In the ever-evolving landscape of the writing profession, where deadlines loom large and market trends shift like shadows, it’s not uncommon for writers to find themselves engulfed in the relentless flames of burnout. The business of writing, with its demands for marketability and strategic branding, can sometimes obscure the very essence of what drew us to the craft in the first place: the pure joy and passion for storytelling. If you’re feeling singed by the pressures of the business of writing, fear not. Amidst the ashes lie embers of creativity waiting to be rekindled.

At the end of 2023, as I sat down to consider what “lessons” I wanted to share in my annual New Year’s post, I found I had gleaned so many things from this busy, productive, and rewarding year that I couldn’t thematically contain them all in one post. The “official” New Year’s post I shared last month talked about what my experiences had shown me about living (and writing) Flat Arcs. What I didn’t get to talk about in that post were the many specific lessons I learned last year in rewiring my relationship to the business of writing.

Over the past few years, I’ve talked about the period of significant burnout I experienced beginning in 2016, which included nearly four years of writer’s block. I learned so much in working through these experiences and am happy to report recovery from both the burnout and the writer’s block. Something I haven’t talked much about yet is how this burnout shone a light on dysfunctional aspects of my relationship with the business side of writing.

A few months ago, I wrote about how my relationship to marketing has evolved, and last week I discussed some of the mindsets necessary for writers to succeed at marketing and business. Today, I want to go deeper and share six insights I received in 2023 that are helping me rewire my relationship with the business of writing into an experience that is not only sustainable but deeply rewarding, creative, and generative.

Why It’s So Easy for Writers to Get Burned Out on the Business of Writing

First, a little background. I began my career, rather unwittingly, sixteen years ago. I didn’t really intend writing or teaching about writing to be a career. I was a sheltered homeschooled stay-at-home daughter, and writing books and starting little online businesses was just the sort of thing we did back then. I loved writing stories, and I started a blog to help me sell those stories. That blog and the subsequent writing-craft books I published became a huge adventure all their own, and before I knew it, I was earning enough to call myself a full-time writer.

I never had a real business plan beyond seizing the opportunities and proving to myself that being a self-published author at the inception of the indie boom was legit. I also had no clue what I was getting myself into. I wasn’t aware of what “joyful marketing” coach Simone Grace Seol talks about on her podcast as “The Three Stages of Growth“:

1. Creation (when you’re writing the book, building the business, etc.)

2. Acclimation (when you’re adjusting to the new identity of success)

3. Acceleration (when you’re taking everything you’ve learned and going 2.0)

I was good at creation and acceleration, but I had zero awareness or skill when it came to acclimation. To repeat Seol’s excellent insight:

So many of us think that hitting the goal is going to be the best thing ever, but then we realize that once we do hit the ambitious goal it starts to feel really, really scary and anxious, and we just kind of have a meltdown a lot of the times…. The pain of acclimation … is that now that you’ve created the thing that you wanted to create, now that you achieved the goal, now you have to get used to … being somebody who has that as part of her reality.

By the time 2016—that massive epoch in my life—arrived on the wings of a huge personal crisis, my relationship with my business was already significantly dysfunctional and unsustainable. The work I was doing to earn money was becoming increasingly disconnected from my creativity. I was making choices based on what I thought I “should” do or what would be most lucrative, versus what really excited me or aligned with my own values. As a result, I was suffering major anxiety attacks almost every time I opened my email. I lived in fear of criticism, and I was constantly chasing after some elusive idea of success that would slay my raging imposter syndrome.

Then when personal crisis hit, I very nearly gave up on the business of writing altogether. For several years, I cut back drastically on almost everything I was doing. I spent the next eight years (and counting!) getting real with myself about the patterns and beliefs that had caused me to create such dysfunction in my relationship with my business (among other areas of my life).

6 Insights to Rewire How You Relate to the Business of Writing

Now my experience may be extreme, and many writers will never reach this level of burnout. My situation was also ultimately founded upon and catalyzed by belief systems, relationships, and events that had nothing to do with my writing or my business. However, over the past years as I have discussed various aspects of my experiences and how they have taught me to heal and grow, I have received so many emails from so many of you who are able to relate on one level or another.

From my vantage point, I see how my struggles are ones so many writers also get tangled up in and, ultimately, for the same reason: because we don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into and because we aren’t taught how to create functional operating systems for the business side of writing. I spoke about some of the culprit misconceptions in last week’s post about why marketing is hard for writers. Today, I want to share some of the lessons I have been learning these past years that have changed my life.

I believe these things need to be normalized and talked about more in writing communities. They shouldn’t frighten anyone away from achieving as much success with their writing as is humanly possible. Rather, they should act as cautionary road markers to help us make decisions that arise from our own deepest alignment and health, rather than in response to some external guideline of what we’re “supposed to be doing” or what being a career writer is “supposed to look like.”

So today, let’s explore these six invaluable insights to rediscover the joy and passion that initially set our writerly souls ablaze!

1. Balance Speaking Up and Setting Boundaries Online

Okay… so imagine a long pause between this sentence and the one before it, because I’ve been sitting here for several minutes, trying to find the words to express something that still feels surprisingly vulnerable. And I suppose that’s the whole point of this first insight. Living as a writer means being willing to speak and to write from a deeply vulnerable and authentic place and then to face the potential criticism and judgement of the world.

It is crucial for writers to be able to create protective boundaries. This, however, is easier said than done. You can stop reading reviews on Amazon, but if you intend to continue with a blog or a social media presence, you can’t close your eyes to what followers are saying. Every day there is the opportunity to run across something someone is saying about you that feels triggering.

Ultimately, the boundaries must be created within ourselves. The only things that trigger us are those that already live within us. At its simplest, if someone says “you’re a bad writer” and it stings, it’s because you believe it at some level. More insidious, however, is the adjacent belief that this someone out there in Internet-land—who is probably someone you don’t know, will never hear from again, and whose own expertise is unproven—deserves to tell you how to live your life.

I was struck by how deep this belief had been ingrained in me when I was working through ways to create boundaries that would keep out unwanted criticism. The thought that arose was, But if I’m wrong, I should be criticized! Whoa. That stopped me short. For me, the unconscious belief was that I deserved any and all criticism that any random person with a random agenda wanted to sling at me. The countering belief I had to find was that I deserved to protect myself and I deserved to choose for myself whose advice I listened to based on my own value system.

2. Stay Connected to Your Own Authority

Boundaries are an external protection system. They are walls erected to keep danger out of our homes. But boundaries are not unbreachable. If an external boundary is our only defense, we’re ultimately doomed. It is important to reach down deep inside and find the strength of our own individual authority.

It’s like that old saying:

If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.

But this, too, can be externalized. When we project authority onto something else, it is often in the belief that if we just follow that person, system, or thing, we’ll be just fine. We often do this unconsciously, not realizing we are identifying with this thing less because we align it with it and more because we derive a sense of approval and protection from it (even and sometimes especially if opposing groups offer resistance).

What I have learned for myself is that the only way to access true strength is to reach deep inside and find one’s own. There is no substitute. This is not easy. Accessing that strength and that ability to hold authority over one’s self often requires digging through all sorts of layers of unsafety in one’s programming. It also requires a radical claiming of personal responsibility and accountability—because now there is nothing else on which to shade blame.

For me, learning to recognize what is happening energetically when I abandon my authority to someone or something else has been a gamechanger in rewiring my ability to hold my own center when triggered and, just as importantly, to find the strength and self-worth to set boundaries unapologetically. Abandoning my own authority often makes me feel physically sick, including intense pressure in my head and neck. When this happens, I have learned to relax my throat and neck, to bring attention back to my solar plexus, and to focus on the crown of my head. I imagine a straight pole of light aligning my body from above the top of my head to below the bottom of my feet. With practice, holding this inner posture of authority becomes easier and easier. The tendency to feel sick in the presence of someone else’s negative opinion grows less, and the capacity for showing up with more authenticity, truth, and conviction echoes a quote that has been one of my favorites from childhood:

I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more as I grow older.–Catherine Drinker Bowen

3. Choose Projects That Light You Up

Many writers may relate to my struggles to harmonize the brutal practicalities of writing as a business with the whims of creativity. Like so many, my life path began simply because I loved telling stories and creating worlds for my imaginary friends. At the point this approach led to profitability, I was delighted. I got to make my living as an artist! But I soon learned that trying to turn your passion into a vocation leads to all sorts of strange bedfellows.

Never mind the demands of commercializing art, let’s just talk about the opportunities. The opportunity is there for so many of us to make good money off our art. The catch is that the art becomes a job. The harder we work at it, the more success we may find. But also, the harder we work at it, the more tempting it can be to work just a little more, a little harder, produce a little more, write a little faster, put out just one more book and then one more and then one more… until it’s not fun anymore. And the well runs dry.

As I have grown better at blocking out the external voices that preach “should, should, should,” I have watched as more and more space has re-opened within me to pursue my own creative delights. Recognized by Freud as the super-ego, this voice embedded in the deep psyche dictates that our choices and actions should accord with an external authority (seeing a theme here?). For me, one of those voices has been that of “being productive.” As an Enneagram Three, one of the great Lies I work to overcome in this life is that “I am what I do.”

Greatly humbling though it was, my period of burnout was a tremendous gift. During those years when my ability to be productive was so reduced, I had to re-learn that my worth did not lie in what I did or in my identity as a writer or a teacher. I had to rediscover the bits I enjoyed about creating and to learn what it was I truly wanted.

This remains a process for me, but last year saw me actually listening to the rumblings of creativity deep within my sacral. Instead of looking solely at what projects were most practical or productive or influential to my bottom line, I began to ask, “What lights me up?” What would I be excited to work on? What feels creative? This was part of what allowed me to return to fiction after a four-year break. It has also completely changed how I interact with my business projects.

Last summer, when I asked myself what project excited me, the answer that left me feeling butterflies of excitement was the Archetypal Character Guided Meditations. The idea seemed weird and off-the-wall and perhaps not very practical. I had no idea if people would resonate with the project, but I did it anyway just because it sounded fun to me. I trusted that my own inner spark of creativity would lead me to the most rewarding projects. Being able to show that level of faith in my creative self did more to refill my well than any other practice I have worked with in these past eight years.

4. Live in Abundance

The overweening productive mindset often arises out of a conviction of scarcity. Throughout my twenties, my unconscious motivation for my breakneck productivity was mostly the idea that if I slowed down for even a second, I’d be destitute. But as burnout threatened, I was struck with the realization that it really didn’t seem to matter how much I earned. There was no end goal that said if I earned “this much,” then I would know I was okay and could relax.

Last year, I purposefully examined my relationship to money. I began digging into my ingrained beliefs and stories around scarcity and abundance. I recognized the profound tension that showed up in my body whenever I looked at my bank account balance. Didn’t matter how much was in there, I would always feel it was never enough. I began to work with this to shift out of fear and into gratitude. The truth is, I am incredibly privileged and have never wanted for anything, and yet it is the mindset of scarcity that influenced every decision about how I ran my business.

One reframe that has been particularly helpful to me is the recognition that “money” doesn’t exist. It’s just an energetic placeholder as we transition one physical manifestation into another. I put energy out into the world via my words on this blog and the books and other products I create for people. That energy comes back to me as numbers in my bank account, which I then eventually transform into food and clothes and Netflix subscriptions and plants (because I always need one more). The energy of those things, in turn, fuels me to once again share my energy with others through my work.

Ultimately, it’s all the same energy. Abundance is not just the money coming in. It’s also the creativity going out. The irony is that when we fear money won’t come in, our conduit for putting creativity out into the world often constricts—becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Working through money stories and cultivating gratitude and abundance around money is a vital skill. This is especially true for those of us who are self-employed and who accept both total control and total responsibility for the resources we bring into our lives.

5. Create With Gentleness

When I returned to writing fiction last year, I did so with utmost respect and caution. I was committed to not repeating the mistakes that led to my alienation from this blessed expression of my creativity. Instead of returning to my creativity “on push,” with a determined focus on productivity and daily to-do goals, I returned with a conscious desire to be “in flow” with my creativity. This time, I wasn’t there to tell it what to do. I was there to listen.

And what I have learned is something I’ve never been very good at in any area of my life, and that is gentleness. I have started writing this story with no preconceived ideas about how the process should go. I have no deadline, no intention of completing the outline or the first draft by such and such a date. I don’t even have the intention of publishing it. I’m not here because I know anything at all. I am here to listen and to learn.

I am in a unique situation, since I don’t currently need this particular book to be published in order to support myself. But I believe the lesson applies to us all, no matter what we’re creating or why. And the lesson is simply: honor the process. You never value creativity so much as when you think you’ve lost it. After it’s left you once, you realize it could always leave again, and you do what you must to correct the habits that chased it away in the first place.

6. Know “You Are the Luckiest Person in the World”

Finally, perhaps the single most revolutionary integration I experienced last year was a lightning shift in perspective early in the spring.

When you’ve been through some tough spots in life (and who hasn’t?), it can be hard not to drag a little of that darkness around with you. Even when things are pretty good, you can’t help but look over your shoulder and wonder if the dark times are about to overtake you once more. This, too, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—unless you change it.

My own experience happened on the eve of having to say goodbye to family who live in a different state. I went to bed that night awash in sadness that “this was my life.” I projected the difficulty of the moment onto all of my other challenges and struggles, telling myself a familiar story in which I was defined by circumstances outside of my control and by my sadness about it.

For about a year up until this point, I had been working daily with a little practice in which I would access embodied feelings such as joy, gratitude, excitement, and love. Lying tearfully in bed that night, I remembered my practice, and I accessed the place in my body where I knew I experienced gratitude. In essence, I consciously created the experience of gratitude in my own body. I did it with the expectation that I’d feel momentary gratitude and then flip back into feeling sorry for myself. But in that moment, the phenomenon of being able to consciously shift my own inner reality hit me like a lightning bolt. I realized in a visceral way: it’s all perspective. How I feel in my body, how I look at the world, the stories I tell about myself—they’re all perspective.

In that moment, as the feeling of gratitude buzzed through me, I examined how the sad little stories I was telling myself could just as easily be flipped on their heads. I thought about my family, my business, all the amazing adventures I had taken and the things I had learned in the past decade. “You are the luckiest person in the world,” I told myself. And I believed it.

Subtle as it was, that moment (which was the outcome of many months of dedicated practice) was life-changing. Although life and all its challenges continue, nothing has been quite the same since that night.

And so my final insight for rewiring one’s relationship to the business of writing—or to literally anything else in life—is that perspectives can be changed. Changing them is generally not an overnight proposition. But determinedly accessing the truth that even in our challenges, we are the luckiest people in the world, opens up an entirely new landscape for dealing with the challenges and the opportunities available to us in this life.

***

I hope these insights are of help to you. They are, of course, personal to my own experience. But I believe they speak to the same challenges many writers face as they continue with long-term careers, and I hope some of my own examples can help all of us create functional, healthy, and ever-evolving relationships with our creativity and the business of writing.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What have you experienced as your greatest challenge with the business of writing? Tell me in the comments!

Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast or Amazon Music).

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The post Burned Out on the Business of Writing? 6 Insights to Rediscover Joy and Passion appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

How do you find the story behind all your stories? Who are you at the heart of your books? Isabelle Knight talks about the importance of author brand in an age of limitless content, and gives tips on how to discover yours.

In the intro, 20 new miniature books added to Queen Mary’s Dollhouse [BBC]; Amazon announced Rufus, a new generative AI-powered conversational shopping experience; How generative AI will impact book discoverability; Amazon AI Ready Initiative free AI training; NY Times is hiring for their own AI initiatives [The Verge]; “There’s nothing wrong with the tech, but it has to be legal and licensed.” [Hollywood Reporter]; Tools & Strategies you must use to survive the 2024 revolution [Marketing Against the Grain].

Plus, I recommend Forever Strong by Dr Gabrielle Lyon; my Kickstarter pre-launch page is up for Spear of Destiny; Vienna, Nuremberg, and Cologne: My Five days Research Trip notes and pictures.

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

You can also support the show and join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Isabelle Knight is a professional publicist, speaker and PR & brand mentor to authors and business founders. She is also adjunct professor in MA, PR & Advertising at the American International University of London.

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

• Brand and it’s importance in the age of AI
• Is human connection more important than content?
• How to draw an emotional connection with your unique story
• Creating and controlling your author brand story
• Dealing with the fear of vulnerability
• Tips for pivoting your author story
• At what stage could a publicist be helpful for an indie author?

You can find Isabelle at BuildYourBrandWithPR.com.

Transcript of Interview with Isabelle Knight

Joanna: Isabelle Knight is a professional publicist, speaker and PR & brand mentor to authors and business founders. She is also adjunct professor in MA, PR & Advertising at the American International University of London. So welcome to the show, Isabelle.

Isabelle: Thank you very much, Jo. It’s pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Joanna: I’m excited to talk about this topic. Before we get into it—

Tell us a bit more about you and your background in the publishing industry.

Isabelle: So my background is a publicist, the bulk of my career was in film. So I was a film publicist for a long time. Then I moved into TV, and this was film production and TV production as well.

So I was a publicist who goes on set and works with the actors and the directors and the writers and that kind of thing, as well as publicizing releases of films and TV shows.

Through that time, I also worked on some book releases with authors, but particularly towards the end of my kind of traditional publicist career, I worked with JK Rowling and the production team that produced the Strike series of books for TV. So it wasn’t JK Rowling, it was JK Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith.

So I was on that for a few years, which was all very exciting. Then the pandemic hits and everything kind of changed, in terms of mostly the way that publicists were able to work and that productions were able to work.

So I took my business online. So now I do everything online. I started working with—because I’d come from the creative industries—I was working with people who are writing books. So this was kind of business owners, but then also, fiction writers.

I discovered that lots of people were writing books but didn’t have any idea of how to bring those books to a readership or to find an audience and grow an audience, and perhaps actually become known as authors and sell books.

I’d spent a long time, 20 years or so, working with people to essentially make them famous and make their creative output famous.

So I thought, well, loads of these people just don’t have any of the kinds of resources and tools and knowledge that as a publicist working in those big industry, that you kind of start to take it for granted that people know what to do when it comes to promoting themselves.

Of course, I quickly realized that many people don’t know what to do. So now, rather than doing people’s PR, or publicity for them, which, you know, for most indie and self-published authors is a very expensive thing to do.

What I do now is I mentor, and essentially teach, authors how to go about building their brand, promoting themselves, creating a name for themselves, and creating a readership, a fan base, growing that readership, and selling some books.

So that’s what I now concentrate on doing, and I absolutely love working with authors. It’s mostly indie and self-published authors, but also small press authors. It’s basically any author that finds themselves having to essentially do most of their own marketing and promotion.

Joanna: Well, that’s definitely most of the listeners. That’s great. So you mentioned the word “brand” there. I feel like it’s so difficult to know, what is an author brand anyway? So maybe you could get a bit into that. Tell us—

What is a brand? Why is it so important, perhaps even more in this age of AI?

Isabelle: Yes, absolutely.

So because I’m a publicist, I come at this from this angle. So just imagine this scenario: if I was going to put you in front of a journalist tomorrow and they were going to ask you about being an author, and they were going to ask you about your books, what they really want to know is—and this kind of extends to what your reader wants to know—is why should they be interested in the books that you have written?

So your brand goes much deeper than what is the book, or what are the books, what are they about, what’s the genre, what are the tropes that you’re using?

It goes much further than that, into who are you as an author and what is it that you have to say, as an author, that is going to give us, the readers, something to care about? Because we’ve got to care about this enough that we’re going to give your book a shot.

Now that we’re all surrounded by content so much all of the time in our age of social media, and increasingly in our age of AI, we’re bombarded constantly with messages.

In the book world, as it gets busier and busier and self-publishing and indie publishing gets busier, which is very exciting, but also makes it even harder now for authors to stand out in that kind of busyness and noise.

So we have to find the thing that makes the author unique.

The way we do that is by looking at what I call the author brand story, which I know sounds quite terrifying to authors when they’re first coming into this. If we kind of set aside the word “brand” for the moment, and we just look at, well, —

What is it about the author that makes them unique? Why are they writing? What are they writing?

So for example, if you’re a fiction author and writing romance, or you might be writing fantasy or science fiction, why are you writing in that genre? What is it that is important to you about it? What messages do you want the reader to take away? What do you want them to remember about the book?

So with a journalist, they’re going to be asking, why do you write? That would probably be the first question. Or, what made you become an author? So it’s thinking about that, and it’s thinking through what you can say about yourself as an author.

So most people become authors because they’re emotionally led to do it. The motivation tends to be emotional when we’re writing and the themes that we’re writing about. So what are the things that drew you to those themes? What are the things that led you to write what you’re writing?

Joanna: So many things there. I’ve been writing notes to come back on.

So you talk there about how we have so much content all the time, and that the person on the other end, whether they’re a journalist or a reader, needs to know who you are as an author and what the emotional connection is between you in some way.

So I feel like for the last decade, we have focused much more on content. So you said content, books being content, even though it’s not a very romantic word.

Are we now at a point where human connection is more important than just ‘content?’

Or has it actually always been that way?

Isabelle: I think human connection has always been important, but I think we’re in a place now, obviously, with AI making it so much easier to produce content, and content that looks like so many other kinds of content. I think this is the point, you have lots and lots of content that essentially is all the same.

So if we’ve got 10 romance novels all lined up together, and they’re all dealing with similar kinds of tropes, and they’ve all got the hero and the heroine or whatever’s going on in the novels. So if you sit and tell a reader, “Which of these 10 books should you read? Well, this one’s about this, this one’s about this,” that reader will probably get quite bored quite quickly listening to what all these books are about.

If we can tell them something about what the book means emotionally to the author, so if they say, “Well, I was actually led to write this book because I’ve been through something similar myself,” or, “I’m really interested in exploring how women are treated by their lovers.”

If we make it a more compelling story on that human emotional level, then that suddenly becomes more interesting to the reader, and they can start to engage with it on their own personal human level.

This is really the thing that AI—and I think I’ve said on social media recently that it can’t do this yet, and maybe that’s another conversation about whether AI will ever be able to do this—but to replicate that unique human emotion.

It’s slightly different for everyone. Everyone has their own unique story. We’ve all arrived at what we’re doing from different places. We all have different experiences. But the human emotions that we feel are often quite universal. You know, lots of other people will have also felt those emotions. So it’s—

How do we draw that emotional connection by telling our unique story?

That’s the thing that I think AI, you know, this is where humans have the edge over computers.

Joanna: I totally agree. You can certainly generate books to market, or generate art or whatever you want to do, if not exactly, then very soon. As you say, what you can’t do is put that emotional reason behind it.

This is where I’d like to get into something a bit more practical because I’ve been thinking about this. So with nonfiction, I feel it’s much easier. So I wrote a book Pilgrimage, it’s a kind of midlife travel memoir. It is about pilgrimage. I mean it’s got religious elements and menopause elements. These are things that humans go through.

So with nonfiction, it seems easier, but with fiction, I do an Author’s Note at the end of all my books.

In every single book I have, sometimes a long, sometimes short, reasons why I wrote the book and the personal side of writing, my research process, all of that.

I was wondering about trying to turn those author’s notes into something, I don’t know, me talking about them on a video, doing another podcast on it, I don’t know. I’m starting to feel like, for my fiction, it’s hard to do this. So what do you think?

What are some of your practical ideas for bringing that emotion and that personality behind fiction, in particular?

Isabelle: Yes, and fiction is harder. You’re right. With nonfiction we can quite often construct the story behind it very well. Fiction is harder, and therefore it can be juicier as well. It can be more interesting for someone like me working with authors to do this.

So the first thing to say is, it is difficult to do this for yourself. To see your emotionally led brand story, author story, objectively is hard to do because we’re so close to it. To start thinking through this, it’s looking through what are the themes.

So, often the themes that mean a lot to you personally tend to come out in our writing, in our fiction, as the themes that we’re keen to explore in the fiction. So when I do this work with authors, what I’m doing is looking for the threads that kind of tie the author’s passions/motivations, and we’ll see that reflected in the writing. So it’s kind of trying to tie all of that together.

Joanna: So if we can identify that, how can we communicate that to readers in a more scalable manner? Because, I mean, obviously, like we’re doing a podcast, this is a one-to-one. We can get into the backstory, as I do on this show. For many authors who are trying to scale their marketing—

What are some of the ways they can portray this more personal and emotional side in a scalable manner?

Isabelle: So when we’ve cracked what are the big themes that you’re exploring on a personal level and also in your writing, then you can start to use those themes to attract your readers and use that in your marketing. So you can use it in your social media.

Most of the time, when authors do this work with me, they’ll put their story on their website. So when we see the “About the Author,” we’re seeing something that is much less generic than, “The author enjoys yachting in their spare time and has three kids.” You know, the kind of bios that you see a lot of. They’re telling us something about them and why they write.

So they’ll start that on their website, and then often they’ll start to weave that into their social media. What happens is, it gives the author so much more confidence, first of all, to market themselves, because they feel like they know what they want to say. They feel like they’ve found the thing that is going to tie them to their potential readers.

What that also does is it then shows you, kind of pinpoints, who your potential reader is really going to be. I say to authors, right, step one is figure out what are we going to say about you as the author. Step two is who are we going to say it to, i.e., who do we want to attract? Who is our reader?

People say to me, “Oh, but my reader is just everyone that enjoys fantasy, or everyone that enjoys YA.” I encourage authors to get more specific about who their reader actually is, you know, the reader who is going to resonate with the big themes that they’ve pinpointed in their brand story.

So once we’ve got that and we’re much more confident in who do we want to attract, which readers do we want to speak to, then the author can start to weave that into their social media. Whenever they’re talking on a podcast, or if they’re doing an interview, if they’re writing an article, all of these things can kind of form the foundation of what they want to say.

Joanna: It’s really interesting. Can we explore the word ‘theme’ a little more? Because, of course, as fiction writers, the word theme can mean different things. So I guess just to be specific to me, because you’re on my show.

So in my fiction as J.F. Penn, pretty much every single one of my books has something that is religious. Although I’m not a Christian, everything resonates with religious history, religious places, religious myth, the supernatural, in the way that it falls towards the religious side as opposed to like witches and ghosts and things.

So that’s something that is an underlying theme in all of my fiction writing. So is that what you mean by theme? Or should it be a more emotional element, like often my books are about sisters?

Isabelle: Yes. So imagine we’re doing an author brand story session then. It’s just the two of us.

Joanna: Just the two of us. No one is listening!

Isabelle: So I would say to you, okay, well, that’s really interesting about the religious myth and the supernatural. So I would be trying to find out, so where does that come from? Where does the kind of fascination with those things come from?

So you mentioned sisters. So that, again, is an intriguing theme.

What is it about sisters? Is it about the relationships between sisters? Is that somehow then tied into the themes of the supernatural, the religious myth?

So I’m always saying to authors, but you know, why?

Tell me why that’s important, and then, why is that important? So that we get right underneath the skin of it.

Often this brings stuff up for people that they hadn’t ever kind of articulated ever, sometimes not even to themselves. They’ll say to me, “Oh, that’s always been there. It’s like a huge kind of thing that is so, so important to me. It’s so integral to who I am and what I’m writing.”

Joanna: That’s interesting. My last nonfiction book was called Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words, and that’s actually the process that one gets into in terms of writing the shadow is these deeper side of things you might not have really known about consciously, but that affects everything you do.

So it’s very interesting that you’re going down to such a deep level for people. I feel like —

So much of book marketing is on the surface. What we’ve concentrated on a lot in the indie community has been keywords, and categories, and ad copy, and cover design as well.

Cover design is obviously really important, but what you’re talking about there is super, super personal. I guess I’m still interested in how we turn that into marketing.

So let’s say, just briefly, I write about sisters. I’m the eldest of five kids, but my dad had a second marriage and my two sisters were a lot younger than me, so over a decade younger than me. So I always felt very scared for them and wanted to protect them.

So in my books, my characters often protect their sisters, as I always wanted to do when I was a teenager. You know, they were born when I was in puberty, so it’s like an emotional time. That story is not in any of my fiction, even though there are so many sisters and that kind of thing. So how do I turn that example into practical marketing?

Isabelle: Well, I mean, first of all, that’s a great story. I can’t believe it’s not in any of your fiction.

So how do we get it from this kind of very deeply personal place? The way I do this, with authors is I say, right, the first kind of iteration is the version that you wouldn’t even share. You know, you might share it with your cat, but that’s about it.

We’re turning it from something that’s deeply personal, it’s filled with very personal details that you might not want your entire readership to know about, and we kind of morph that into a version where we’re really concentrating on, like I said earlier, the emotional themes that other people are going to resonate with.

They don’t necessarily need to know all of your personal details in order to understand it. So what I would focus on there is, you know, we’re writing about protecting vulnerabilities, from what you said.

It’s perhaps feelings of responsibility for those who are vulnerable, but perhaps also remembering your own vulnerabilities. In a way, you’re protecting yourself by protecting others who you love who are also vulnerable. So we could go there with it.

So when we start talking about that, then other people say, “Oh, yes. I can resonate with that. I can connect with that.” So we can start to weave that into our marketing.

We don’t have to give the whole personal backstory every time.

You know, these books are exploring vulnerability and how we protect ourselves and our loved ones from vulnerability.

Joanna: It’s interesting. I mean, I primarily write thrillers, and most thrillers actually are about saving the world from some big threat. So that’s a sort of blown-up version of protecting. I say blown up, I explode a lot of things in my books.

I mean, this sort of protecting the world, protecting the family, protecting my sisters, that kind of thing. It’s interesting to think about it on a bigger level.

I do want to come back to what you mentioned there, that there are several layers of the process. There’s the sort of very personal one that you might just share with your cat.

You also used the word, I wrote it down, you used the word “juicier” earlier. Like, oh, that’s kind of juicy information. That as a publicist, you might go, oh, let’s follow that story, what’s really behind there?

I feel like that’s a real journalism thing. I’ve got some friends who are journalists, so they do that too.

The thing is, at one point I did get on TV, and I was in papers and magazines and things, and I was very uncomfortable with the whole thing. I feel like, especially these days with a lot of outrage, a lot of hate online, there is this fear of being attacked by the press, or on social media, or getting some kind of public backlash over something even if we didn’t mean it.

We’re afraid of that juiciness. We’re afraid of putting that stuff into the world for fear of being hurt or our career being destroyed.

How do you address that fear of being publicly exposed?

Isabelle: Yes, and this is a really, really good point. It’s an excellent question. Yes, that word juicy, it’s misleading, really, because I agree with you.

What I’m not doing is I’m not trying to put people into situations where they are vulnerable, where they feel exposed, and they feel like they are opening themselves up in a way when they can’t protect themselves from potential judgment or being attacked online, or whatever it is.

So what I’m not doing is looking for what I call the kind of cheap headlines. I mean, PR, sometimes deservedly, has this reputation of being that we’re just looking for the easy headline, we’re looking for the salacious gossip, we’re looking for the juicy story that we can exploit.

What I’m doing is showing authors how to do the opposite of that, which is by taking control of your own author story. So starting with the personal level and then building it up into something where you get to decide what you share and what you don’t share. That’s really, really crucial.

You’re not just creating your story, but you’re curating it as well.

So you decide that bit is going in, that bit is not going in. I will say, the story police are never going to come by and say, ‘Oh, but you didn’t tell us about that,” because what you choose not to share, you don’t share it, and people aren’t going to know about that.

You get to control your story, and that gives people the confidence to then go out and market themselves because they’ve got a handle on their story. They know what it is that they want to say. So we know the compelling piece that we want to give to potential readers.

We also know that we don’t have to share personal details. We don’t have to be vulnerable if we’ve decided that’s not something we’re going to share.

So again, going back to that example, that if I put an author in front of a journalist, and the journalist will start asking lots of questions, going, “Why is that important to you? Where does that come from?”

So if you’ve already done that work yourself of deciding this is what I’m saying about myself as an author, then you have that story ready.

Joanna: Yes, it’s like thinking about it in advance. I think for a lot of people—

It’s things that have come back from the past and things that have been taken out of context.

So things you might not have thought about, or even you shouldn’t need to think about.

So it’s like, even if we control the story, then people take us out of context, or they take things in our book. I’ve even had people email me lines from my novels that characters have said, and say, “You must think this. You are X about X.” No need to go into details.

I’ve been doing this for many years now, so I’m kind of used to it, but there are times when it’s like, seriously, this is not good.

So even if I curate one part of my story, it doesn’t stop people coming in other ways. So I guess, how do we deal with that? I guess if we want to be seen, if we want people to buy our books—which we do—

Is this just part of the game that we have to deal with?

Isabelle: This is the whole idea of having a brand. It’s deciding how you’re presenting yourself, what is it that you’re showing of yourself. It doesn’t mean that you’re showing the whole of yourself, it’s deciding which pieces of you, what version of you, is the public facing you.

Like you just described, when you might get backlash and criticism from things that, you know, even that you’ve said or written years before, if you’re sure of your brand story, you can always come back to that and use that to respond to any criticism that you get.

Again, this is where working with a publicist at times like that can also be helpful as well, to figure out how to respond to things like that.

But if you’ve decided in your brand story, all of the work that you put out as an author, and deciding how you talk about it, and how it relates back to the author brand story that you’ve decided that you’ve written, then it’s much easier to respond to those kinds of criticisms.

Rather than it feeling like you’re on the backfoot or feeling like somebody has exposed something that you weren’t prepared for, you didn’t know how to respond to.

That is tricky if that is happening, and say it’s something you wrote before you were very secure of how you’re presenting yourself. So that is difficult to come back to, but we can absolutely do it. It is deciding which pieces of you are the public facing and which pieces of you are private.

Joanna: I think it’s really interesting. So let’s take someone who has an established brand. It’s very interesting that you worked with Robert Galbraith as JK Rowling because of this pivot.

Sometimes people feel trapped in a brand, and they want to pivot into another brand.

And that is a really good example.

Now, it’s questionable whether Robert Galbraith would have been as successful without it being outed somehow, or leaked, potentially, who the real person was, which is an interesting question.

In terms of less famous authors, if you want to pivot out of one thing and be known for something else, how do you bring existing fans along?

Can you pivot that author story, or are you best to just start another name?

Isabelle: So this is brilliant question because I get this a lot from authors. I think for you as well, you mentioned you have kind of two different brands. So authors either have more than one existing brand, as it were, or they want to pivot. They’re known for one thing, and they want to pivot into the new thing.

So we don’t need to create lots of different brands. We don’t need to become lots of different people, lots of different authors.

We only need one author brand story. That story can evolve as you do, as a writer, as an author.

The story can grow with you, but the kind of fundamentals of that story will remain the same.

Using the JK Rowling example, when she first wrote the Harry Potter series, the story behind that was that she was a single mother who was struggling and wasn’t getting a break for ages. It was kind of that front of writing fantasy stories that kind of take you out of reality.

Then when she pivoted, again, it was the being known for one story, changing and pivoting, and becoming known for something completely different and wondering whether she could get away with being anonymous. Obviously, she didn’t get away with that for very long at all.

It’s always creating that kind of story behind the story, which is what we want to do. But we can use one brand story to wrap together all of your genres, all of your books.

I work with authors sometimes who might be writing romance and children’s books, for example, but we don’t need to create several different brands. We can do that under one brand, but we’re looking at what are the themes that tie together those different genres. I would say 100% of the time when it’s the same person writing that those motivations are going to be the same across their genres.

Joanna: I’d say I disagree with that. I think that especially as one writes a lot more books, the audiences become very different.

My audience as Joanna Penn is quite different to J.F. Penn. They’re different aspects of my personality.

The readerships are different. The email lists are different. The ads are different. Everything looks different. You know, it has a different voice even, and not because I’m somehow a split personality or anything like that.

You mentioned children’s and romance, well, that’s fine. But I know a lot of children’s authors who also write horror, and they have to split their websites. Or erotica, maybe it’s not sweet romance, maybe it’s erotica.

So people, certainly in the indie community, I think we tend to write generally a lot more books than in the traditional industry. So, often we are moving into these further parts of ourselves, I guess.

So I certainly agree with you on one level, but I also disagree because I feel like it’s actually more sensible to manage, at least the more direct marketing around email and ads and all of that kind of stuff, as two brands.

Isabelle: Yes, I do agree with that. That is absolutely true that in your direct marketing the way you present yourself is going to change across your different brands.

You can still have your kind of 360-degree author brand story so that we can still see that it’s you, even if you might be writing in wildly different or opposing genres.

You’ll have your two brands visually, you’ll have your two brands in the way you present yourself and maybe even in your name, but your author brand story will still be able to trace it back to that story behind the story. But you will absolutely need to adapt in your direct marketing and the way you talk about those different genres, for sure.

Joanna: I find this so interesting. As we said at the beginning, I think this is just more and more important over time.

I also know that for my fiction, I’ve hidden behind the books because it’s much easier for me to write a book.

For example, I’ve never done a live reading of my fiction. Never, never done that.

I’ve never done a book launch, never done most of the things that most traditionally published authors do as part of, I guess, what they call marketing. It is very different to what we often call marketing in the indie world, but I feel like that’s actually becoming more important.

So I did want to ask you because, again, one of the feelings in the indie community is hiring a publicist may well be too expensive.

I think you said it yourself a bit earlier that it might not be worth it. But when might it be worth it as an indie author? In what stage of an indie author career?

What might they achieve if they do hire a publicist or work with someone on this?

Isabelle: This is another interesting question. So a lot of the authors that I work with are getting off the starting blocks, in terms of working out what their marketing strategy is going to be, working out who they are, how to present themselves as authors, and to get going.

Then they start to build the kind of results that if I was providing what we call done for you publicity services, that I would want to see. This is getting themselves interviewed on the radio, they get into magazines, they are interviewed on podcasts, they start giving talks, and they do book launches at bookshops, and that kind of thing.

So the way I’m working with authors is they are able to get all of these results for themselves, with me kind of guiding and supporting and showing them this is what you have to do next.

For example, learning how to pitch yourself as an author is such a huge skill that loads of authors struggle with. If you don’t have a background in marketing and PR, that kind of thing is going to be really difficult.

So at the point where you might want to hire a publicist to do this for you, is the point where, as an author, you’ve grown your brand to a certain level. You’ve got a good readership, you know how to do your direct marketing, you’re making sales, you’re engaging with your readers.

You have more of a relationship with your readers, as in, you know why they’re reading your books, you know who they are and what they’re looking for in you, as the author. You’ve got a fan base, you’ve got readers who are eagerly awaiting the next book in the series, and so on.

So when you get to the point where you’re doing so much direct marketing, actually, some of it is about not having the time to do all of your publicity, PR marketing, all by yourself. So if you’re at that level, then hiring a publicist for your next big book launch, you know, that could be the right time to do it.

Until you get to that point, you can be learning how to do so much of this for yourself and how it works. So learning how to establish relationships with journalists, for example, how to pitch yourself.

Remember, how to pitch yourself applies to pitching to agents, publishers, journalists, book festival organizers. All of these people are people you would need to pitch to. So once you’ve learned that skill, you can use it over and over again.

Learning how to present yourself is something that once you’ve kind of cracked that, then that’s a skill that you’ll use over and over.

Whereas if you’re hiring a publicist to do it for you, they’ll go off, and they’ll do the strategy, and they’ll bring back the results, but without you being so involved in understanding what that process is.

So I think my philosophy is teaching people how they can do this for themselves. I’m not teaching you how to become a publicist, but I’m teaching you how to understand how to market yourself and what’s going to work for you to reach your readership. Then you can repeat those actions over and over as you go through your career.

Joanna: Yes, and again, I feel like as indies we’ve spent a long time—like many of us are very, very good at direct sales. In a changing world where the human connection is going to become more important, I do think this is important. So hence why we’re talking.

Also, you do have a course coming up. You have lots of things you do available on your site. So just—

Tell us about your services and where people can find you online.

Isabelle: Brilliant. So my website is BuildYourBrandWithPR.com. I have a six-week Build Your Author Brand course that I run. It’s an online course, but you get access to me. We do live sessions, so it’s not just learning on your own. You’re learning in a group with other authors, you have direct access to me, and we have lots of live Q&A sessions. That will start again on the 24th of February 2024, so that’s a six-week online course.

You can also work with me one-to-one, as well. So I work with lots of clients online, as well. So you can either do group programs or one-to-one programs.

Joanna: Do you repeat that over time? Like if people listen to this later and they want to do it, do you do them several times a year?

Isabelle: Yes. So I run the six-week online course that runs three times a year, at the moment. So yes, if you miss the next one, then you can sign up for the one after.

Joanna: Brilliant. And you have an email list and everything there as well, so people can find out more?

Isabelle: Yes, yes. So you can sign up to the email list through the site. If you feel like working one-to-one with me on your author brand story, you can also book a quick call with me to talk about that.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Isabelle. That was great.

Isabelle: Thank you. Thanks, Jo. It’s a pleasure.

The post Your Author Brand With Isabelle Knight first appeared on The Creative Penn.