Poets & Writers Magazine features editor India Lena González hosts this virtual event celebrating the ten debut poets featured in “Performing the Future: Our Nineteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” from our January/February 2024 issue. The event includes readings by the poets as well as a conversation about their debut books, their influences and inspirations, and their individual paths to publication.
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Author: jkashiwabara
Say the word “marketing” to a group of writers, and you’re likely to elicit a groan. Almost anyone with dreams of seeing a book in print can relate to the deflation experienced when it becomes clear that simply writing an excellent book isn’t enough to sell any notable number of copies. Sooner or later, any writer committed to publishing and selling a book will have to accept that learning how to market the book is just as important, if not more, to the book’s success than the book itself. This is often a frustrating experience since, in general, marketing is hard for writers.
Why is this? After posting last month about how my own approach to marketing has evolved over the last sixteen years, I started thinking about why it is that marketing is almost universally deplored by writers. Although some writers are, of course, exceptions, most writers hate the idea of marketing.
Here you’ve just done this incredibly monumental thing of learning all the complex and high-level skills involved in writing a book, only to be told you’re basically back to ground zero. Now you have to start all over and learn the equally complex and high-level skills of marketing a book. The difference is that most of us learned the art of fiction because we loved the process; few of us are equally attracted to learning the art of marketing.
Now, some writers may be perfectly clear that they are writing for reasons that do not require marketing. Perhaps they are writing a story for their grandchildren or a memoir for purely personal reasons, and it doesn’t matter much if they sell more than ten copies, if any. That approach is 100% legit. I am always a stand for getting clear with yourself about your own motives for writing and your own personal definition of success.
But most writers want to be published. More than that, most writers dream of making good money off their books, maybe even writing full-time. That’s also legit. But the dash of cold water is that this dream will not happen without the ability to market your book. Doesn’t matter if your intention is to publish traditionally or independently. Either way, more than half the job of being a successful writer is marketing.
I’m sometimes asked if I think a writer needs to go to college to get a degree in Literature or an MFA. My response (as someone for whom college wasn’t an option, so take this in light of its obvious bias) has always been, “No, you can learn everything you need to know about writing a book via the multitude of resources that are available online.” However, in recent years, I would amend that answer to suggest that, instead, if a person is serious about a writing career, they would do well to pursue a degree, or at least classes, in marketing or business. If I had it to do over again, that’s what I would do.
I say that to emphasize the sheer importance of marketing and business savvy as the leverage point to transforming writing into a viable and profitable career. If it sounds sobering, that’s because it is. However, it is also important to know that, just as the incredibly complex skill of writing a book can be learned by anyone with the initiative and discipline to study and practice, so too can the equally complex skill of marketing a book or creating a business around your writing be learned by anyone. The resources are literally at our fingertips. All that is required is the willingness to move past the initial (and often substantial) resistance that many of us feel and to begin putting in the work. After a while, marketing can turn out to be just as much a creative pursuit as writing.
One of the most effective ways to move past limiting beliefs—such as “marketing is too hard” or “I’m a writer, not a marketer”—is to recognize those beliefs as such. In today’s post, I want to explore some of the reasons I believe marketing is hard for writers (at least in the beginning), and how writers need to flip their mindsets in order to embrace marketing and business as tremendous opportunities.
To my mind, the reasons marketing is hard for writers generally come down to two factors:
1. Writers don’t usually start out with any marketing skills.
The belief that “I’m a writer, not a marketer” is 100% true in the beginning. And in the immortal words of Carmine Falcone, “Ya always fear what ya don’t understand.”
2. Writers fail to recognize that writing full-time is a business and has to be run as such.
The idea that being a writer means you spend the majority of your time writing is a largely antiquated notion. Being a writer these days isn’t so different from being an entrepreneur.
All of this can seem scary and overwhelming to writers who are already nervous about marketing. The first thing to realize is that’s okay. You feel that way because you’re facing a challenge to expand your growth on a number of levels. Feeling this way is a sign you’re on a positive track that will transform your life.
The second thing to realize is you won’t always feel this way. If you’re truly committed to becoming a successful writer, there is no reason you can’t learn everything you need to know about how to market and sell your books. All it takes is the willingness to learn, put in the time and the effort, make mistakes, try again, and nurture your own experience as you go.
To get you started, here are five mindsets to balance out the fear that marketing is hard for writers. Just being able to recognize and acknowledge underlying reasons for those fears can help you move through them to the tremendous opportunities and rewards available on the other side.
Marketing is a field all its own. One of the reasons writers initially struggle with marketing is simply that writing and marketing are entirely different experiences. Being a writer is an entirely different identity from being a marketer. In many ways, the two can seem completely opposite. If nothing else, writing is a personal and introverted task, while marketing is a public and extroverted task.
Completing the feat of learning how to write a book is a mountaintop experience that can often lead writers to exhale in relief. You’ve done it! You’ve reached completion. But the journey isn’t over. No one will ever read a book unless they know about it. The simple fact that a great book exists will not draw readers. The only way to attract readers (and sales) is to embrace the next mountain. Beliefs that you shouldn’t have to learn both skills or that simply writing a book should be “enough” are counter-productive and will only hold you back.
All of that said, it’s also useful to recognize that despite all their differences, writing and marketing also share common ground. Both are, in fact, deeply creative and inventive acts, requiring keen awareness of self and others and an instinctive sensitivity and intuition about what works. Viewing marketing as an expression of creativity can help bridge what sometimes seems an insurmountable wall between marketing and writing.
Marketing is an art form. It’s not just the fries added on to your burger combo meal. Just like writing, marketing is a full ten-course meal all unto itself. To truly thrive at marketing—and to truly appreciate the experience of marketing—writers must recognize that marketing represents a high-level skillset. Successful marketing requires respect for those skills.
It’s no different from writing a book: although formulae can be followed (and often are in the beginning when the person is still learning), the true magic doesn’t happen until the person grasps the deeper theory and applies those principles in a way that arises from their own unique creativity and intuition.
By all means, learn the marketing formulae. Pay attention when marketing gurus tell you to start a mailing list, run promos, buy ads, etc. But don’t treat it as a checklist. Like writing itself, marketing requires more respect and love than that. It requires not just a commitment to learning what to do but also to understanding why.
It’s true marketing is not easy. This is often what trips writers up. But just remember this: writing isn’t easy either. If one is worth mastering, so is the other.
Marketing is a commitment. It is a commitment to yourself, to the book you have so proudly created, to your belief in the importance of putting that book out into the world where it can be read, and to your own continuing growth. If you have written a book that is ready to be published, then it is not “unfair” that you now have to market it. Marketing is the natural next step on your adventure. It is an inherent part of the experience. To spend years on your literary masterpiece only to expect to knock out the necessary marketing in a weekend is not only unrealistic, it is also disrespectful to your larger dream for that book.
The only way to become a successful marketer is to commit to putting in the time and the work. This requires the cultivation of the “three e’s”: education, experience, and expertise.
Educate yourself about marketing. And I mean go deep. Sign up for e-letters and blogs written by fellow authors who offer marketing advice (such as The Creative Penn, David Gaughran, and Kindlepreneur), but don’t stop there. Studying marketing itself. Study copywriting. Study advertising. Study social media. Study web design. Study graphic design. You don’t have to study all of these right away or to the same depth. But go beyond the advice of the writing world to study marketing from within its own field. Just as writing is a life-long study and practice, so is marketing.
Learn from your own experiences. The most valuable lessons I have gleaned about marketing have been through my own trial and error. Take what you’re learning and apply it. See what results you get. See how people respond. See how you respond. Find out what approaches light up your creativity versus those that make you feel icky or dead inside. Marketing techniques evolve more quickly than ever these days, so it’s important not to get stuck in ruts. Stay curious. You may even find that marketing becomes as enjoyable a creative pursuit as writing itself.
Finally, cultivate expertise. Take pride in your marketing, just as you do your writing. You are a marketer now, so you might as well be the best you can possibly be.
Marketing is a business. If you’re now a marketer, then you’re also a businessperson. If you’re writing for money and particularly if it is your career or you want it to be, then writing is your business. This means moving beyond the starving artist trope to learn the technicalities and legalities of setting yourself up for financial success.
At the least, this might mean creating a professional website and mailing list. It might also mean hiring an accountant or incorporating as an LLC. It means budgeting and setting up retirement funds and paying for your own insurance and learning how to file taxes on royalties or as a self-employed entity.
As a writer, your top priority is your art. But as a businessperson, the bottom line is money. If you’re writing full-time, this means all your resources are dependent on your writing, which means practical concerns must enter in to your decisions, both about what you write and also about how you market and sell your creations.
I’ll be straight with you: marketing gets a whole lot more appealing right about the time you realize it’s what puts bread on your table.
Marketing is a job. “Full-time writer” evokes idyllic images of spending one’s days scribbling away in a book-lined study, only occasionally emerging for crumpets and tea. Perhaps this was true enough a century or two ago, but for the vast majority of modern midlist or indie authors this is not the whole picture. If you’re a full-time writer, then the act of writing is only a small part of your professional responsibilities.
Last year when I talked about what my daily schedule looks like, quite a few people were surprised at how little time I spent writing. And it’s true. Half or more of my time is spent on tasks other than actively writing. I might be answering emails, maintaining or updating my website, or posting to social media. Or I might be working on other aspects of content creation necessary to get the writing out there—editing a blog post, recording a podcast, typesetting a book, researching, working with a cover designer, negotiating for foreign rights, doing monthly accounting, planning new projects, writing up a weekly schedule, etc.
Being a full-time writer can be idyllic. To the degree you are successful, you have the opportunity to set your own schedule, work from home, and control all the most important decisions about your work and your life. But as any entrepreneur or self-employed person can tell you, the idea that you will end up working fewer hours than someone in a corporate job (especially when you’re starting out) is laughable. There are so many other tasks involved with the business of writing than just the writing, some of which are mind-numbing, but many of which are great fun in their own right.
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Ultimately, I think the main reason marketing is hard for writers is simply the result of their either not understanding the big picture of what it takes to live successfully as a full-time author or a “magical thinking” that is in resistance to those facts. There is no magic carpet that will take even the best-written book to bestseller status. There is only the opportunity, available to all of us, to roll up our sleeves and get to work.
Making the business of writing your career is a grand way to spend your life. I have no regrets or complaints. Indeed, I feel incredibly blessed and lucky. But it’s not a fairy tale. It’s a job, and just like any job, the best way to get ahead is simply to put your head down and do the work.
If you ever feel resistant to the idea of marketing, see if you can go a little deeper and examine your own reasons behind this resistance. What you find may simply be a general sense of bewilderment at not knowing how to market. The good news is that’s where everyone starts. From there, the possibilities of what you may learn and where you may go are limitless.
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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Author: K.M. Weiland | @KMWeiland
What are the benefits — and the challenges — of crowdfunding on Kickstarter? How can you fund successfully, as well as make a profit with your campaign? Paddy Finn gives his tips.
In the intro, you can find more selling direct resources here; Streaming due for a streamlining [FT]; Authors Guild explores AI licensing deal [Hollywood Reporter]; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI on Bill Gates’ podcast, Unconfuse Me; AI audio company ElevenLabs in funding deal [TechCrunch]. Plus, follow my book research trip for Spear of Destiny on Instagram @jfpennauthor or Facebook @jfpennauthor.
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.
Paddy Finn is the author of science fiction and fantasy novels, the CEO of Penny Dragon Games and Starcane Press, and is a Kickstarter expert.
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 Paddy at PaddyFinn.com, and his course at KickstarterUniversity.com.
Joanna: Paddy Finn is the author of science fiction and fantasy novels, the CEO of Penny Dragon Games and Starcane Press, and is a Kickstarter expert. So welcome to the show, Paddy.
Paddy: It’s awesome to be here, Jo. Thanks for having me.
Joanna: I’m so excited to talk to you about Kickstarter. But before we get into that−
Because you have so many companies doing a lot of products.
Paddy: First of all, I don’t know how I manage my time. It’s a strange one because I started writing fantasy and science fiction novels back in like 2015/2016. Like lots of authors, I’ve been writing ever since I was a kid and could pick up a pen or a pencil.
I started to hear about this self-publishing thing, and I may have started listening to The Creative Penn podcast and a few other podcasts around that time as well. So that kind of gave me some impetus to take this thing seriously. Then I went to a few conferences, and they really encouraged me. Come 2018, I went full time as an indie author and did very well for a few years.
Then I saw another opportunity in a slightly, let’s call it an adjacent market, I guess, where Kickstarter was doing very well for some people who were creating content for Dungeons and Dragons. I’d been playing Dungeons and Dragons for like seven or eight years at that stage.
I figured, hey, I like this thing. It’s writing plus a little bit of game design. It’s similar, but also different, and it’s a new challenge, so let’s give that a try. It exploded as soon as we tried it, really. So that was kind of an indicator that, hey, we should keep doing this thing because it’s working. So we kept doing that thing.
Joanna: So Starcane Press is your publishing house?
Paddy: That’s correct. So Starcane Press is kind of like a combination of star and arcane because we like to work on science fiction and fantasy. To be honest, when we started with the whole Kickstarter thing and the new industry, really, it took us away from novel publishing.
Only in the last kind of 6 – 12 months have we started to circle back to that. It’s been a bit slow going, but 2024 is going to be a year where we will really focus again on novels. So we’re looking forward to that.
Joanna: So for someone like me who, I mean, obviously, I’ve heard of Dungeons and Dragons, but I don’t really understand what kind of products you’re creating. So tell us like, what are the products you have been doing for the games?
Paddy: It’s primarily books. Hardcover books, but also PDFs. We’ve been leaning very heavily on digital content, specifically PDFs in the past 6 – 12 months. However, the industry does love a hardcover book. The great thing about those two things is that, generally, they’re a much higher ticket item than a novel.
So a hardcover game book could be anywhere from $40 to $60. If it’s a special edition, or like a premium cover, it could be over $100 per copy. Then your PDFs, they can be anywhere from $5 to $35 to $40, just depending on what’s in there, how big it is, and whatever the content is. But essentially, it’s just a book.
Dungeons and Dragons, when I describe it to people, it’s like writing, only you’re doing it with four or five other people. One person at the table is the narrator, and they control all the minor characters and the antagonist. Then the other people at the table are players, and they control the main characters or the protagonists.
So together, you just sit there, and through your imagination you tell a joint story and create this awesome thing. It’s an experience, and it’s a creative outlet for a lot of people who don’t really get a creative outlet these days. So I think it’s appealing to a lot more people.
Joanna: Yes, and again, I’m just fascinated−before we get into Kickstarter−because this is about products as well, and, as you said, higher ticket items. So are you writing the game for the narrator person to use as an outline for the game?
Paddy: Exactly. So it depends. One of the Kickstarters we launched last year that did very well was like a Celtic setting book, which is just a world building book that says, hey, here is a Celtic-flavored world. Here are a bunch of clowns. We kind of drew on the inspiration of Irish, Scottish, Manx, and it’s got a little bit of Cornwell kind of mythology.
We kind of said, well, if you want to run a game like that in that kind of world, here are a bunch of locations and items and monsters, and just lots of different things that you would encounter in those folktales. They’re in this book, and you can lift this book up, and you can now tell a story or run an adventure in this world because you have all the stuff there.
Joanna: That actually sounds really fun. I never did gaming. My brother did gaming, and still games. I often feel a little bit kind of jealous that I missed out on this stuff. I know you can start anytime, and I should probably get into it now.
It’s so interesting hearing about it in terms of the world building because, I mean, that is what we do as fiction authors. We create these worlds and have adventures in it. You also mentioned, I guess as part of the world building−
Cards or little figures? Or are there other things you offer with them?
Paddy: Oh, we do. To be honest with you, it’s not necessary, but I tend to get a little carried away with shiny new things. I guess a lot of authors have Magpie syndrome, and I am foremost among them.
Yes, so we would have the book, and the core offering is the book in PDF form or hardcover. Usually, we’ll also offer like an alt cover of the standard version, which is just a standard book with a different cover on it, essentially. That might be like a limited edition, so it’s a bit more. Then a premium cover, which might be like leather bound, or leatherette.
On top of that, we might do dice, dice trays, dice vaults, miniatures, maps, posters, card decks with monsters or spells or magic items on them. Really, it’s whatever your imagination can come up with and whatever people want to invest in.
So we’ve experimented with a lot of things. We’ve seen other people in the market do certain things that worked well, and we’ve gone, hey, let’s try that. Also, we’ve tried our own things.
Like the Celtic campaign, the Celtic-inspired one that we launched last year that I referenced before, that was the first time−oh no it wasn’t, it was a second time−we tried making a plushie. We made a little leprechaun plushy and a little pooka plushie. A pooka is just like a little gremlin type creature. That was a lot of fun.
It’s amazing when you go to a manufacturer, and you have to learn how to design the drawings for these things and who to work with. It’s similar to doing a novel, in that you work with an artist, you work with different people to help you in different stages of creating your product.
Then you work with a bunch of people, it goes through this process, and then you end up with a leprechaun plushie in your hand, and you’re like, “Wow, how did that happen?”
Paddy: I am.
Joanna: You’re allowed to do this. It’s not cultural appropriation.
Paddy: Actually, we were running some ads, and we got in lot of trouble with some of those ads.
Joanna: Yes, I imagine. I’m thinking of all those Irish people who were very annoyed!
Paddy: There were a lot of people that were annoyed. A lot of people who weren’t Irish as well, and they were like, this is racist, et cetera, et cetera. I’m like, I’m Irish. I’m like one of the most Irish people you know. I speak the language, I play the music, I live in the country. Cut me some slack, please!
Joanna: I just wanted to point that out, and also for your accent, if people were wondering. So we’re going circle back to the merchandise because I’m so interested in that.
Just in terms of what is happening in the author ecosystem, because obviously, there’s people like you, Russell Nohelty, and people who’ve been doing Kickstarters for years. Then, I don’t know, maybe it was Brandon Sanderson who started it going really mainstream. But in the indie author community, what have you seen like in the last year?
Paddy: I think it’s a combination of things. So I think it’s to do with the industry lifecycle, partially.
So indie publishing, I guess you could say it really had its heyday or its golden age, i the kind of early to mid-teens. I mean, that’s not to say that you can’t be incredibly successful now doing that, because a lot of people are doing exactly just that, but there are a lot more people.
The tools that exist today that make it very accessible, did not exist back then. So there weren’t as many people doing it. So that creates a lot of competition.
Whereas, I don’t encourage that anyone ever shy away from competition because, for me, competition is just an opportunity, it does make it a bit more difficult if you are coming out at like brand new.
Also, I think because the industry has changed in terms of, for example, the big player in the room is Amazon, and they aren’t always the easiest to work with. They demand a lot, in terms of if you want to have access to their audience, they want you to be exclusive on KU or whatever.
I think we’ve seen a lot of people move wide over the years and that’s just increased and increased as —
If you do direct sales, then yes, there’s an upfront cost involved, there’s more admin, etc., but you don’t have to pay a royalty to Amazon. You get the royalty. Obviously, there are some sales fees and whatnot, depending on your platform, but there’s a lot more control.
If you’re an indie, I mean, you’re independent. So you have to ask yourself, well, am I independent? Or am I an Amazon publisher? Because those aren’t necessarily the same thing. I make trouble with a lot of indie people for saying that, but, you know.
Joanna: Not on this show!
I’ve always been super wide. I think you’re right about the maturity of the retailer-centric indie author model. That’s the only way I’d rephrase it, that sort of focus on a few retailers is what’s changing. Being an independent author is now a much bigger and more creative prospect.
That’s, I think, why I’m so attracted to the Kickstarter and direct sales model, is now there’s all these things we can do. Like you said, the tools have expanded it.
It’s not all rainbows and unicorns. You mentioned some costs and admin involved, so let’s just be clear about this. When you’re using the retailers, you do pay a certain amount of money in terms of when you sell a book, they take a percentage, and you might have to pay for ads and all of this.
There are benefits. You don’t have to deal with a lot of customer support and all of that. So what are the main differences?
Paddy: It’s a bit of a double-edged sword, this one, but you kind of touched on it with the customer support side of things.
So if you’re using a huge retailer, generally you don’t have access to customer data, or your customers at all, really. That’s kind of hidden behind their system. Like you said, a benefit of that is you don’t have to deal with the customers.
The flipside of that is you can’t contact the customers, tell them about this awesome thing you’re working on. It’s very difficult to promote your stuff because you don’t know. If I launch something is Amazon going to share it? How does the Amazon algorithm work? There’s a lot of guesswork involved.
Whereas when it comes to direct sales, or Kickstarter, or anything of that nature, you do have a lot more visibility on your customer base. That’s one of the things I keep telling people about Kickstarter.
I’m not affiliated with Kickstarter, by the way, in any official capacity or anything. They don’t pay me to talk about Kickstarter or anything like that, but the platform has so many things going for it, such as that visibility. To me, that is−
Or fans or backers or whatever you want to call them. That audience ownership is extremely important, especially in today’s world.
You know, people think they have a following on YouTube or Amazon or TikTok, whatever it is these days, that that’s their audience, but it’s not their audience. That audience belongs to that platform.
If that platform does that at the change something, your business could change drastically overnight because it could limit your reach or it could do something that negatively impacts your business.
So the great thing about Kickstarter is you have everyone’s email addresses. If you’re sending them stuff or delivering stuff, you have their physical addresses. You may have their contact number.
So if Kickstarter was to change something one day that could maybe impact your business, well, you already have all the information you need to still contact those people. So audience ownership for Kickstarter is a huge plus. I would even say it’s maybe the biggest plus.
That does come with a number of challenges, and that is you have to build that audience yourself. There is a little bit of organic reach on Kickstarter, and there are ways to leverage that, but it might not be the same as bigger platforms.
In terms of like Amazon, if you’ve built up a following on there for the last 5 – 10 years, and then you launch your book, the hope would be that Amazon is going to promote that new book to the people who have purchased your previous books. That still happens, so there’s a benefit to that.
Joanna: Also, nothing lasts forever.
The maturity of the industry that I started self-publishing in 2008, and then 2009 was really when Kindle really started taking off. I mean, that’s the other thing, we all have to start again.
I feel like I’m starting again on Kickstarter and Shopify and all of this, but that to me is the next 15 years. So I don’t want people to think oh, well, starting again as a bad thing.
Paddy: It’s like, they talk about survival of the fittest and whatnot, and they say that it wasn’t the survival of the fittest, it was the survival of the most adaptable. That’s the same for us.
If you’re operating in an industry, and there are a lot of changes in that industry, well, if you adopt, you’re going to be okay. That just does mean sometimes starting from scratch, and that’s okay.
Joanna: I like that, the ‘survival of the most adaptable.’ That’s definitely where we want to be. I mean, I’m like, okay, how am I going to look after my career for the next 15 years, and this is the way I see it.
So let’s get into a bit more detail. So you do have a great course, which we’re going to talk about later.
But one of the things that I think is interesting, so people think, oh, Kickstarter, it’s like a magic bullet, I’ll just put up a thing, it’ll work, and it’ll be amazing. A lot of Kickstarter campaigns do fail to fund.
Which means their campaigns don’t fund.
Paddy: The biggest mistake that most people, including authors, and even some very successful people on Kickstarter, they don’t take advantage of something that is readily available to everyone, and that is the pre-launch phase of a Kickstarter campaign.
So anyone who isn’t familiar with it, when you launch a Kickstarter, it goes live and you start promoting it when it launches. You tell a bunch of people to go to your Kickstarter, and you hope they support you.
However, there is a really powerful tool that’s called your pre-launch page, which you can set up three months, six months ahead of time, and kind of start building up a little bit of interest in that campaign in the months before it launches. So you have this chance to kickstart your Kickstarter, if you want to say, or give yourself this boost.
I see a lot of people maybe just doing it for a few days or a week, or just they don’t do it at all. I’m like, you’re missing out on one of the biggest opportunities to promote your campaign. One of the things I say to people is, your second most important day on your Kickstarter campaign is the day you launch, and the most important day is every day before that.
So it could be six weeks before or three months before. I think three months is a really good lead time. Six weeks, you can still accomplish an awful luck there.
Essentially, all that happens is in a pre-launch page, it’s just an image and a button, and people can come along and follow. Oh, and a title. So they can tell what it is, really.
If they are interested, they follow it. That means on the day of launch, they receive a notification from Kickstarter saying, “Hey, this thing that you followed, it has launched now. Go check it out.” That can be incredibly powerful.
For us, it’s the difference between a five-figure campaign and a six-figure campaign.
Joanna: Which brings me on to a personal question, because I totally get this. I learned from Russell and Monica Leonelle, and they said to do this.
So I’ve done two campaigns as we record this, both of which I had a long pre-launch, both of which funded within a few minutes because all those people, as you said, went and bought immediately. Thank you to all backers listening.
I just tried to set up my new campaign for a novel called Spear of Destiny. I tried to set it up, I clicked the button, and they said we can’t let you put this pre-launch live.
I was like, what? I mean, because I have fulfilled 99.9% of everything. So I was like, what is the problem here? So what can you tell me? What is the problem?
Paddy: So there are a few issues here. So first of all, if you’ve only run like a few Kickstarters, they are a little more cautious.
Once you’ve run like four or five, it’s a bit more flexible. They can see, hey, you’ve got a solid track record, so we don’t really have a whole lot to worry about here.
The only thing is sometimes it’s just automated. So it may even say that, but it could be that an automation tool went and did it.
Joanna: Oh, no, I went back and forth.
Paddy: Okay, so you’ve gone back a few times to them and they’ve still said that?
Joanna: Yes. Okay, so what I thought was potentially the problem is that I do have some consulting sessions outstanding on my November Kickstarter, but they have a year to take those and there’s only like eight people left out of over a thousand backers. So I thought, well, that seems odd.
Then I was wondering, there’s this box. So when you log in to Kickstarter, you can go to the pages you manage, and there’s a box that says, “I’ve received my stuff.” I was thinking, well, maybe my backers just haven’t clicked that box. Could that be it?
Paddy: I don’t think so because I don’t know anyone who ticks that box!
Joanna: I was like, do we need to tell everyone to tick that box?!
Paddy: Like our backers never tick those boxes. So I think it could be maybe you’re in contact with someone who’s a little overzealous as well. To be honest with you, this is not unusual, by the way. It’s fairly normal.
You know, I say it gets easier when you’ve run a handful of campaigns. I mean, I’ve run over 20, and I still will get someone coming back to me and saying, hey, you know, et cetera, et cetera, same things. It’s some kind of an objection, and it could be that I need to negotiate with them over three or four messages before they eventually go, okay, right, we can see you’ve got most of it done.
Generally speaking, I haven’t had any major trouble if I have fulfilled the core of my offering. So for example, if it was like, here’s a book, and everyone’s going to get a book.
Joanna: The thing I wondered was, I was pretty hardcore with this fulfillment. You know, I finished the book, and I actually ordered the printing of the books before receiving the money so I was able to sign them and send them out. So I was thinking that maybe they just think I was too quick?
Paddy: I think probably, because when I got that book, I was like, whoa, I wasn’t expecting it so soon!
Joanna: And you were a late one, because I couldn’t get your address.
Paddy: I was, but even then I couldn’t believe. So maybe you’ve just like over-delivered. They’re like, this person is joking, this can’t be real!
Joanna: Yes, they must be lying!
Of course, a lot of people get the money and then they spend a year like doing the project or whatever. So I think what I’m planning on doing−and just to encourage people listening, there are people on the other end of the Kickstarter and all of that−I guess what I’m planning to do is just go back in at the end of the month and try again.
Paddy: I think you just need to send them a message as soon as they respond to you and just explain.
Another way to do this is, and I don’t know which way you are planning on fulfilling the consultation, but you could send a coupon or an email and say, “Here is the confirmation that you’re getting this consultation.” Then you just send them an email and say you’ve sent them the coupon or the confirmation email for the consultation, so now that has been fulfilled.
Joanna: Oh, that is a very good tip. So for people who haven’t done one, you have to say whether you’ve shipped things, and so I was like, okay, I get that, but these are unfulfilled. So that’s a great tip. I’m going to do that.
Okay, so coming back into the campaigns themselves, some Kickstarter campaigns do fund, but the author, I’ve heard−I mean, I made a good profit−but some authors end up breaking even or sometimes they’re even out of pocket. I’ve heard of people who’ve actually lost money on campaigns. So how do people cost this out?
Paddy: It can be a bit of trial and error, especially because this industry, especially from the literature and publishing side of things, is still fairly new. I mean, we have a lot more information now than we did four or five years ago when I started to experiment with it. So it can be a tricky one when it comes to costing.
What you generally do is go through a very basic kind of calculation where you’re like, okay, so what is my average pledge going to be? The way you do that is you take your cheapest pledge and your highest pledge, and you kind of meet somewhere in the middle.
Then you go, okay, so if I get X number of backers, and they pledge an average of whatever that is, let’s say it’s $10, and I want to make whatever, then you can do that calculation. Then you can go, okay, well, I know then that I’m going to get roughly a ballpark figure of this number. Then you need to make sure that you break down your fulfillment and that it fits within that number, essentially.
One of the things I try to communicate to people is that only breaking even, or even your campaign costing a little money, you should kind of expect those things, especially with your first campaign, and maybe even your second one. Your third one is probably when things are going to kick off or click.
When have you done one of anything and it’s been profitable, right? Like the first novel you launched−if you’d launched it at the right time, and things were pretty good back in the heyday of Amazon, then that could have done pretty well−but generally speaking, when you launch your first novel, you need a few novels.
That’s because, number one, you’re not very good at writing if you’ve only written one novel. Or you can be very good, but you can do a whole lot better because you need practice. Then once you’ve written a bunch of novels, they sell better because they’re better written, and you have a lot more wisdom and experience.
It’s very similar with Kickstarter. You know —
So there’s a lot of value in what you learn, it’s not just what did you get in terms of your funding.
Also, which something people overlook, is you got a couple of backers on there. Well, not a couple, but hopefully more than a couple, but you’ve got a bunch of backers. That’s, again, the audience, something a lot of people overlook.
For me, that is the primary benefit of Kickstarter is you’re building another audience. Some of that audience will follow you on to the next Kickstarter, and the next one, and the next one. So it just keeps building.
My approach is your first Kickstarter, if you’ve not run one before, you should look at that as an opportunity to learn.
And the only reason you’re running that Kickstarter is to learn and to get your name out there a little bit and just grow comfortable with the platform and the environment.
Then the next one, you can build on that. You can increase your expectations and act accordingly. I don’t know if that’s helpful at all.
Joanna: I think that’s helpful. I think I obviously went overboard because I do have quite a decent sized audience already. For my Pilgrimage campaign, I did only have a target of something like, it might have even been 2000 pounds or something because I really didn’t know what would happen with that book. It was really a test, and I learned a lot.
Like you said, I buy a lot on Kickstarter, short story sort of collection eBooks. So a lot of my campaign pledges are like $5. That’s a lot of what I fund on Kickstarter. These are people who put up short story anthologies, maybe they make a couple of $100 or $1,000, or like you said, it’s small, digital, easy to fulfill.
Then I guess on the physical items−
I mean, that can really kill you, right?
Paddy: Yes, shipping is a really tricky one. So what I would recommend with shipping is to try to use something like BackerKit, so that you collect shipping after the Kickstarter campaign and do not collect that as part of the campaign.
Now, there are pros and cons to both of those things. It can be tricky.
So one of the biggest problems you can run into with shipping is that you charge X number of dollars for a, let’s say, hardcover book to be shipped from the US to the UK, or vice versa. Then something like COVID happens, and shipping goes through the roof, and you were only going to ship these things six months after your campaign launched.
Now, you’re okay because you shipped your stuff right after your campaign finished. That was like, wow, okay. But most of the time, these things take time.
Sometimes there can be delays and things in life happen, and sometimes you can take a bit longer to fulfill your campaign. That’s okay, as long as you’re open and you communicate with your backers.
This happened to us, actually. So our first campaign, I think it funded at about $4,000, and it cost us $5,000 to fulfill. That was fine, we designed it that way. We created a $2,000 cushion because we knew, hey, we’re going to learn a lot of stuff here, we’re going to build an audience, and then a month later, we’re going to do a much bigger Kickstarter.
That one did a lot better, and it did six figures. We had that trouble where we did it on BackerKit, but we also did it a little too soon. It was like, let’s collect shipping now and get everything together so we know exactly how many we’re going to produce and ship.
Then there were a bunch of delays because there were shortages in paper stock and cardboard, and we were struggling to find a printer. Then we went like six months overdue, and time just kept going on. We kept getting turned down and pushed back by different printers.
They were like, “Yes, we have paper stock now,” and then a month later, they’re like, “Oh, we can’t run your thing all of a sudden because we don’t have that paper stock.”
Then by the time the shipping came around, it’s like, oh, my goodness, shipping is like three times more expensive than it was when we charged for it.
However, BackerKit does allow you to separate the shipping from the Kickstarter campaign, which can be very helpful in that case, because you don’t know what’s going to happen.
When you’re starting out it might be like, wow, that seems like a lot to ask for people to back a Kickstarter and to pay for shipping separately. However, that’s the culture. That’s what a lot of people expect in that environment.
People have been doing this for years if they’ve been backing campaigns, so they’re used to it. So it might be a little bit unconventional, but that’s just how people do it on Kickstarter.
Joanna: Yes, I’ve done two campaigns and I didn’t use BackerKit, partly because I was a bit scared of it, in a way. I was like, it’s going to take me a lot to learn how to use one system, the Kickstarter system, so do I have to learn how to use BackerKit as well?
So could you talk a bit more about it and when it’s useful? I guess we’ve talked about the shipping side, but−
Because, of course, it costs more. They take another percentage, don’t they?
Paddy: They do, but it’s kind of more than covered by the convenience that it creates. It processes a lot of the stuff in the back end for you.
Essentially, so BackerKit started out as a pledge manager, which is just a way to help you fulfill your Kickstarter campaign or whatever campaign, you can be using a different platform.
So if you run a Kickstarter−it used to be that for whatever reason, Kickstarter didn’t build this in the beginning−all you could do on Kickstarter was launch your product on there, people could come back you, and they send you the funds at the end of the campaign. So then you could fulfill your promises to your backers.
They had no way of dealing with email addresses, and if you wanted to get shipping information you had to send out a survey individually to people, and it was just like a really big headache admin-wise.
So BackerKit came along and they’re like, hey, we can create a plugin type of application which can do all that for you. So all you need to do is hit a button, it’ll import all your backers, it’ll send out all the stuff, and it’ll automate everything. Now there is a learning curve, of course, but it does take a lot of the pain out of it.
Now Kickstarter have since brought about their own pledge management thing. But BackerKit has engrained itself so much in the culture, it took Kickstarter so long to get there, that BackerKit is the go-to pledge manager at the minute.
So the pledge manager is great because it allows your backers to go and look at their pledge. What did I get? Do I have to pay shipping? Can I add stuff on to the pledge, because back then I didn’t want to get this thing, but now I see I do want this thing, so can I add it on?
So that’s outside of collecting shipping. It does shipping, but it also does cross-selling.
Now, BackerKit also has something called BackerKit launch, which is like a crowdfunding-specific mailing system. It is extremely powerful because their deliverability is really high. That’s like maybe our number one converting tool when it comes to promoting our Kickstarter campaigns.
Then they have something called BackerKit marketing. BackerKit marketing is where they run Facebook ads for you, but you need to have so many campaigns under your belt. You can show that, hey, when you launch a Kickstarter, you can guarantee it’s going to make X number of dollars and that you can cover that ad spend. That can be very effective.
They now have BackerKit crowdfunding, which is just an alternative to Kickstarter. So BackerKit knows what they’re doing, is what I’m trying to say here. They have some very powerful tools. There is a learning curve, but like anything, it’s worth learning those tools because they can take your Kickstarter campaign to a whole different level.
Joanna: Okay, you’ve convinced me. I was just like, oh, I just can’t deal with another thing.
Plus, because I had finished my book and got the weight, and I costed out the shipping kind of exactly, and I knew I would ship them, I was able to do that. But I can see the benefit of waiting on shipping.
So I did want to return to that merchandise, because at the beginning you were talking about maps and posters and miniatures and cards and a plushie. So are there any recommended services that you have? Or−
Paddy: It depends on what you want to do.
So if it’s going to be books, you have to first figure out am I going to do print on demand, right. So if you’re only going to do a few dozen books, maybe even a few hundred, print on demand might be a viable option.
Once you start getting higher numbers, you’re kind of looking at maybe an offset print run. Maybe first a digital print run, but then an offset print run where it’s going through a printing press at a manufacturer’s warehouse somewhere. It becomes an economy of scale once you get to like a thousand copies of anything.
The same goes with manufacturing. So when it comes to manufacturing things like that, there are a lot of services where you can do it.
If you’re doing merch like mugs, or t-shirts, hoodies, pencils, pens, stationery, that kind of thing, there are lots of services online that you can do that. They’ll actually create those on demand as well, so it cuts out a lot of the admin and the shipping on your site.
So we’ve worked with different people in Lithuania, some people in Canada, some people in China, Taiwan. To be honest with you, we’ve had really good experiences all over the place. So I can’t really recommend anywhere in particular, because it just depends what you want to do.
We try to manufacture as much as we can in one place, because then it can all be shipped out together.
So for example, if we are going to do a big print run of 3000 books, hard copies in China, well, then it makes sense to also do our dice there if we can, and our plushies if we can, because then it’s all going to be shipped together to the same warehouse in the United States. Then our fulfillment partner will take care of it, and they’ll send a bunch to the UK.
Whereas if you have three or four manufacturers doing different things around the world, then you have to coordinate it all going to the same place. That can get a bit messy.
So that would be my tip if you’re going to manufacture things. If you’re doing it yourself, it is a lot of fun, but it’s also a lot of work and you don’t want to overwhelm yourself by having so many moving parts moving all at once.
So number one, try and keep it all as close together as you can, but also build up towards it. Don’t decide, hey, I’m going do like 10 different products all of a sudden. Like you don’t want to do 10 new products all in one campaign. Trust me, I’ve done it, and it was not a good idea.
Maybe start with one or two new things. Then on your next campaign, add another one or two new things. Then eventually, you’ll have this catalog. Don’t do it all at one time.
Joanna: It’s so interesting. We talked earlier about the difference between the retailer-centric model and this kind of direct sales model.
It really is like —
We are now trying to build our own Amazon, basically.
Our own little Amazon in our little corner of the world that we want people to buy from. So if authors are like, I don’t want to run an author business, then do not do this, basically.
Paddy: Yes, exactly. The thing is, when you put it that way, it sounds like it’s more difficult, and that’s because it is.
The thing is, if something is more difficult, that means most people aren’t going to do it.
So if you are a person who does do it, well, that’s going to put you in a very advantageous position. So for anyone who’s maybe thinking, oh, that sounds like a lot of work, it’s like yes, it is, but once you do that work, it really pays off. It’s worth doing.
Joanna: Yes, and obviously, I am very pro-AI. I love a lot of the AI stuff. I am also aware that there will be a tsunami of AI-created stuff on easy platforms. But —
Paddy: Exactly.
Joanna: Or even a beautiful book with gold foil, like I just did. So I think, as you say, it’s the difficulty in getting to market.
It’s so funny, I remember coming into the Kindle world back in 2009. The people who were coming out of traditional publishing who’d got hundreds of books back, they jumped on and became the first Kindle millionaires, really, because they have this big backlist.
They took advantage of new technology to kind of get ahead of the pack. I almost feel like, even though Kickstarter is not new, I feel like for authors, it really is pretty new.
Paddy: It is. I’ve said this before, like Kickstarter for authors is kind of like where Amazon for authors was back 10 years ago. There’s a lot of opportunity.
It’s still an infant in terms of its maturity and its development as an industry.
We’ve seen a few big players come along and bolster that market a little bit. Well, a lot, like Brandon Sanderson, as you mentioned earlier.
We’re going to see more of that in the future. As that grows, the opportunities are going to grow with it. If you’re here now and you can take advantage of those opportunities, awesome. If you come along in 10 years’ time, it’s going to be like, well, it’s not as “easy” as it was back then, inverted commas.
Joanna: Yes, easy and hard. It’s so funny people are like, oh, it was much easier to be big on Kindle in 2009. I’m like, do you realize there was nothing? We had to hand code our mobis back then!
Paddy: There was no Vellum to format everything for you.
Joanna: There was nothing. There were no ad systems. There was hardly any customers because people were like, “I would never read an eBook.”
Paddy: I know. It’s funny how things go. People think it was easy, but it was just different. It was a different kind of hard.
Joanna: Yes, and that’s where we are now with Kickstarter, obviously.
So I did want to ask you before we finish up just one last question. At 20Books Vegas, I was on a panel with you, which was amazing, but then you did a solo session on how to do a six-figure or seven-figure Kickstarter campaign. So what are the hallmarks of those bigger campaigns? We’ve said people should start small and digital only, but−
Paddy: It is a matter of starting small and getting bigger gradually.
But also, that is assuming you don’t have a huge audience you can bring to the table right away. You know, if you’re Brandon Sanderson and you tell people you want to do something, you can bet they’re all going be there.
If you’re not Brandon Sanderson, it’s going to take you a bit longer. You need to learn the platform and build your audience over time.
One of the most powerful tools for doing that, or even for getting a little bit ahead of people−I don’t want to say as a shortcut or fast-tracking thing, because there isn’t really any such thing−but as a way to gain an advantage, you can really leverage the pre-launch campaign or the pre-launch portion of your Kickstarter campaign. So start three months out and start promoting it.
I mean, you asked earlier, what are one of the challenges that authors have? And why are they breaking even, or maybe losing some money on their campaigns?
One of the things is, as an author, you kind of approach Kickstarter as a store, like where you’re going to sell a book. That’s not what people go to Kickstarter for in terms of the backers and the people who want to pledge to a Kickstarter campaign.
Yes, they want the reward. That is an expectation. However —
They come to buy into something that gives them some meaning, or to live vicariously through you as an author because they want to write a book, but they probably never will get a chance to do that.
So your approach for people is not just, “Hey, buy my book.” It’s, “Hey, come on this journey with me. Let’s do this together. I’m creating this book, but really, we’re doing it together. We’re all in this. You’re pledging this campaign, and it’s allowing me to do this thing. You’re part of this thing.”
So rather than just doing the hard sale where it’s like, “Hey, come get a book. You’re pledging this amount, and we’ll send it to you whenever.”
It’s like, “Well, this is a new thing. Have you ever wanted to write a book, and you just can’t get around to it? Or you don’t know when you’ll get around to it? Or maybe you never will just because you’re so busy all the time? Well, then let’s make one together.”
It could be fantasy, it could be whatever genre that person is interested in. When you frame things like that people are just so much more engaged. So it can be a bit of an adjustment when you’re coming from one industry to the other, but I think that once you make that adjustment that can make things a lot easier.
Joanna: Yes. It’s funny, though. I mean my first Kickstarter campaign that I backed was Seth Godin’s massive doorstop of a book over a decade ago. So I’ve been backing for over a decade, and yet I didn’t even think it would be right for me until last year, 2023. So it’s really interesting how I just didn’t think I could do that, even though I was writing and publishing books that whole time.
It is interesting how it is a very different platform. So I guess what I’m saying to people is —
Paddy: Yes, and there’s no better way to do that than to back one or a few. Then you’re like, oh, yes, so this is what it looks like. That’s what that button does. This is what a pledge is. That’s what a survey is.
The language on Kickstarter is very specific to crowdfunding as well.
There are a lot of terms and you’re like, why is it called reward? Why isn’t that a product? Why is it funding and not sales or money?
Joanna: It’s a story, not a sales page.
Paddy: When you think about it, after you’ve done it a few times, you start to realize, oh, yes, there’s a reason behind these words. These words actually matter because it sets expectations for the people who are pledging.
Also for you as a creator, the fund thing, for example. It isn’t like, hey, people have come and paid for those product, and now this funding is the income, and now I can go do whatever with the funding. It’s like, no, the funding is there fulfill that promise and to create that product. That’s why it’s not called sales. It’s called a pledge. So yes, it’s an interesting one.
Joanna: Yes, so exciting. As you say, this is another platform. This is a different mindset. There’s a lot of business involved.
Thankfully, you have a course. So I’ve only been through a little bit of it so far. So tell people, including me−
Paddy: Oh, yes. You can find it on KickstarterUniversity.com. If you type Kickstarter University into Facebook, it will also bring you to the Facebook group.
It’s a private group, but anyone can access it, and we post material on there and tips and tricks. Essentially, it is designed to take you from one Kickstarter to having several Kickstarters under your belt so that you can then confidently go off and do whatever it is you want to do with crowdfunding.
The way I look at it is the price you pay for the course, you should be able to make that back within the first year of taking the course. I’m confident that if you do the course and what we say in the course, that it is going to do that for you.
It’s not just for authors, it’s for any kind of creative or online entrepreneur. So it can be you want to create comic books, shoot films, maybe it is you’re an author and you want to do novels, or you want to experiment with transmedia and try a tabletop role playing game in Dungeons and Dragons, or an automation, or who knows.
There have been people on Kickstarter who have funded potato salad. Like, literally, just potato salad. Now, Kickstarter has since changed the rules, and you can’t do that anymore. But it just shows that you can really just experiment with things and try new things.
The course is designed to take all the guesswork out of it. You know, I’ve learned a lot, I’ve made a lot of mistakes, done a lot of trial and error over the last several years. So it’s kind of like designed to take the sting out of it from that point of view. So here are my mistakes, don’t do those, but what you should do is this thing.
There are a bunch of step-by-step guides which take you through your first Kickstarter. So you kind of talked about this on our panel in 20Books Vegas, Jo, and I felt this way myself, when I launched my first Kickstarter, I was terrified.
Even just hitting the Submit for Approval button, not the Launch button, like this is way before the launch button. I was just submitting it for approval, and I was so afraid to hit that button, that I hired a consultant to come along and pretty much hit it for me.
Then when it happened, I was like, oh, what was I afraid of? That was silly. I was afraid, but I think that’s just a legitimate thing for people. It’s something unknown, it’s new, and people are going to be afraid of it. So I want to try and take that fear out of the equation for people as well. That’s what the course is all about.
Joanna: Well, we only met at 20Books Vegas, and I really love your kind of gentle approach. That’s how I feel your tone is, it’s quite gentle and supportive. I don’t know if that’s your goal, but that’s how it feels to me.
Paddy: I’m glad you feel that way. I don’t know if I do that intentionally or whatnot.
Joanna: I think that’s just you. So when I met you and you were talking, I was like, aw. I’d literally emailed you and said, “Oh, you backed my campaign, I didn’t know who you were.” And then we met and I was like, oh, okay, I really want to learn from you. So that’s why I’m in your course, and I’m really looking forward to doing it.
You’ve really helped me today, even just with your answers. So just so people know, I’m not an affiliate of your course, I am an enthusiastic fan.
I hope people do that. As you say, if they launch a Kickstarter using the help, they will be able to make the money back anyway. So just also−
Paddy: PaddyFinn.com is the central place to get me, and that links to several different things.
Or if you want to see the novels that I’ve published, one of my pen names is Killian C. Carter. I publish science fiction under that pen name. I haven’t done so in a while, but I’m circling back to that. So you can find that on Amazon and take a look at some of the material I put up on there if you’re so inclined.
Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Paddy. That was great.
Paddy: Thanks very much, Jo. Have a good one.
The post How To Be Successful On Kickstarter With Paddy Finn first appeared on The Creative Penn.
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Author: Joanna Penn
Expats is a drama television series adaptation of Janice Y. K. Lee’s best-selling 2016 novel, The Expatriates. Directed by Lulu Wang and starring Sarayu Blue, Nicole Kidman, and Ji-young Yoo, the six-episode limited series follows the lives of three American women in Hong Kong and their fateful, life-changing encounter.
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Author: bphi
I really enjoyed this laid-back discussion around AI tools as part of the creative book cover design process with James Helps from Go On Write. We discuss how generative AI tools can help make more unique and interesting cover designs, and how designers can have a more imaginative time making them.
This episode is supported by my Patreon community, who fund my future-focused thinking time. If you join the community, you get an extra solo Q&A show monthly, as well as behind-the-scenes videos on planning for the year ahead, AI and creative business, plus discounts, early access, and more. Join the community for the price of a coffee a month at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn
James Helps is a book cover designer at GoOnWrite.com, offering pre-made covers and custom cover design. He also writes articles for authors about the impact of AI at his blog, HumbleNations.
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 James at GoOnWrite.com, HumbleNations.wordpress.com, or JamesHelps.co.uk.
Joanna: James is a book cover designer at GoOnWrite.com, offering pre-made covers and custom cover design. He also writes articles for authors about the impact of AI at his blog, HumbleNations, which we’re talking about today. So welcome to the show, James.
James: Hi there.
Joanna: Hello.
James: I guess the first thing I’d probably say is I don’t really like the word business. It’s more that I make covers for people that I like. They come in and chat to me, and I’m just a designer that really enjoys doing covers.
I guess when it comes down to the AI stuff, I got interested in that probably around two years ago when there was a lot of stuff in the air. There was like the DALL-E and Imagen that I was reading about quite a lot. I’ve always been sort of somebody who’s looked at technology as a thing.
In my history, I did a computer science degree back in the early 90s. As a kid, I was always interested in technology and design. So it’s something that I always read about. So I knew AI was coming, but I didn’t realize that it was coming that fast.
It was actually a friend of mine who’s another designer, Craig, who told me about Midjourney. For me, it wasn’t completely perfect, but I felt, well, it’s time to actually start looking at this and learning about it. So it’s about two years, 18 months ago now, that I started playing around with it.
Joanna: It’s interesting though, you said back in the 90s that you did a computer science degree and that you knew AI was coming, but you didn’t know it was coming that fast. Of course−
So do you think it’s all just sped up in the last couple of years, as you say? Because it feels like people think, oh, it’s come out of nowhere, but of course, it hasn’t, has it?
James: No, I mean even in the 90s they were talking about neural networks and how machine learning was working.
I think Google, at a certain point, scanned all the books, and all those books that were scanned were used for machine learning to do things, to understand the structure of text. So anybody who’s used Google Translate, that’s basically AI.
I guess the thing that sort of surprised me, looking back on it now, is the fact that it happened just after the pandemic. That’s sort of interesting. I’ve got a theory, which I’ve told the same theory to my friends, my more tech friends, and they said the same thing. They agreed with me.
It’s the fact that there was a certain point in the pandemic where everybody was putting money into Bitcoin, and Bitcoin was shooting up and up. So then everybody was trying to mine Bitcoin, and the technology that they needed was graphics card server farms.
Then obviously, the pandemic finished, Bitcoin crashed, and there was all these sort of empty server farms, graphics card server farms, so they all became available. I think that was what actually sped up it all just happening at once. There was cheap computing power to actually start playing around with these things.
Joanna: That is interesting. I have also heard that, that they need a lot of these types of computers. It is interesting, isn’t it, how we need this hardware to make the software to make things like nice images, and of course, words and all of that. We’re not talking about the word side today.
Let’s get into what design services are available right now. It feels like when we started emailing, maybe six months ago, like you mentioned Midjourney and DALL-E. I feel like people are like, oh, these are educators, although DALL-E, of course, is incorporated into Microsoft.
James: I guess there’s a whole host of things that are happening. Especially with things like video, you’ve got Runway ML and you’ve got Pika.
It isn’t really a book cover thing, but then I started thinking, oh, maybe do a little animated cover, like take your image and have animations. I’ve kind of played around with them, they’re not really there yet.
For me, when I started looking at it, I looked at all the services, and I liked Midjourney because it just basically had the best aesthetic, firstly. Secondly, it was a private company, so it’s not run by one of the big tech companies. It’s not a shareholder company. It was just the best of the lot, really.
Also, the guy came on every Wednesday and did a stream about how they’re developing it. They’re really connected to the user base, as well. So it’s just the one that’s the best one out there. So that’s the one that I use, and it’s pretty much the only thing that I’m massively interested in.
Apart from this, there’s also little tools out there that I use in my sort of day-to-day job. Like there’s a background removal service that’s powered by AI. There’s also a vectorize tool, which is just Vectorize.AI, which is useful for certain tasks as well. So there is other AI bits and pieces that I use.
Joanna: A few things there, so you mentioned Pika and RunwayML. Midjourney has also said that they’re going to get into generating video this year, in 2024, as we’re recording this. So I think that’s really interesting, because I’m also a paid Midjourney subscriber.
I tried Pika Labs. I also, like you, I was like this is not really there, and Runway looks too technical for me. So I think I’m just going to wait for Midjourney video.
James: I think the interesting thing with Midjourney is that they’re going about it in a slightly different way as well. The guy who runs Midjourney, David Holz, I think originally he comes from an augmented reality background. He was building like headsets or something years ago.
So he has this vision that he wants 3D-generative worlds, like art installations that you can go through. So I think he was talking about video, in terms of having it best in 3D.
I found this interesting because when it comes to graphics, obviously, you have foreground and you have background, and then sometimes you want to zoom out, sometimes you want to zoom in, sometimes you want just parallax scroll between things.
It’s interesting that at a certain point, it will be more that you generate an image, and then you can move around that image to get the right angle, if you see what I mean. So I find that quite sort of a compelling way to look at it.
Then obviously, you might want to move and have videos. I think you will get more sort of zoom in, parallax scrolling videos with Midjourney to start off with, rather than those sort of trippy nightmarish things you get from Pika or Runway.
Joanna: It’s so funny because, again, we’re recording this January 2024, and it’s going to sound old really fast because within six months, I mean, these things are just going to be amazing.
Coming back to some of the other things.
So it seems like all the tools that cover designers and graphic designers use in general now have their own AI services. So what do you think about that development?
James: Well, it’s kind of interesting to a certain extent because, obviously, they’re taking technology. Now, where they take that technology from, it might be Stable Diffusion white label or it might be OpenAI white label, where they take the actual technology of training the model.
So somebody’s got to train the model for Getty or Shutterstock, and it’s based on their catalog. But when I’ve looked at those, they’re pretty bad. They’re pretty, pretty terrible. The Adobe one is interesting, but it’s still somewhat bad.
I have a friend, Craig, who’s a designer and he’s more corporate, he works for blue chip companies. Interestingly enough, he’s used Firefly. What he uses it for is more, you get a picture and you want to extend the background. So it’s like not really creating things from scratch.
Joanna: That’s the generative fill, I think.
James: Yes, like generative panning across. So like maybe you have mountains in the background, you want the mountains to go a bit further, so you can use that image and it fits to the actual brochure or website that you’re designing. So he’s doing more of that stuff.
My friend, he’s a bit of an AI skeptic in a way. We send each other when we find things that are really bad, like really nightmarish videos. We both kind of make music as well. The fact that he’s a bit of a skeptic in terms of the quality and he’s starting to use it, you can see where the future is leading with Adobe products, I guess.
Joanna: Yes, and you mentioned that you find Midjourney the best. I think that’s because you’re an artist, you’re a designer, and you know how to drive it.
I have a lot of interest in visual art. My dad and my brothers and sister are visual artists, so I know a little bit. So I’ve been playing with Midjourney, but I actually find now that DALL-E gives me images that suit things like my speaking, for slides and things like that, or for the blog, for example, it’s easier for me speaking just in plain English.
In Midjourney, I feel like you, as a designer, have the language to drive Midjourney to get what you want. I mean−
James: Yes, I think at the bottom of it there’s like a massive misunderstanding of what all generative stuff is. It’s this idea that you just quickly say something and you get this amazing picture out of it, and none of them work like that.
I think things like DALL-E with OpenAI, like ChatGPT, it’s good for things like slides because you can just say things in natural language quickly, and it understands that natural language.
When you’re actually creating something like a book cover, you’re looking at a sort of deeper idea of what you want to present. So there is always like imagination at the start of the whole process. You’ve got to come up with the right idea.
I mean, it’s interesting with writers because I probably put them into three sort of distinct categories when they come to me for a commission.
I’d say there’s a third of them that don’t know what they want, they’ve got no idea. And I’m like, well, that makes me happy because I can go chat to them about their book and I can extract the right information to create something catching and interesting for a cover.
There’s a third of people that have a very specific idea about what they want on the cover. They’ll say, I want this exact thing. I’ll go, yes, that’s a good idea, and I’ll do it.
There’s also like a third of the people that come to me that go, I want this scene from my book, or I want something that everybody else does. And in that instance, it’s for me to persuade them that that’s a bad idea because that’s not what a good book cover is.
A scene from a book is too much. There’s too much visual information on there.
When you’re talking about Amazon thumbnails or people scrolling on the phone, people are not going to see what it is.
So there’s an interesting thing of there needs to be a concept at the start of any sort of project, or two thirds of the time, it’s that concept.
I think the thing that’s interesting at the moment is Midjourney has gone from 5.2 to 6, well, it’s 6 Alpha at the moment. The first thing that I did when version 6 came out, I was like, can it do this? Can it do that? Can it do this?
So one of my sort of classic things is “something made of something.” So like, “I want a zombie made of smoke,” or “I want a house made of green glass.” So then you see where the edges of the boundaries of what it can do are.
Then that just expands your imagination and expands like the concepts you can start thinking about when you’re trying to come up with a book cover. So I find it a fun tool to see where the edges of my imagination are.
Joanna: I love the way you’re describing it. I think it also relates to how a lot of authors, including myself, use AI for words as well.
It’s like you don’t just go in, say, “write me a thriller with this character,” and you know, boom, output. That’s not how any of this stuff works.
As you said, you need the imagination, you need a deeper idea of what you want to create.
Well, let’s get a bit more into your process because it’s still that you don’t go onto Midjourney and say, “make this one image,” and then you’re done. It’s like it’s not one image that you can generate. Presumably, you generate lots of different things, and then you also make a composite in terms of a cover.
With a combination of trial and error and the composite sort of thing?
James: Well, I think the first thing to say, which is quite interesting, is sort of previous to Midjourney, I was using stock images. The interesting thing with that is you sort of chat with the client, it always starts with chatting with the client and hashing out the idea.
Joanna: On that, do you mean chatting by phone or by email?
James: Email.
Joanna: Yes, me too. I was going to say, aren’t we all introverts? No one wants to chat.
James: The other thing is, I’m 50 years old now, and if I had a phone call, by the end of the phone call, I wouldn’t have remembered what had been said to even type it down. So with email, it’s all there on a nice email thread.
So once you come up with your idea, when I was using stock images before, I’d go try and find stock images to fit the idea, and I’d be like, no, there isn’t any good ones.
So then what you’re doing, even if you’re like doing a composite, even if you’re taking different stock images and doing editing on them, you’re still in that position where you’re either trying to persuade the client to go for this compromised idea, or you compromise your idea as the designer.
Now with Midjourney, I’ve kind of changed the way I work to a certain extent. I’ll chat with them and maybe send them a few, what I call, quick and dirty images that I’ve generated.
So here is sort of how it can go. Like there’s a job that I’m working on at the moment where it’s like a pig-man cowboy. Look out for that book, I can’t remember the name of the author.
So it was, alright, I’ve generated some pig-man cowboys, which are not perfect, but then the guy goes, “Oh, yes, that’s that, but maybe we can do it more cartoony, or we can do it more this.”
Actually proving to the client and proving to myself that whatever the crazy idea is is going to work, it just makes my life easier, in one sense, from the imagination point of view. But because you can do that, then it means there’s a lot more work at the other end because clients/authors become more specific in what they want.
They may now be like, “Oh, I like that, but can we have it a little bit lighter?” or “It shouldn’t be in the woods, it should be with a mountain background.” So the more sort of directions you can go, the more things we need to generate and get right, really, as a whole entire thing.
So in terms of commissions, it was easier to do with stock images because it’s like, well, that’s what you’ve got. We’re putting these images together, we’re doing a bit of editing on it, there you go.
Joanna: Oh, interesting. That is interesting because a lot of people then go, well, it’s much easier. But I think it’s easier if you aren’t a designer, because as you say, it just kind of expands the time.
I mean, I play around with AI in my writing, and it definitely doesn’t speed it up. It just changes the process and what you can do. As you say, you iterate a lot faster when you’re thinking about it and using different words to generate these images.
Then after, let’s say you get all your concepts sorted, how do you then put it together into a cover? Are there specific other tools you use to do that, and fonts and things?
James: Yes, that’s just the boring part of the job. So I mean, strangely enough, I don’t actually use Adobe tools. I use something called Xara Designer Pro, which is something I’ve used for like the last 20 years. I don’t know, nobody’s heard of it, but I really like it.
I actually got a copy of it when it first came out. It was called Design Xara Studio. It had a red sort of car on the front. I got a copy of it because I lived in a shared house in Leeds with a girl whose friend worked for the company, and he went, I’ve got this design software. And I was like, oh, I’ll have a look at it for you.
Joanna: And it was on a CD or something probably about then.
James: Oh, definitely. It was the 90s.
Joanna: I love that. So you’re working on software from the 90s and using the latest in generative AI tools.
James: I think the version of Xara I use now is from 2012. It’s like 10 years old.
Joanna: I like that. I think I’m also the same. There are some things I really like using that are pretty old school and then I like to play with these other new things.
Okay, so that kind of goes through some of the benefits, I guess, for using AI. So I guess one of the questions that people wonder is, is this going to destroy all the jobs?
I guess, if you don’t want to call it a business.
James: No, I’m not really particularly worried. It’s kind of interesting, I did a survey, I always like to ask my author’s questions. What covers do you want? What do you think of this? What do you think of that? So Google Forms is my best friend, I use it a lot.
So I asked them last year, and one of the questions was, “If AI replaced me, what do you think I should do?” Strange enough, 45% of them said I should become a writer.
I thought was quite ironic because I actually got into cover design and Kindle stuff because I am a writer, but the irony being that I’m too busy designing to actually write my own books these days. So they’re like, oh, yes, if we destroy your job, you can actually do the thing you wanted to do, like the original idea. So I found that amusing.
Also, my other idea when I thought about it, when I have a doomsday sort of picture, I think I’ll open a chicken wing shop. That is sort of my idea. There’s no decent chicken wings shocks in Barcelona, I thought it would be a little bit of a money spinner.
So I mean, it’s a lot of hype around AI. There’s more things that can’t do than it can do.
I think that if you’re somebody who likes playing with technology and being like, let’s just see what this can do, you find out where the edges are.
I’m kind of that person where you find out the boundaries of what it can and can’t do, and then you find out what’s actually useful. At end of the day, it’s just a tool.
I think the hype that’s out there is very different from what the reality is once you started playing with it, and went, oh, no, it can’t do that. As you say, you can’t go, “write me a thriller,” and it’ll write you a full thriller. It just doesn’t do that.
Joanna: Or even if it did do that at some point, and I’m sure it will be able to do that at some point, that’s not the book I want to write.
James: Yes, or read.
Joanna: Exactly, so I think that that is the more important thing. So yes, I can actually output a book cover really quite quickly now. I mentioned to you that I’ve done it for a short story, Beneath the Zoo. It was one prompt on DALL-E, and then I used Canva to put some text on.
So that can be done, but that’s because that was that project and it was something that was in my head. But today, for example, I sent two new things to my book cover designer and said, “Look, I need these,” and we’ll go through the usual process.
I think what you’re saying is, you know, we’re exploring and playing with this is because we really enjoy it. This is what we like doing. But most people, they don’t want to do this anyway. It’s not their chosen field or their chosen interest.
James: I think it’s like a strange thing because, like, to my mind, everybody is doing whatever they’re doing, but have their own place to do that, and they’ll find their own tools to do something, and they have something that they enjoy.
I have musician friends, and I’ve made music in the past. I love music, I adore music. I don’t have a Spotify account. I’m a Bandcamp person. I like to buy my music. I like it in high quality. I like to give my money to the artists. I like to find obscure stuff that nobody else has heard and Bandcamp is fantastic for that.
Then I’ve got friends that are more into vinyl or won’t get anything unless it’s on vinyl. You live in a world where things change, and probably most people are on something like Spotify, but there are spaces for everybody in the world.
I think to feel that way is the way it should be, that you go, “this is my thing.” Or you can only listen to live music and don’t even listen to records. So however you want to be, that’s entirely up to you.
So I guess it can sometimes feel as though like, oh no, this is the way it’s going, or this is the way it has to be, or this will destroy this, or this will create that. But things change, the world changes. It’s forever turning. You just find your own place in the world, and what you enjoy, I guess.
Joanna: ‘You do you,’ I think the modern saying is.
James: Yes, that sort of thing.
Joanna: Now, I did want to return, so you mentioned the survey about AI that you did towards the end of 2023.
James: The first thing that I really found surprising−well, no, I didn’t actually−is that the amount of people that responded to it, five times as many people went and read the results to the survey than responded. I was like, people kind of don’t want to talk about it, but they want to know what everybody else thinks.
I guess there were a few things that were like really sort of shocking to me. Firstly, I asked people, “How much do you know about AI?” And two thirds of people said either a lot or a moderate amount.
I’m somebody who’s been reading about stuff, I follow quite a few people, and my response to that actual answer would be not very much, and I kind of follow it. People like to think that they know more than they do.
The fact that it’s just changing so fast, it’s hard to keep up. So at a certain point, I let go a little bit. I was like, oh, that’s mildly interesting, but I stopped deep diving into all the new services and everything that was coming out, I just sort of like glance at it to a certain extent. So that was interesting.
The other thing that was very interesting to me is that 30% of people that responded, said, “Don’t like AI. Will never use AI.” As I said, that’s fine. People can be in their own little space, you do you sort of thing.
Then later on, I asked some questions like, “Which AI-based tools would you use if they were available?” So things like if there was an AI marketing tool, would you use it? If there was an AI audiobook tool, would you use it? If there was an AI, etc, etc.?
Joanna: Well, people do already. Like they use Grammarly and ProWriting Aid, both have GPT-4 or other tools embedded in them now. So most authors, I think, are using it. Especially now that Microsoft has rolled out lots into their Microsoft 365. So yes, that is interesting.
I think what people think is AI changes over time.
James: Yes, I mean, it just makes sense, doesn’t it? Like, if you’re not using that tool, you don’t understand how that tool works. So there is like a separation, until you start using something you don’t understand how it works. It’s really that simple.
Then it’s like needs and musts, isn’t it? Necessity is the mother of invention. So as soon as there’s something that’s actually useful to you, you’re going to pick it up and start playing with it and using it.
I think there’s sort of a separation between authors and cover design, because those people are writing and they’re not designing book covers.
Joanna: You’ve been using software for decades because cover design and graphic design has been on software a lot longer than writing has, I guess.
James: I’ll tell you, the first job I ever got was in maybe about 1983, and it was on Lotus.
Joanna: Oh, I remember Lotus.
James: Yes, it was one of the Lotus Desktop Publishing. There used to be a thing called desktop publishing software. I did a newsletter for my dad’s friend who was running a business and I got paid four pounds.
Joanna: You’ve been around a while. I just wanted to ask, on that survey, so people said, “Oh, I’d never use AI,” but−
James: I think, yes. I think there’s a sense that people are wary. Generally what happens with a commission, and I’ve talked to other book cover designers, I don’t see them as competition, I see them as people like myself, so I don’t not chat to them.
We’ve all come to the same conclusion that when it comes to commissions, 80% of the people are happy with AI, and you’ve got 20% that are a little bit wary of it. On the actual survey, the number was like 10% higher. 30% were quite wary of AI book covers. But when when it comes to crunch, it’s about 20%.
Joanna: I mean, as we said towards the beginning, now services like Adobe and Getty, and there are lots of them now that have it, more and more designers will be using aspects of AI. I think things are changing. I even wonder whether this will be out of date because it’ll be an accepted part of the process within six months.
I was thinking about TikTok, so TikTok is the biggest thing in book marketing these days, and I was laughing about the owner ByteDance have now released what some consider to be the best text-to-video product (MagicVideo). So the best video AI product is coming out of TikTok, which, of course, has trained this model on everyone’s TikTok videos.
James: Yes, completely. I saw the same thing. In fact, I do think we follow the same guy on Twitter.
Joanna: Yes, the same people and the same newsletters. I keep an eye on these things, and I feel like a lot of authors who protest about, say, Midjourney, happily use TikTok, and when their video product comes out, maybe they’ll use it for their own book marketing.
I feel like in many ways, people are happy for book marketing to use AI. Like Meta, for example, Meta ads. Or Amazon ads, Amazon, of course, is driven by AI.
So it is such an interesting time where I feel like perhaps the fear and things have lessened a little bit in one way as inevitability sets in.
James: Yes, I’ve got certain searches I do quite regularly on Twitter, and this sort of AI book cover thing has died down somewhat. There was one that I saw, I think it was a few weeks ago, where somebody posted up, “I’m going a little bit mad because I can no longer tell whether or not it’s AI or not on book covers, and I don’t like AI.” But they couldn’t tell, so it was like, really disconcerting for them.
In fact, I’ve seen a few messages like that. So it is changing, and it’s just the way it is. Also, I mean, it’s a strange thing because if you’re going, “I’m 100% against AI in all things,” then firstly, you need to log off from social media.
Joanna: Get off the internet!
James: Pretty much. It’s like a purity test, isn’t it? Like, if you’re saying, “Oh, I’m 100% not AI,” and then you’ve got all these things that are actually using AI or are going to be using AI. I mean, there was a thing I read the other day about Windows, the Microsoft Surface.
Joanna: Oh, it’s got a new key, right?
James: They’re putting a new key on for Co-pilot.
Joanna: All the new keyboards will have a button for AI. I love it.
James: Then also, I think you’ve got a few companies that are a little bit late to the game. You’ll see Apple having a bit more AI stuff this year as well, because they’ve sort of been−
Joanna: Quiet.
James: Yes. I mean, Meta is the interesting one because they seem to keep doing lots of missteps. We didn’t all end up in the metaverse, did we?
Joanna: Not yet, but of course, the word Metaverse. I mean the Apple headset, which is coming next month as we record this, it could be the iPhone moment. I mean, I didn’t get an iPhone in 2007 when Apple launched the iPhone, but they certainly weren’t the first people to put out a smartphone. Like they weren’t the first people to put out an mp3 player, but they took a lot of that market.
So, I mean, we’re just at the beginning, I guess. As older people, perhaps, in the tech industry, we’ve seen a lot of change and there’s a lot more to come.
We’re almost out of time. So why don’t you−
If people are interested in commissioning a cover or checking out your blog, where can they find you?
James: My website is just www.GoOnWrite.com. If you want to call it Goon Write, you can call it Goon Write. Some people call me the goon, so that’s fine. It doesn’t bother me. It’s amusing. There’s a link to my blog from there. It’s HumbleNations.wordpress.com. You’ll find all the stuff there.
I’ve made some awful music that’s online, which I’m not going to tell you where it is because it’s awful. I’ve also made some humorous, quite dark Princess Diana t-shirts, not going to tell you whether those are either.
Joanna: What about your writing?
James: Oh, my writing. JamesHelps.co.uk.
Joanna: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, James. That was great.
James: It’s been an absolute pleasure.
The post A Creative Approach To Generative AI In Book Cover Design With James Helps first appeared on The Creative Penn.
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Author: Joanna Penn
In this 2023 virtual event hosted by City Lights Bookstore, Emily Luan, author of 回 / Return (Nightboat Books, 2023), and Brandon Shimoda, author of Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023), read from their poetry collections and discuss themes of memory, mourning, and migration in their writing.
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Author: bphi
In a recent New York Times article titled “January’s Secret: It’s the Best Month,” journalist Steven Kurutz makes a case for the first month of the year. Not usually a fan favorite with its short days and cold weather, Kurutz points out the month’s many unsung advantages: post-holiday relaxation, less crowded streets, the reassuring feeling of getting back into routine, and how the blissfully uneventful stretch of weeks can offer a calming break from social obligations. This week write an essay about your favorite month of the year. Even if it’s one that revolves around a holiday or exciting seasonal offerings, take some time to reflect on the unsung pleasures of the month.
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Author: Writing Prompter
Whenever I am asked to speak publicly on editing, I sense the audience’s hope for a formula or key: as straightforward as how to write a winning cover letter or as inscrutable as which week of the submission period to hit Send. However, so much of what I teach in my courses and write about in my newsletter comes down to mindset, not craft, and certainly not insider information.
Your writing begins in your mind-body; your publishing journey begins with your mindset. The time it takes you to bounce back from a rejection is far more important than whether or not you face repeated rejections—indeed, receiving them is a positive indicator that you are actively submitting your writing, which is step one towards having a book out in the world. It won’t always be possible to reframe disappointment quickly or easily, but the faster you shift from thinking “I am a reject” to “this [poem, pitch, book] wasn’t right for this [issue, agent, publisher],” the more you will summon and preserve the precious energy that allows you to keep showing up each day to the work.
Do not fall into the trap of conflating your worth, and the life-affirming pleasure of writing, with the final product. Redirecting insecurity to blame the market, the system, and so forth won’t help, either. Why? Because indignation isn’t a useful emotion from which to write. Part of your job as a writer is to generate and preserve the emotions and conditions that will help you write. I can offer no better advice than this: Practice radical honesty with yourself and cultivate a sense of space between your creativity and the business of submission. Your journey will be far smoother, saner, and more rewarding. You will work in a way that rises to meet your gifts rather than depletes you, if you make how you feel your priority.
—Maya C. Popa, poetry reviews editor, Publishers Weekly
Photo credit: Bill Wadman
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Author: karenng
“I was really curious about how this fear of impending loss affects people.” In this 2023 LIVE From NYPL event, C Pam Zhang reads from her second novel, Land of Milk and Honey (Riverhead Books, 2023), and discusses grief, natural disasters, and apocalypse in a conversation with author and television host Padma Lakshmi.
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Author: bphi
In this anthology, a half century of American short stories from all genres, including science fiction, horror, and fantasy, are presented and selected by editor and critic John Freeman. Spanning from 1970 to 2020, a variety of voices, forms, and styles are highlighted, as well as often overlooked stories from renowned authors such as Dorothy Allison, Percival Everett, and Charles Johnson. There are short tales by Tobias Wolff, George Saunders, and Lydia Davis, next to near novellas by Susan Sontag and Andrew Holleran. The wide-ranging collection also includes stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken Liu, and Claire Vaye Watkins. “This anthology, though it tracks the high points of the short story, is enabled by spaces these writers opened up,” writes Freeman in the introduction, noting the significant mark these authors have made for the future of the short story.
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Author: jkashiwabara
Epiphany is a religious day of celebration commemorating the visit by the Three Wise Men to the baby Jesus with their gifts, observed in January. Originating from the Greek word meaning “manifestation,” in a work of literature, an epiphany generally consists of a different sort of appearance—a moment that seems to suddenly illuminate the truth, one that oftentimes changes the course of a character’s life. Write a scene in a new or ongoing short story in which your main character experiences such a dawning realization. What is the catalyst for this discovery? How does this newfound insight transform their subsequent actions or interactions with another character or a future decision?
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Author: Writing Prompter
In this short video, filmmaker and author Miranda July talks about Snarla, a feminist punk zine she created with Johanna Fateman while living in Berkeley, California. Their zine as well as other zines and works are on view in Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines at the Brooklyn Museum through March.
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Author: jkashiwabara
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