that is how life works. When we are in something, we can’t see the end, or reflect upon its meaning. We have to finish the experience in order to truly understand the arc.
TIP: If you can’t see the character arc and transformation in your story, you might not have finished the journey yet.
In terms of writing your character arc, you need to emphasize both the beginning and the end, so the journey and transformation are clear.
After I wrote the conclusion — which represented the end of the three pilgrimages — I realized I needed an epilogue that reflected the opening scene, a circular return to my initial self-destructive thoughts at the river.
Jonathan and I walk over that bridge together several times a week, and we did it almost every day during the pandemic. So I wrote the epilogue about standing on the bridge together, and then later went for a walk and stood there with him again to depict what I had already written.
This particular incident is an example of the difference between Truth (with a capital T, i.e. the deeper meaning of the story) and truth (with a small ‘t’ i.e. what actually happened.)
The Epilogue underscores the Truth of the book, that life goes on and there are flowers and hope even later in life, that the seasons will keep turning, and that I walk on together with my love.
But it hadn’t happened exactly in that way at the time that I wrote it.
Truth in memoir is a difficult subject and each writer will define their boundaries as they feel to be right. After all, it is still a story, and you need narrative devices to make the book more readable.
Lying or making things up entirely are not acceptable, but a writer may turn several minor characters into one person. They may write things out of order. They may write a conversation as they remember it, but memory is, of course, flawed and a dramatised conversation will not be exactly what happened.
Rachael Herron, author of Fast Draft Your Memoir, says,
“the truth in the memory is changed every time you pull it out.”
The details may be fuzzy, but you can still aim for emotional truth.
This striving for truth also resulted in my decision on the final cover design, covered in more detail in section 10.
Essentially, I shared cover options with my patrons and some travel writers and they all picked one that had a ‘happy happy, joy joy’ vibe, but that is not the emotional truth of Pilgrimage!
I decided on one of my photos with a stormy sky and a mountain to climb. It fitted the Truth and the truth of the book, and as one of my own photos, it is authentic in every way.
TIP: Figure out your Truth (capital t) and try to make your truth (small t) as correct as possible, while still serving the story.
From my interview with Alastair Humphreys about his travel memoirs,
“I never make up stories of stuff that didn’t happen, but I often amalgamate a lot of different truths. So, lots of different memories of, say, campsites or perhaps different individual people I’ve met, I often amalgamate all of these things into one nugget of a story which serves to tell, more accurately, how the experience was at the time — and in a way, to make it more truthful. Not to make it more factual, but to make it more truthful.”
One of the key elements of travel writing is evoking a particular setting. A sense of place is critical for this genre.
But since Pilgrimage is a ‘lessons learned’ book as opposed to just a travelogue, I had to choose specific places to write about to illustrate each section, rather than a constant stream of description in each scene.
Our job as writers is to manipulate the mind of the reader. They should experience what we want them to through the details we choose to share.
Those details can be sensory description — sight, taste, touch, smell, sound — and you can enhance these with metaphorical, symbolic, emotional, or spiritual elements in order to deepen that sense of place.
One highlight of my three pilgrimages, and possibly the most spiritual of them all, was the crossing to Lindisfarne, Holy Island, which I share in chapter 2.3. A glimpse of the divine in sacred places.
I took a lot of photos as I walked across, but did not write about it until the next morning, and even then, my journal notes were sparse.
I wrote and rewrote this section many times for Pilgrimage. I wanted to share the physical and emotional truth of it and give a glimpse into how truly special this place is. If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend walking the sands to Holy Island.
I’ll share a section from the passage and highlight the sensory detail.
I rose before the dawn on the final morning of my pilgrimage on the St Cuthbert’s Way. I stood at a farm gate looking east into the rising sun, next to a field of curious alpacas and chickens [SIGHT] quietly clucking in their roost. [SOUND] As the darkness lifted, the castle on Lindisfarne stood in silhouette against bars of coral clouds, shot through with luminous yellow and pink as the sun rose above the horizon. [SIGHT]
The end was so close now.
I was relieved because my muscles ached and I wanted to stop and rest and not walk another day, but I was also sad that the journey was almost over. I wanted to finish the path, but also to keep going. Yet there is nothing beyond Lindisfarne, only the North Sea, and I would reach the furthest point that day. [EMOTION]
The clearing sky indicated that the weather would be fine for my crossing of the sands [SIGHT], but I still felt some trepidation. The tidal website warned it was only safe to cross with a guide, and there were tales of walkers lost to the sea in the fog, or cars stranded on the causeway as water reclaimed the land.
But I had prepared, and I knew it was safe to cross. All that remained was to step off onto the sands that the sea left behind.
As the sky turned pale blue, I returned to the farm to retrieve my pack, hefting it onto my shoulders for the last time. [TOUCH]
It was only a few kilometres from the farm to the edge of the causeway. I walked with Dave and Keith, pilgrims I had met a few days back after getting lost on the boggy moor. On the way down, Keith and I discovered we had both studied theology and read many of the same books. Whereas I had turned my degree into the basis of my thrillers, he had spent a life of service as a social worker, supporting those with mental health issues. We disagreed on matters of faith, but there was a spark of intellectual connection. [SOUND] Pilgrimage encourages the discussion of such deeper matters and I fleetingly wished we could carry on our debate. But we were soon at the edge of South Low, where the tide had turned and the waters were receding.
Several enormous concrete blocks lay just before the causeway, anti-tank sea defences from World War II. [SIGHT] There were signs warning of unexploded ordnance in the area as well as quicksand, and more warnings of what could happen if the tide cut you off. It was hard to imagine the military swarming over this area, now a National Nature Reserve, protected for the biodiversity of life within its shifting sands and tidal waters.
A series of marker poles stretched across the sand to Lindisfarne, interspersed by two wooden refuges on stilts for those who could not beat the tide. The sky was pale blue and clouds scudded high above, and I could see all the way to Holy Island. It was safe to cross. [SIGHT]
I rolled my walking trousers up above my knees. Walking barefoot was the traditional way to cross, but I had blisters and raw patches on my feet, [TOUCH] so I wore my walking shoes with waterproof socks. I grasped my poles to steady myself — then stepped off the causeway onto the sand. [TOUCH]
I wanted to walk the final stretch alone, so after taking photos with Keith and Dave, I let them stride ahead.
The sand was initially firm underfoot [TOUCH] as I followed the path of tall wooden poles towards Holy Island. I skirted around deeper pools of water, stepping over the wiggly casts of lugworms and the footprints of wader birds. [SIGHT] Gulls flew overhead, their calls piercing the air. [SOUND]
There were patches of grass in places and channels of deeper water to navigate, [SIGHT] with sections of sucking mud [SOUND] which I clambered through, using my walking poles to gain a more even footing. I almost lost one shoe in the mud, [TOUCH] and it was certainly a more challenging walk than I expected. Less a stroll across firm sand, and more an adventure to reach the final destination.
The lower parts of the wooden guide poles were covered with barnacles and bladder wrack seaweed, surrounded by winkle shells and long strands of sea grass. [SIGHT, SMELL] Crabs scuttled in the shallow water, trying to sink away from the light. The upper parts of the poles that lay above the tide were stark white, reflecting the morning sun, and I could imagine pilgrims spotting them with relief on a foggy crossing.
I stopped halfway across and turned my back on the causeway, looking south across the water to Bamburgh Castle in the distance. A mournful sound pierced the air, a low moan like a chill wind sweeping through ruins. [SOUND, METAPHOR] The call of grey seals out on the sand flats, singing as they have for generations of pilgrims. I was just one more in a long line stretching back through history, and my footsteps would wash away with the tide like all who walked here before me. [SPIRITUAL, EMOTIONAL]
The crossing took about ninety minutes, with time enough to navigate slowly around the mud and deeper water channels. I finally clambered up the bank on the other side and sat on a bench, looking back at the mainland as I changed into dry shoes. [TOUCH]
As with my arrival at Canterbury Cathedral a year ago, there was no fanfare, no one cheering the finish line of my pilgrimage. Only a quiet sense of satisfaction that I had accomplished what I set out to do. [EMOTION]
As writers, we all have our strengths and weaknesses. In reading this now, and analysing it after the fact, it underscores my strength — visual description — and also my weaknesses, sound and smell, in particular.
I am sensitive to sound, so am more often than not trying to shut it out with noise-cancelling headphones. I also lost my sense of smell with Covid and I don’t think it ever returned completely.
I walked across a few months after having Covid, so it’s possible I couldn’t smell the sea or the seaweed, but at least there is a mention of it. If I was rewriting this now, I would layer in more sound and smell, and also a few more metaphorical elements.
But overall, I’m happy with the passage and I think it gives a sense of the experience.
TIP: Use specific sensory detail to bring scenes alive.
If you need help with specific senses, you can use Sudowrite or ChatGPT or any of the AI tools to help you.
Check out my tutorial for Sudowrite where I talk about how to use the Describe function. Highlight a word and then ask it to Describe in more detail. The tool will return every sense and also metaphorical ideas.
I use Scrivener as my writing software and I ended up with several Scrivener projects for what turned into Pilgrimage, all started and left unfinished over the years.
The original project was called Untethered, and it was more a series of essays about my various travels and my search for the idea of ‘home.’ I turned these into solo episodes on my Books and Travel podcast, but I couldn’t find a thread to turn it into a book I wanted to write.
I started another project after the Pilgrims’ Way that was more a travelogue with a day-by-day account of the route and thoughts along the way. But once I wrote it all down, it seemed pointless. There are many guides already and I had nothing new to offer.
I kept typing up my journal entries, and I wrote thousands of words under chapter headings, some of which made it into Books and Travel episodes, others which still lie dormant, perhaps never to be used in a published work at all.
After I returned from the Camino, the book I wanted to write solidified in my mind.
I started a fresh Scrivener project and copied and pasted elements from all the old projects into it. I also added transcriptions of various solo podcast episodes and interviews I’d done on other shows, as well as typing up more journal notes from each trip.
I add placeholder texts for everything I can think of, and then I organize it and fill in the blanks later. It truly is wrangling chaos, and sometimes I just have to walk away and return when I can see clearly again.
As I work through each section, I move the older sections into the Research area, which means they are not included in the Compiled document, which I backup every day.
Here’s a screenshot from Scrivener with my Raw journal notes, which include practical things like the toilets at a supermarket as I thought I was writing a travel guide at that point.
It’s also a good example of not knowing what you will think is important until later. My notes mention ‘the surprising mural by Adam Kossowski’ in Peckham, but there are very few details in the journal. I took lots of pictures of it, which you can see here on Instagram.
In the finished book, it became part of chapter 2.2. Walking in the path of history puts life in perspective, where I expanded the description. The mural represented 2000 years of history, and one picture made it into the finished hardback. It was more important in retrospect, as it represented the historical aspects in both a metaphorical and physical way.
TIP: Don’t try to write in linear order. Just get everything down and then reorganise later.
Every time I finished a writing session, I exported from Scrivener into MS Word, backed that up on Dropbox, and also emailed it to myself.
You can watch a tutorial on how I use Scrivener for fiction and non-fiction here.
I also read a lot of books as part of my research. They gave a historical and religious perspective on pilgrimage, added to my knowledge about the benefits of walking and mental health, addressed midlife challenges, provided quotes to give extra resonance to the book, and helped me figure out where the book might fit in the ecosystem. I included the most useful in my Selected Bibliography at the back of Pilgrimage.
“In writing you must kill all your darlings.” William Faulkner
Once I had finished writing everything up, I had over 100,000 words of notes, thoughts, questions, quotes, research, journal pages, and ideas in my Scrivener project. Even once I had rearranged things, it was still a big book.
But when I read it from end to end with fresh eyes, I realized something significant.
From the reader’s perspective, it was full of repetition.
The final book includes one chapter on The Pilgrim’s Day, but of course my notes were aspects of this over and over again, and the same for aspects of hardship, where I combined all my ramblings about pain into one chapter.
The therapy is done, so leave it behind and reshape the words so they become something different.
If you are still writing for therapy, if you are still emotionally connected to the words, you will find it impossible to edit. Put the manuscript away and come back to it when you have some distance — and that might take longer than you think.
By the time I returned from my Camino, I had completed my character arc. I was on the other side of the experience and I could see what the finished book would be. I could then edit to fit that vision.
It serves no purpose for the reader if you include multiple instances of the same thing, so I removed tens of thousands of words to distill the manuscript down to its essence, and I reshaped the chapters into thematic elements.
This was incredibly difficult, and it took several passes before I honed the manuscript down to a slim 35,000-word draft.
I’ve never had to do this much word culling before. I usually write lean and have to expand. But this kind of writing was very different. What served me as I journaled each day differed from what served the reader as they read the book.
TIP: Write what you need to in your first draft, but serve the reader once you’re in editing mode.
Kill your darlings, cull your words, rid your manuscript of repetition. It’s hard, but it will make for a better book.
Publishing choices are always difficult, but a personal memoir is a particular challenge.
Yes, there are incredibly successful memoirs — Wild by Cheryl Strayed, and Educated by Tara Westover are two that spring to mind. They were traditionally published and became super successful, and rightfully so.
But there are countless numbers of memoirs that are published and don’t make a splash. They sink with barely a ripple. If you license your rights to a publisher and it is not successful, then you have lost control of what is a highly personal book that means a lot and you may regret your choice to let it go.
Self-publishing a memoir means the book stays in your control, and there are pros and cons with that choice too. I have spoken to many memoir writers who say that they are pleased they self-published as it meant they kept control of the book, could decide on the cover and marketing options, and generally were more comfortable being responsible for the book as it was so personal.
You can find more details on the specifics of how I professionally self-publish here.
I’ve been focusing more on selling direct to readers over the last few years and I am pivoting my business to be ‘direct first,’ with some ‘direct-only’ products. I will still publish on the big retailers, but only once I have made money upfront first.
The goal with a Kickstarter campaign is to make a big chunk of sales upfront, and keep 95% of the profits. It is a lot of work and I will share my lessons learned on the campaign separately, but it was worth it for me, especially with this unusual personal memoir.
Some say that Kickstarter is like an advance from a publisher, because you get a chunk of cash near the beginning of the process. My campaign made almost £26,000, and there is no way a publisher would have paid that for such a niche book.
Once I have fulfilled the Kickstarter pledges, I will sell Pilgrimage from my JFPennBooks store for a month and then from 1 May, the ebook, audiobook, and black & white paperback will also be available on all other stores.
The goal is to take a bigger chunk of the revenue before the book is available everywhere, because of course the book platforms all take a cut of sale, so it’s better revenue-wise to sell direct first.
If you’re considering a Kickstarter campaign, it is much more complex than other forms of publishing, so please read Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter by Russell Nohelty and Monica Leonelle. [Lots more resources here.]
I wanted a beautiful hardback with interior color photos as my primary format for the Kickstarter.
I also wanted a special paperback with color photos, and both of these will only ever be available through the Kickstarter and from my store, www.JFPennBooks.com (unless they are sold secondhand elsewhere).
I produced these with Bookvault.app who I also use for printing from my store. The print quality is fantastic and they have great customer service.
For the hardback specifics, the books are: Case Bound – Cloth, 115gsm Coated white paper, Buckram Paris Blue cover stock, Novel size (203 x 127 cm, 5 x 8 inches), Matte lamination, with 16 full-colour interior pages.
I have never used coated heavier paper before, but the printed interior colour photos look so good this way, so it’s worth doing if you want a similar quality.
As per usual, I also produced an ebook, self-narrated audiobook, black & white paperback, and a large print edition. These formats will be available on all the usual stores and published through KDP Print for Amazon and Ingram Spark for all other places, as well as through Bookvault for my store.
My designer, Jane, at JDSmithDesign.com worked with me to do the book design, and it was a challenging process to decide on the photos and get it all formatted.
We did it all before setting the Kickstarter live in order to get the final weight of the printed books which impacts shipping costs, an important thing to get right in the campaign.
I also used Midjourney to create a scallop shell ornamental break for the print and ebook editions.
I went through an extensive process to decide on my final cover for Pilgrimage. First, I took screenshots of similar books across the travel genre and made a presentation for my cover designer, Jane, so she could see the type of thing I was aiming for. I also provided several of my own photos from the routes.
Jane came back with six alternatives, three of which used my photos.
I did a poll for the six with my patrons and asked some travel writer friends, and the overwhelming choice was a cover with blue skies, green grass and a happy feeling.
But it was not my picture, and I didn’t feel it was emotionally ‘true,’ in terms of the promise of this particular book.
It was important to me to use one of my pictures for such a personal book, and also to make it clear that the reality of pilgrimage (and mid-life) is more like climbing a mountain under stormy skies than skipping downhill in the sun without a care in the world.
I ultimately went with one of my own pictures from the St Cuthbert’s Way. You can see the entire cover design process with all the images here.
I’ve been narrating my own non-fiction books and short stories for years now, so I was always going to narrate my memoir. [You can listen to a sample here.]
Even if you hire professional narrators for your other books, you might still consider narration for your memoir, as it is such a personal book and many memoirs are narrated by the author.
However, I realise that for some, this might be a scary prospect. In an interview on writing travel memoir, Alastair Humphreys talked about his narration of My Midsummer Morning.
“I was absolutely dreading it. As I started to read, I was thinking, ‘This is going to be terrible, it’s going to be awful.’ I was really dreading that, but I was pleased. It was actually quite a good book. And so, I think it was a good experience to do and definitely worth doing. It really wasn’t much of a hassle at all.”
My specific tips for audiobook narration are in my book, Audio for Authors: Audiobooks, Podcasting, and Voice Technologies.
TIP: Think about what formats your audience might want, particularly for this special book, and how you might produce each. It might be different from your usual production process.
As Pilgrimage has been years in the making, and does not fit into my usual genres, I was unsure about how to market it, especially as (at the moment), I have no plans to write another travel memoir.
I must confess to being quite concerned about the marketing, since I have a book on the topic, How to Market a Book, and I have a reputation to protect. If Pilgrimage flopped, I would be seriously embarrassed and yes, I am afraid of failure and I have fear of judgment. Not an unusual situation for authors!
Usually with book marketing, it’s about writing books in a series, and using the first one to attract readers with promotions, so they go on to read others in the series.
Or if it’s a stand-alone book, there are usually other books which relate even tangentially to help with cross-promotion across an author’s name.
But Pilgrimage does not cross over at all with my non-fiction books under Joanna Penn, and it also doesn’t fit with my J.F. Penn thriller/dark fantasy audience.
Of course, it’s still written by me, so those readers who want more of my writing in general would buy it, but I couldn’t count on selling many copies that way!
I decided to publish under J.F. Penn as there are religious and historical research elements in my fiction, and I also hoped that it might bring in new readers for my books as some of the pilgrimage sites are in the stories. Santiago de Compostela is in Stone of Fire, Lindisfarne is in Day of the Vikings, and Canterbury Cathedral is in Tomb of Relics.
My marketing for the Kickstarter launch period included:
I’m also planning to do another marketing push once the book is out on all platforms, including Amazon Ads to specific pilgrimage books and keywords, which hopefully won’t be oversubscribed because it’s such a niche topic. Plus Facebook Ads to a landing page on my Shopify store, JFPennBooks.com to continue fostering direct sales.
It’s quite good having different phases to the marketing, so I will do another wave in May 2023 for the ‘second launch.’
This very specific book doesn’t really fit with my existing backlist, but it is evergreen and can potentially reach a completely different audience to those I usually target with my other books.
I’m looking forward to being more creative with my marketing!
I hope these thoughts have been useful as you think about writing your own memoir, or perhaps doing a Kickstarter campaign for your book/s. Please do let me know any thoughts or comments below.
You can find more links to interviews and books on writing memoir here.
The post Tips On Writing Memoir With J.F. Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.
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Author: Joanna Penn
When a group of strangers gathers in one setting, whether in a horror story, mystery, or in real life, the situation makes for a great premise. In The Extinction of Irena Rey (Bloomsbury, 2024), the debut novel by author and translator Jennifer Croft, eight translators from eight different countries arrive at an author’s house located in a primeval Polish forest to begin their work when the author disappears. As they investigate the author’s whereabouts while attempting to continue their work, rivalries and paranoia begin cropping up. Write a story that revolves around a group of unacquainted people, all confined in one location. Experiment with different modes of dialogue, setting description, and point of view. How will their secrets be revealed?
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