In a world flooded with stories—books, shows, films, and endless social content—it’s easy to fall into passive consumption. But as writers and creatives, what we take in matters just as much as what we put out. To write with depth, clarity, and resonance, we must first learn to read more intentionally and watch with greater awareness. Intentional consumption isn’t about being rigid or “highbrow.” Rather, it’s about choosing stories that challenge us, feed us, and reflect the kind of storytelling we want, in turn, to create.
Earlier this month, I offered a post about “Why Intentional Storytelling Matters in an Era of AI and Algorithm-Driven Content.” It was an exploration of all the reasons intentional storytelling has always mattered and perhaps matters more than ever in our modern era of ultra-speed and convenient shortcuts. The first comment on that post (amongst many in a wonderfully rich discussion) was from Heather J. Bennett who wrote:
It’s also a problem with lazy readers who aren’t taking the time to slow down and read the story as it’s written. … Their attention spans for reading for the nuance of the storytelling is shorter with understandable life priorities and needing to get things done.
This immediately spoke to something I was already thinking about, which is that intentional consumption—reading and watching—is just as important, if not more so, than intentional creation. However, this isn’t to separate writers from consumers or suggest “others” should bear the blame for “bad” stories being all too acceptable to the market. After all, we as writers are first and foremost members of that same audience. To the degree we seek to create intentional art—art that that is “on purpose” and for a reason—then this is a reminder that our reading/watching choices not only inform the general market, but also the quality of what we’re inputting into our own experiences and how that that affects the output in our writing.
How Does What You Read and Watch Shape Your Writing?
Which is more important: writing intentionally or reading intentionally?
It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg question, but ultimately I believe intentional media consumption is more important. Why? Because the personalized landscape of our individual media consumption is the fertile ground out of which grows everything we might hope to create. Someone who chooses media with the utmost intention is unlikely to then create without intention. Even if they did, I have to believe the careful attention to input would still favorably impact the output.
No doubt, you’re familiar with the suggestion that you are the average of the five people you’re around the most. Your media consumption impacts you just as greatly. It’s worth examining five of the shows you watch most often and five of the series you most like to read (or perhaps for simplicity’s sake, the type of shows and books you most enjoy) and considering how they have “made” you—for better or worse.
You can also think of it like this: your writing is unlikely to rise above the average quality or thematic messaging of what you read and watch. More crucially, consuming low-quality media risks the dulling of yourself. And if nothing else, even if the effect is neutral, you must contend with the fact that in not asking more of your media, and therefore of yourself, you are missing potential opportunities to raise yourself.
How Reading and Watching Low-Quality Content Affects Your Writing
Intentional media consumption affects everyone, but as writers, our interaction with media has the potential to create a greater ripple effect. Not only do our media choices affect us personally (which, of course, necessarily affects our writing), they also directly shape our own works of fiction.
The single greatest rule of thumb when it comes to questioning whether you’re reading and watching critically is to consider whether or not you are reading or watching with your soul.
Fundamentally, what I mean by this is that engagement should bring a certain spark of aliveness. What you read or watch should make you feel alive.
Media is nourishment for our minds and souls. Just as with the physical nourishment of food, we have to consider whether we’re getting enough quality nutrients. Are we consuming junk content or “real” content? Just as with junk food, it’s true enough we all tend toward a soft spot for junk entertainment.
What is junk entertainment?
Empty calories that are satisfying-but-not-satisfying.
Adds nothing of real value.
Possibly leaches valuable nutrients (i.e., time, happiness, contentment, positivity).
Strangely but inarguably addictive.
This isn’t to say the occasional cheat day isn’t a worthy part of our lives, but a steady diet of anything that isn’t actively adding value is, at best, a waste and, at worst, actively harmful to both ourselves, our potential readers, and inevitably the collective.
Do Stories With Agendas Harm Good Storytelling?
We tend to blame much of our current dissatisfaction with modern media on the fact that storytelling has become ever more polarizing and political. It is not uncommon for the release of even the most popcorn-y of all entertainment—the summer blockbuster—to be bulldozed by political rants of all persuasions. It can be difficult to engage with modern media without guarding against intrusive messaging (and that may even be before we know what the messaging may be).
Many people cry out that stories should not be vehicles for political and social agendas and should get back to being “just for fun” or “just entertainment.” (But maybe you already know what I think about the “just” word in front of stories…)
I do not believe this is the problem. Stories have always been political. By their very nature as an inherently transformational experience, they can’t be anything else. (Never mind that the simple act of reporting on the human condition is also inherently—and often dangerously—political.)
Neither is the problem that “real” stories and “important” stories shouldn’t be fun. Indeed, I can’t help but think that the most wildly entertaining genre stories are those with the most potential for impacting humanity—not only through their sheer accessibility but also through their natural tendency toward the simple depth of the archetypal experience.
No, in my opinion, what we are ultimately reacting against—and, out of sheer exhaustion, increasingly putting up with—are specific trends that have taken us away from the true heart—the true soul—of what story really is.
Plot-driven stories that neglect character arcs (i.e., characters made to serve plots rather than plots made to serve characters).
Entertainment-first storytelling vs. artistic integrity (i.e., seeking stories that will supposedly sell vs. writing stories of originality and personal intensity).
Flat stereotypes vs. rich archetypes (i.e., writing tropes and plot formulae vs. meeting, understanding, and mining the deeper archetypal wisdom of story transformation).
Storytelling instead of story channelling (i.e., creating stories primarily or entirely from our left brain’s logic vs. listening to what wants to come through the right brain).
What Does It Mean to Read More Intentionally as a Writer? (7 Tips)
In many ways, I think reading and watching critically is actually more difficult than mindful storytelling. Partly, this is because we often feel we have less control over what media is placed before us to consume versus what we can consciously choose to create. Mostly, however, it is because consumption is a relatively passive action—we simply sit and accept what we are given, even if we don’t necessarily like it—whilst creation necessarily demands our entire active participation and therefore choice.
As such, and because watching and reading as a writer is such an intrinsic part of the larger storytelling process, upping the ante on media literacy for writers becomes a deeply important topic. To that end, here are several suggestions for nourishing your creative mind, all of them straight from my own practices in intentional media consumption.
1. Stop Consuming Content That Doesn’t Spark Curiosity
So, yes, the first step is to just: stop watching and reading.
If there’s no spark, turn it off. Don’t consume mindlessly just because it’s there. Just say no.
Although I have always had the habit of watching a hour or two of TV or movies in the evenings, recently I decided to take an indefinite break, for the simple reason that I was spending upward of two hours every day watching stuff that, for the most part, I didn’t even like. Part of this reaction is due to my own moods and tastes at the moment, but part of it is the very real scroll of doom on Netflix and other streaming services.
By stepping away from habitual viewing, not only can I spare myself from increasingly unintentional media choices, I can also devote those two hours to more productive pursuits—like reading a (good) book or working on my own writing. If a movie or show comes along that I’m actually excited about (Stranger Things 5, looking at you!), I’ll watch it.
Until then, impress me. I’ll wait.
2. Make Space for Silence
I have always felt (with no small amount of satisfaction) that watching movies and reading books was just part of my job. But amidst the ever-increasing cacophony that is my (almost) 40-year-old brain in the year of 2025, the need to step back and hear myself has become perhaps an even more important part of that job. As writers, we are (and, I think, should be) influenced by the media collective. But our stories ultimately come from us, and the only way to truly find them is to make sure we can hear our own inner whisperings louder than whatever junk-food TV might be playing in the background.
3. Practice Reflective Watching and Reading
When you do read or watch, take the time to think critically about what you consume.
For a writer, this may begin by critically analyzing technique.
As a 21st-century human, this demands noticing where we might be copping to habitual and ingrained responses (either for or against).
Perhaps most important, it should mean noticing how you feel.
Questions to ask about intentional reading and watching:
How are the feelings that are coming up (whether big or small, for or against, happy or angry) a mirror for you?
What do you think the author wanted you to experience>
How did your actual experience line up with this?
These are first and foremost soulwork questions, but inevitably also questions about honing writing technique.
4. Challenge Yourself With Unfamiliar Stories
Reading with intention often means going off the beaten track. Instead of simply choosing the latest show available on streaming or the newest bestseller in your favorite genre, take your autonomy in your hands and make the commitment to be bold. Read things that are edgy.
Edgy stories are those that push you because:
They require skillful comprehension,
They ask you to step beyond what it is triggering, confronting, or uncomfortable.
They beckon from outside your current comfort zone or personal interests.
They represent something strange, frightening, or “other.”
They scare you (just a little bit).
5. Revisit Books and Films That Moved You
Return to some of your old favorites—those that spoke to your mind, heart, and soul. Sometimes I have to go back to the books and movies that made me want to be a writer in the first place—just to see if the old magic is still there. And it is. And it always gives me hope, because it means story is still there. It’s still alive—on the page, on the screen, and in me. Story is just as vibrant and moving and exciting as it ever was, as long as we’re looking in the right places.
6. Create Intentional Reading Challenges
A good reading (or watching ) challenge is always a good way to mix things up, to make sure your choices are intentional, and to explore story terrain you may otherwise have missed entirely.
Three of my ongoing challenges are:
Reading the classics (which I define as any famous book written prior to 1980).
Reading the Pulitzer winners for fiction.
Watching all the movies in my collection in reverse order starting in the 1930s.
Here are a few ideas for reading or watching challenges:
An author who challenges you.
A genre you’ve never read.
A book you know sits across from your current ideological fence rail.
A movie from each decade.
A foreign film.
Something you used to love and something you used to hate—just to see if anything has changed.
The point is to detour from comfortable ruts and to rouse curiosity for the unknown. You never know what you’ll find—probably your next story idea!
7. Read for True Fun, Not Passive Distraction
Finally, it’s worth saying that intentional media consumption is not about forcing yourself to become a highbrow literary elitist (unless you want to be). Rather, I believe the single greatest sign we’re on track with our reading and watching is that we are having fun.
Not mindless semi-satisfaction.
But true heart-pounding, gut-clenching, laughing-out-loud, squealing-in-the-theater, delighted, ignited, enlivened fun.
Yes, story is indeed entertainment, but it is never just entertainment. It is engagement. True fun is never mindless because it shows us the core of our own passions and truths.
So perhaps the best rule of all for reading and watching with intention is to ask: “Am I having fun?” And if you’re not: don’t.
***
If stories are nourishment, then writers are the cooks who must taste every ingredient before serving it up. What we take in becomes the flavor of what we offer the world. Choosing to read more intentionally is more than a personal practice—it’s a creative responsibility. When we consume with care, curiosity, and courage, we elevate our own craft and influence the stories being told around us. The world doesn’t need more noise. It needs storytellers who are listening first.
If writers don’t read/watch with intention, who will?
In Summary:
Intentional media consumption isn’t just about watching “better” shows or reading “smarter” books. It’s about aligning your media choices with your creative purpose. When you engage with stories that challenge, inspire, or even unsettle you, you’re nurturing the very soil from which your own stories grow.
Key Takeaways:
You are what you consume. Your media habits shape your inner creative landscape.
Junk content dulls creative potential. Just like food, low-quality stories leave you hungry for meaning.
Reflective consumption enhances storytelling. Asking why something moved you (or didn’t) sharpens your writing instincts.
Challenging content helps you grow. Step beyond your comfort zone to discover new perspectives and storytelling techniques.
Fun is a compass. True fun—joyful, engaged, soul-stirring fun—is the best indicator of intentional story alignment.
If you’re feeling inspired to not just consume stories more intentionally but to write them more intentionally too, check out my most recent book Next Level Plot Structure. This one’s for writers who are ready to move beyond just hitting plot points to really exploring the deeper architecture of story—including plot structure’s mirror-like symmetry, the four symbolic “worlds” found within every story, the pacing beneath the beats, and the powerful emotional logic that makes a plot resonate. It builds on what I taught in Structuring Your Novel, but goes further into the soul of structure itself. If you’ve ever sensed there’s something deeper going on in great stories—even if you couldn’t quite put your finger on it—this book will help you tap into that, shape it, and use it with purpose. It’s available in paperback, e-book, and audiobook.
Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Do you think writers have a responsibility to read more intentionally—and if so, what’s one story that changed the way you think about your own writing? Tell me in the comments!
Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Spotify).
How do you turn a big-budget TV show idea into an audio drama you can produce yourself? What does it take to create a 10-hour, 30-actor historical drama? And how can guerrilla marketing in airport bookstores help find your audience? Alison Haselden shares her experience of writing and directing Wicked Dames.
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.
Joanna: Alison Haselden is an author, screenwriter, and actor. Her latest project is the historical fiction audio drama, Wicked Dames. Welcome to the show, Alison.
Alison: Thank you so much for having me, Jo.
Joanna: I’m excited to talk to you today. First off—
Tell us a bit more about you and your creative background.
Alison: I have been in the creative world since the day I was born. I’m so grateful to have had a very supportive family who realized they had no choice; I was going to be singing, dancing, acting, and putting on plays in the neighborhood whether they wanted me to or not.
I grew up in Orlando, Florida, which has always had a bit of a pipeline to Los Angeles. In the nineties, we had all the boy bands and the Musketeers, so there was a lot of opportunity there.
I started working in professional acting at age six and was fortunate to be able to work and train throughout my childhood in Orlando, and I was able to go to Los Angeles a bit as well.
I was also an avid reader and writer my entire life. I just love stories in every medium I could get my hands on, which has continued into my adult life. I went to university for journalism and marketing, which really honed my writing skills.
Coming out of university, I worked in content marketing for seven years. That helped me get my reps in for building writing stamina, as well as learning marketing skills that now help me so much in my acting and writing careers.
It’s been a beautiful journey. I’m at a place this year where I can look back and see that —
In the years I thought I was treading water, I was actually building useful skills —
that I’m so grateful for now, even though they felt like detours at the time.
Now, I’ve quit the corporate world and I work for myself, marketing consulting for creative executives keeps the lights on while I pursue my acting and writing careers.
I act primarily in film and TV now. I just wrapped on my first series regular role in a limited series that should hopefully be coming out at the end of this year or in 2026. We released Wicked Dames in the fall of 2024, and I just finished writing my YA Fantasy. So, we’ve got a lot of projects going on.
Joanna: I love that. I love how you outlined that you also did jobs that maybe felt like you were treading water, but you were building on the side. I think some people think that you just go from child actor to TV shows to multimillionaire.
Alison: That is a common misconception.
Most of us are what I call “middle-class actors.”
Joanna: Like mid-list authors.
Alison: Exactly. It’s the same thing.
Most folks that I work with, we all have something else going on on the side because this career is so inconsistent, and it’s the same with writing. We all have to have multiple irons in the fire these days.
Joanna: On that, because you are juggling freelance work as well, with all these different projects and interests—
How do you manage your time with a portfolio career?
Alison: I used to be a “white-knuckle-it” kind of person and would hyper-schedule myself to try and pack every minute of every day with a box to check off. In the past two years, I have shifted away from that, and it’s weirdly worked out better than I could have ever imagined. There’s some kind of divine intervention there, I think.
Somehow, I rarely have competing deadlines and I follow my intuition in terms of what my priorities should be. If I have a deadline on something, of course, that gets put to the top of the pile, but I’ve been so fortunate that it’s just worked out.
For example, this past year I was focusing solely on Wicked Dames from about April 2024 through the beginning of November 2024. Then I took a little break and an idea came to me, and I put my head down and wrote this whole YA fantasy I’m working on about witches in Nantucket.
Right when I finished that and needed a little break, this TV show opportunity came along. I couldn’t really write while I was on set—it’s pretty demanding of your brain space—but it worked out because I needed to have time away before coming back for edits.
The less I try to control things, the more it weirdly works out in a way that is supportive of my creative process. There are so many different sides of our brain. I can’t just be creatively brainstorming 24/7; I need to switch to the other side of my brain and do more logistical things.
For the way my energy works, being able to switch hats helps me recharge in the process, so I’m not over-functioning in one way for too long. Then I’m actually excited to go back and check in on another project.
Joanna: It sounds like you never do the same thing back-to-back; you’re switching all the time.
Alison: Yes, and that part has been pure chance. I don’t know how that’s worked out so far, and maybe it won’t be that way forever, but I really have been lucky enough to have quite a bit of variety that cycles through the year.
Joanna: Let’s get into Wicked Dames. You mentioned the YA fantasy, but Wicked Dames is a historical story.
Why write Wicked Dames? And why make it an audio drama instead of a book?
Alison: One of the unique things about my background is that I don’t sit down and say, “Okay, I want to write a film script,” or, “Okay, I want to write a novel.” My ideas download into my brain, and I know immediately what format I want to lead with. I do write almost everything in multiple forms of IP.
I’m working on two different books right now, and I’ll probably write a pilot episode or a spec sheet for each of those, but both came to me as a novel first.
Wicked Dames, however, came to me and I saw it as a TV show. I saw the visuals of it so clearly; it just felt like a TV show. I have written the book version of Wicked Dames, but my intuition really wanted me to get it out there in as close to a TV format as possible.
Anyone who knows about film and TV knows that historical fiction is very expensive to make. So, rather than try to scrounge together an opportunity to make it as a pilot episode, I wanted to get the IP out there as soon as possible, but I wanted it to feel very experiential.
I wanted the audience to feel like they were really in that world, and an audio drama was the perfect solution. Unlike an audiobook, which is typically one voice reading the book verbatim, an audio drama is essentially a TV show without the visuals.
You get a more immersive experience with all the different actors playing the characters, plus music and sound effects. It seemed like the right medium to get the story out into the world, and I’m so glad I did it that way.
I write a lot of historical fiction, fantasy, and some contemporary rom-com. Those might sound very different, but to me, they all have an element of magic to them, which is the throughline.
I’ve always loved historical fiction; it’s so magical. It’s an escape, but also so grounding because we know that parts of it are real. It just all flowed in that way.
Joanna: In terms of writing one, people might be able to picture a TV script with camera directions and dialogue.
How do you format an audio drama script and add in things like sound effects?
Alison: Many people want to have strict rules, but really, there are no rules. I think there are even fewer rules for an audio drama script. I write it like a cross between a novel and a TV script.
The formatting on the page is structured like a TV script, so it doesn’t read like a novel with paragraphs of text. We have the character breakdowns, the action, and the header that outlines the setting.
I do add a lot more to the action and description sections than I would for a traditional film or TV script. In this story, the narrator is doing a lot, so I wanted there to be plenty of description.
On my edit passes for Wicked Dames, I was thinking from the audience’s perspective: if they are only listening with no visuals, what can be communicated via a sound effect and what cannot? That’s where I would decide what kind of narration to add.
I didn’t nitpick those details until the second or third editing pass. That really helped because you’re going from being a storyteller to being more of a strategist, ensuring that your listeners have the best experience possible.
Joanna: Of course, you were both acting in and producing this.
Alison: Yes, I wore a lot of hats on this. I wrote it, I directed it, and I am a voice actor in it.
It was a lot, but I felt uniquely qualified to step into those roles. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that to all authors, unless you have a desire to learn some of those things.
For me, I really wanted the opportunity to flex those skills. One day I would love to be a showrunner of a TV show, and this was a good training ground for that.
Joanna: Let’s get into the challenges of doing an audio drama compared to, say, an audiobook, especially as an independent creator without big studio funding.
Alison: I’m going to share all my secrets. I don’t think I would’ve had the confidence to do something like this if I didn’t know about some of these tools and opportunities.
One of the biggest barriers to entry people imagine is finding actors, but the beautiful thing is that there are actors at all levels out there.
It’s been a difficult time in the entertainment industry following COVID and the writer and actor strikes in 2023. Our industry is still struggling to recover, so there are more actors than you’d think who are passionate about the work and looking for projects. It is very possible to find incredible actors who will work within your budget.
The best places to find actors are sites like Actors Access or Backstage.
You have to do a little admin to get your account set up to post a casting call, but I cast all my actors through there. You can be transparent about your budget, set up the audition sides from your script, and then review everyone’s profiles and submissions.
It seems like a lot, but I promise it’s easier than you might think. There’s a little nuance here. In the United States, I ran my project through the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, because I wanted access to a wider net of actors.
You don’t have to do this; you could do it as completely non-union, but then only non-union actors can be part of your project, which is totally fine. Those websites are open to both union and non-union projects.
This is where people get nervous—the technology. You have a few options to consider before casting. You could note in your casting call that you’re only considering actors who already have recording equipment.
Or, you could make it open to all actors, but you would probably have to accommodate recording them, either by paying for their studio time or inviting them to a home studio.
Many actors who do voiceover work have microphones in their homes and can work with you over Zoom and send you the files. That is probably the easiest way.
I would say the biggest challenge for me, and the part I was least familiar with, was hiring an editor. The editing is everything, especially if you have a large cast and want lots of sound effects. The editor puts all of that together.
I would recommend saving up a decent amount of your budget for that because they put in a lot of hours. That’s the part that takes the most time, the most budget, and the most back-and-forth to get the final product you envision.
Joanna: Give people an idea of the money, tell us how long the Wicked Dames series is and the scale of the production.
Alison: We have 10 episodes in Wicked Dames, and they all range between 35 to 60 minutes. So, it’s about 10 hours of content. We had over 30 actors participate, all with different-sized roles.
I paid my talent hourly—$25 an hour—or sometimes per session, depending on how much work they were doing. I was super upfront that I did not have a big budget. I paid my editor $3,500, which was a good deal because he was looking for the experience for his portfolio. I got really lucky.
I was putting in a lot of my own effort, so I was saving a lot of money but putting in the hours myself. I was able to produce the audio drama for under $6,000, which is very much on the lower side.
I was directing, coordinating talent, and had a tight recording schedule. I recorded every single day for the entire month of June last year.
I found a group of actors who were really excited about the project and deepening their own artistry. It was a slow season, so everyone had extra free time.
All the people who were part of the project were really meant to be part of it, and they brought so much life and fun. Seeing how they brought their own take on the characters I wrote was a joy.
Joanna: How do you distribute an audio drama and how do you make money from it?
Alison: There are a lot of routes with this, and it depends on your goals.
For me, my main goal was to get my IP out there and have a strong portfolio piece showcasing my work as a writer, actor, and director all in one. I wanted to hopefully break even and then start to build a community around my project.
I’m happy to say I was able to break even, and we’ve built a lot of community. My TikTok grew exponentially to 24,000 followers.
I’m in this for the long haul, and with the end goal of one day making this a TV show, it was more important for me to get the IP out there than to turn this particular audio drama into a business. Because of that, I chose to release it for free.
I have donation links in the show notes for those who enjoy it. However, you could put up a paywall through platforms like Patreon or Substack. That would probably have made more money but would have lowered the visibility, and I wanted visibility more than a short-term financial gain. You can also try to get ads on it.
One of the ways I built community was by hosting several in-person, themed events with local coffee shops and bars, which allowed for profit-share opportunities. That worked well to not only bring in a little money, but also to build fans around what we were doing.
Joanna: You said you broke even. Was that from donations and events?
Alison: Yes, it was from the donations. People were loving the show, making it all the way through, and then they would send us a tip if they enjoyed it, and it was through those events. It was very unexpected and heartwarming to see that people enjoyed what they were listening to and wanted to donate to our production.
Joanna: What platform are you publishing on?
Alison: It’s the same as any other podcast. I just used the Spotify for Podcasters platform. It’s cross-posted, so it’s on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and YouTube. It’s accessible for free on all of those platforms.
I also have my own webpage for it with additional content. We filmed a video trailer, which was fun. There’s a bit of a mystery in the story, so on the website, you can get some of the materials that the girls discover to put together the clues. I like making things interactive where I can.
Joanna: Now you’ve started— You better tell us more about the actual story.
Who are the Wicked Dames?
Alison:Wicked Dames is about young women who seduced and killed Nazis during World War II. I was inspired by the very real stories of many young girls and women who did this—some as young as 13 years old. Some worked alone, some with local resistance groups, and some with official intelligence agencies.
I had read these stories over the years and thought it was crazy that no one had done anything with them. We have so many World War II stories, but most are about men in primary combat.
At the same time, my fiancé’s grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, and her mother did incredible things to keep her family alive. I was hearing those stories, and I think they combined in my head and spit out Wicked Dames.
I wanted to explore the shades of gray. For young women in Berlin during this time, there were many different nuances to their experiences. Each of our girls comes from a different background and has personal challenges that lead them to work together.
We also have a bit of a serial killer moment; one of the girls in the group is a serial killer who is just benefiting from being alive during this time of war. I always thought,
“When would be the best time to be a serial killer?” Probably during a world war.
She’s mixed in with girls who are quite innocent and trying to do what’s right, and others who have their own vendettas.
There are a lot of layers, a lot of mystery, and I think it’s a pretty fun ride. I like to say it’s a cross between Little Women and Peaky Blinders, with a dash of Inglourious Basterds.
Joanna: You come from a marketing background.
How are you marketing the audio drama?
Alison: I definitely like to use a mix of tactics; I am not a “put all your eggs in one basket” kind of gal.
Digitally, we have the website, an email list, and social media promotion on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Threads. We had those in-person events and partnered with podcasts and other media outlets.
My favorite thing that I did was a bit of guerrilla marketing. I ordered a bunch of bookmarks with QR codes and wrote handwritten secret notes on antique-looking paper. I travel a lot, and so do people in my family, so I distributed those amongst everyone.
Anytime we went to the airport, we were stuffing these in airport bookstore books, trying to pick relevant ones like other historical fiction or World War II texts. I would also go to my local libraries and do that.
It’s a delightful surprise if you pick up a book and there’s a secret note inside. I would frame it as, “You’ve been recruited by the Wicked Dames. Learn more and check out the website.” It was really fun to track the QR codes and see where in the world the bookmarks ended up.
Joanna: That sounds amazing. Even if it didn’t pay off in click-throughs.
Alison: And it made for really great social media content. People online thought the idea was cool, so the posts I made about doing that got a lot of engagement and traffic. It’s all connected.
Joanna: You started by saying you want this to be a TV show.
What happens next? Are you pitching it as a TV show?
Alison: I am so intuitively led now. I sat and brainstormed about the next steps, and what came to me was to write more.
Historical fiction is a difficult sell, especially right now. This IP is going to sit out there and hopefully continue to build community, and maybe it will come across the desk of someone who is excited by it.
Right now, I’m focusing on getting my foothold in through some of my other projects that I think would have an easier time getting a green light, like a contemporary rom-com or fantasy. Fantasy, even though it’s big budget, is a more popular sell these days. I’m focusing on those projects.
My YA fantasy is completed and in edits, and I’m about halfway done with the first draft of my rom-com. I’m actually already talking with one network about that project, and I’m not even done with it.
If I hadn’t listened to my intuition and had just continued pouring all my energy into Wicked Dames, I wouldn’t have been able to make headway on these other projects, which I think will open up more opportunities and get me to a place where I can say, “Oh, and by the way, I have Wicked Dames here.”
In publishing, they often tell you to focus on one genre. However —
Straddling both the publishing and entertainment worlds, I’ve noticed it’s beneficial to have a few different genres.
Having options helps when adjusting your sales strategy with the industry’s ebb and flow. Sometimes they want something low-budget, and other times, during an abundance period, you can pitch your high-budget projects. I’ve let myself dabble for that reason.
In an industry that’s so flaky, nothing’s guaranteed until it’s on the screen or the book is in your hands. I’ve taken that as permission to do whatever I want.
Joanna: Some people get disheartened by that and feel like giving up. How do you deal with that?
Alison: I certainly do get disheartened, but one of the blessings of having grown up working in this world is that I realize how impersonal it is. That can sting, but it’s also freedom.
Timing is everything. It’s easy to think that if something we love doesn’t take off when we want it to, it’s never going to work out. And yet, there’s so much evidence of the opposite—projects started 10 years ago that suddenly find the right time and all the pieces fall into place.
I’ve seen too much evidence of that, and that’s what I turn to when I’m having a hard day. I look at those stories from other artists, and that gives me hope. I’ve never been a competitive person, except with myself. I believe that seeing other people’s success and their journeys is proof of what is possible for us.
Also, like I’ve said this whole time, I allow myself to indulge in what genuinely lights me up creatively. I’m always happier with that work, and people always like that work better too.
On the days I’m feeling down, I remind myself that I genuinely delight in the work. It’s the business side of it that’s the sucky part. So, I let myself go back into my creative cave, and that’s where I recharge.
Joanna: That’s super encouraging.
Where can people find you and Wicked Dames and everything you do online?
Alison: All of the updates on the multifaceted aspects of my career are on my website, AlisonHaselden.com. I’m also pretty active on social media—Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Threads—under my name, Alison Haselden.
I also have a fun new series on YouTube called “The Showrunner Note,” where I walk through my pitch for adapting popular books into TV shows or films. If you are a fellow book and media lover, that might be something fun. I would love to connect.
Joanna: Well, thank you so much for your time, Alison. That was great.
We’ve all experienced it: a story that looks good on paper, features big-name characters, or starts with an intriguing premise—but somehow falls flat. Maybe the characters feel hollow, the plot drifts without purpose, or the ending lands with a thud. But what actually makes a story “bad”? Are there pitfalls you can look out for that can save your story? More importantly, how can you avoid these mistakes when writing or editing?
Bad storytelling is one of those things where you “know it when you see it.” Or, rather, you feel it. Sometimes when you read or watch something that isn’t working, it can be hard to put a finger on what’s gone wrong. And yet your gut knows. Your visceral reaction to the story may range from a mild sense of dissonance, confusion, or even boredom all the way up to outright irritation or even anger.
The good news is that, as writers, the moments when you start feeling the ick are the best teaching moments possible. They give you the opportunity to look deeper into your own experience and examine why the story prompts this reaction. Although the reasons can span the gamut and are often quite subjective and personal, today I want to look at five of the most common mistakes that can create an objectively bad story. I’ve included examples of stories in which the topic in question was well-executed as well as stories in which mistakes turned what might otherwise have been good stories into bad stories.
What Makes a Bad Story? The Top 5 Reasons Stories Fail
1. Characters Who Don’t Accurately Reflect Humanity
It’s not who you are underneath. It’s what you do that defines you.
When it comes to characters, truer words were never spoken than these from Batman Begins. This also goes back to that all-important adage, “Show, don’t tell.” Basically: audiences will always judge your characters based on their actions before they look to any other cues. Even if you’ve created a character who is archetypally coded as a good person, that isn’t enough by itself to prevent audiences from judging and disliking this character if the character is acting out not-so-good behavior.
Worse, if you suggest to audiences that a character is good, only to have that character’s actions fail to accurately reflect how such goodness plays out in real life, the character will likely seem hypocritical or worse. In real life, this is how we interpret such inconsistent behavior from other people. Why should we expect audiences to see our characters any differently?
But make no mistake, this is tricky, since authors too often fail to see their characters with the same objectivity as readers will. Not only do we tend to see characters how we intend to portray them, we also tend toward blindness where our skills aren’t pulling it off.
Bad Example: In the BBC series Land Girls, the character Joyce is presented as brave, plucky, humble, and hard-working. She courageously volunteers as a Land Girl to serve her country during World War II, soldiering on in the face of her fear for her beloved husband, who is a rear gunner in the RAF. The problem (amongst many in this beleaguered series) is that Joyce was written to consistently perform actions that showed her to be selfish and controlling—not least in abandoning her wounded husband for mistakes he made when he had amnesia in France.
Land Girls (2009-11), BBC One.
Good Example: The secret to remedying this problem is to write dimensional characters. Of course, no character is good all the time. In fact, such characters tend to be boring. But writing a character with layers and complexities is different from inconsistently presenting virtues and vices. Any truly good story does this one well, but a recent example that comes to mind is Wicked, which creates a complex dynamic between frenemies Elphaba and Galinda. Both characters present internal ironies: Elphaba is not as bad as she lets others think, and Galinda is not as good as she lets others think. Instead of glossing over these complexities, the story explores them honestly, not least in authentically representing the consequences of both characters’ decisions. The most obvious example is that Elphaba must eventually take on the role of the renegade everyone has always thought her, not least because it is difficult for others to believe the truth beyond the roles she has always played.
When characters don’t learn from their mistakes, and instead keep doing the same foolish nonsense over and over throughout the story, the intention on the author’s part is usually to milk a certain trope for all it’s worth. Comedy is an obvious example—and when the character in question is a supporting character this can sometimes work. However, although audiences will willingly accept vast shortcomings from a character, they will not long suffer a fool who refuses to learn and grow from the consequences of personal actions.
Stories are change. If everything is the same at the end as it was at the beginning, you don’t have a story. Even in Flat Arc stories, in which the protagonist does not change, the story world does change. Stories are ultimately studies in evolution—whether deeply personal and moral or just practical. If characters fail to grow over the course of the story, this not only lends itself to repetitive action, it also fails to accurately portray an intriguing individual who is worth following around for the entirety of a movie or book.
Bad Example: Let’s go back to some millennial rom-coms here. The Wedding Planner showcases the major problems of the genre in that the characters learn little to nothing from the conflict. In particular, Jennifer Lopez’s female lead shows as little grasp of self-worth at the end of the story as she did at the beginning. She changes her mind about potential love interest Matthew McConaughey, even though he has done nothing to erase the fact that he is a proven cheater—having compromised his relationship with his fiancée (who is not Lopez) repeatedly over the course of the story.
The Wedding Planner (2001), Sony Pictures.
Good Example: Both lead characters in the classic You’ve Got Mail learn from their mistakes and limiting perspectives (their Lies) over the course of the story. Both behave abominably at times, but their coming together in a relationship at the end of the story feels satisfying rather than frustrating because both have also proven their capacity to change. (Indeed, perhaps the most beloved romance of all time, Pride &Prejudice, follows a similar pattern and works precisely because the main characters change so dramatically in the end—particularly with Darcy’s benevolent rescue of Lizzie’s disgraced sister.)
You’ve Got Mail (1998), Warner Bros.
3. Plots That Are Constructed Around Actions Rather Than Motives
Most of the problems in this list come down to the central issue of characters that exist to serve the plot, rather than plots generated by the characters. The simplest way to check your story is to ask whether you’re inventing actions for your characters and then tacking on the motives afterward—or whether you are allowing actions to arise naturally out of deep motivations. We see this often in stories of all genres, but perhaps nowhere more obviously than in action-oriented stories, in which scene dynamics are constructed to take advantage of, exemplify, and hammer home certain character traits.
This is done to create what is intended to be the pleasurable experience of watching characters act out certain dynamics. Ironically, the result often fails for the basic reason that the character’s actions, however interesting in themselves, are not arising from or creating causal or consequential growth.
Bad Example: The recent BBC adaptation of Winston Graham’s historical drama Poldark diverged from its source material in its fifth and final season. The result was a noticeable shift in the quality of writing for the very reason that the writing became more about making the characters do things for the sake of the plot, rather than allowing the plot to rise realistically from the characters’ actions (something the series had done very well up until this point). The final season harps endlessly on the protagonist Ross Poldark’s “recklessness,” plunging him into increasingly foolish and absurd situations—no doubt in the belief that the audience has always enjoyed this personality trait. The difference in this season is that the character’s motivations are retrofitted onto his recklessness, rather than the recklessness arising as a natural personality response to his deeper motives.
Poldark (2015-19), BBC One.
Good Example: Although there are a few moments in the series that push this line, Yellowstone‘s presentation of Beth Dutton generally offers a strong example of a larger-than-life character who creates dynamic and interesting plot events that arise naturally from her own personality and motivation. There is rarely a sense that Beth is being forced to behave in certain ways just to create these plot events or to allow for potentially shocking or intriguing scenes. Rather, the force of Beth’s own passionate character creates the plot events as she goes. She is a particularly obvious example, since her personality is so aggressive and over-the-top, but she shows how writers can get the best plots simply by asking, “What would this character do in this situation?” instead of “How can I get this character to realistically do this thing?”
Stories have to mean something. Otherwise, why bother? Life is about meaning. The act of living is about finding that meaning, and stories are meant to reflect that. If they don’t offer meaning—a point—then not only do they almost always fail to entertain, they also miss out on a much greater potential.
How do you inject meaning into a story? It doesn’t have to be anything grand or sweeping or even deep. It just has to offer an ending in cohesion with the story that preceded it.
The meaning of a story is always found in the ending. The ending proves what the story was about. This means that, no matter how great the first 90% of your story, if the ending doesn’t offer a suitable commentary on everything that has come before, the plot won’t ultimately mean anything. Every scene in a story’s plot must drive the story’s conflict toward an endpoint that is cohesive and appropriately tense with all that came before.
Bad Example: I’m going to pick on the final season of Poldark one more time. It’s worth noting that, in the books, this season is not the end of the characters’ stories. However, for the purposes of this adaptation, the fifth season is the end and therefore the only opportunity for audiences to pull a final sense of meaning from the saga. Unfortunately, the comparatively poor writing in this finale not only weakened the overall characterization, particularly of Ross, but also failed to hone in on what had always been the throughline and point of the story: the conflict between Ross and his nemesis George Warleggan, [SPOILER] who is here relegated to the background with a bizarre portrayal of delusional madness in the aftermath of his wife’s death [/SPOILER].
Poldark (2015-19), BBC One.
Good Example: The contrived “ending” of Poldark‘s Season 5 aside, the overall presentation of the story in the previous four seasons were exemplary—not least because the plot naturally returned again and again to core themes: Ross’s tempestuous relationship with his wife Demelza, his obsessive feud with George Warleggan, and his passionate championing of his mine workers’ rights. Every ending of every season leading up to the final one felt satisfying exactly because the tightly focused plots allowed for outcomes that not only felt cohesive but that carried the weight of a deeper resonance.
Good themes arise naturally from plots that are driven by strong characters. Although you can study theme (and in my opinion should—check out my book Writing Your Story’s Theme), you really don’t have to for the simple reason that if your plot and character are working well, so is your theme. In short, if you avoid all of the previous pitfalls, you’re probably already writing a story with innately chewy themes. On the flipside, however, is the problem of writing themes that feel too obvious or on the nose.
These are usually stories in which the theme is either explicitly harped upon (as a sort of “moral of the story”) or stories in which the thematic metaphor is blatant (i.e., the story’s external conflict is too obviously contrived as a mirror of the theme). There’s nothing wrong with an explicit thematic metaphor (such as the communism of Animal Farm or the underworld of grief in What Dreams May Come). But a good rule of thumb is that the more explicit the thematic metaphor, the more emotional complexity the story requires in portraying its moral quandaries.
Bad Example: Thunderbolts* was a much better film than much of what Marvel has been putting out in the last six years. Unfortunately, it suffered from a lack of thematic depth for the very reason that it leaned all of its thematic weight into the explicit metaphor of mental health and depression. [SPOILER]The bad guy is literally depression—a sentient and all-consuming void that has become disassociated from its human originator.[/SPOILER] On the surface, this is an excellent thematic metaphor, especially since it ties into the protagonist Yelena Romanov’s own existential struggles. And yet the film felt decidedly shallow in the face of such a tremendous thematic exploration, simply because its plot and character dynamics did not catalyze the theme. The characters and their involvement with this antagonist were largely incidental, thematically pertinent only tangentially through their personal histories with PTSD and guilt.
Thunderbolts* (2025), Marvel Studios.
Good Example: A much better example of cohesive themes is another Marvel entry, The Winter Soldier. Although structurally much the same as Thunderbolts*, this film is able to deepen itself beyond simple action-genre tropes into an earnest exploration of the complex intersection between moral values and relational loyalty. The reason its themes feel far more organic, and as a result more thought-provoking, is because those themes arise naturally from the protagonist, Steve Rogers, and his interactions with every other character, particularly his long-lost best friend Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier. One notable difference between these two films is that every character in Winter Soldier plays an important thematic role in interacting with the protagonist and prompting his own journey. In contrast, characters in Thunderbolts*, including the nominal protagonist Yelena, are little more than spectators to the main action, which is driven by the seeming bystander “Bob.” They could easily be changed out for an entirely different team of heroes, whereas Steve Rogers is specifically inherent to the plot and theme in Winter Soldier.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Marvel Studios.
***
In the end, bad storytelling is usually the result of misalignment between character and action, plot and meaning, theme and execution. The most common narrative failures happen when writers try to force stories rather than uncover them. The silver lining is this: if you can recognize what doesn’t work in other stories (and your own), you’re already halfway to crafting something better. Great storytelling is simply honest storytelling driven by real characters, deep motivations, and resonant consequences.
Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What’s a story you wanted to love—but just couldn’t? What made it fall apart for you? Tell me in the comments!
In Summary:
Stories that fall flat often share the same core problems: characters that lack dimensionality or growth, plots that prioritize spectacle over motivation, and themes that are either nonexistent or overly literal. Understanding these pitfalls can help writers tell stories that are more emotionally honest, structurally coherent, and ultimately more impactful.
Key Takeaways:
Characters must reflect human complexity. Viewers judge characters by their actions, not the author’s intentions.
Change is the heartbeat of story. If characters (or the world) don’t evolve, the story stalls.
Plot must arise from character motivation. Don’t reverse-engineer actions just to create drama.
Your ending is your meaning. A satisfying conclusion echoes and elevates everything before it.
Themes work best when organic. On-the-nose metaphors often feel shallow without strong emotional grounding.
Want More?
If you’re ready to dive deeper into what makes characters truly work—and how to build meaningful arcs that drive everything from plot to theme—check out my book Creating Character Arcs. It breaks down exactly how to construct transformative journeys that resonate with readers and anchor your entire story—both plot and theme. You can find it here in my store or anywhere books are sold. It’s available as an e-book, paperback, and audiobook.
Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Spotify).
Are you feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to constantly release new books and battle algorithms? Do you wonder if there’s a more sustainable, low-stress path to a successful author career? Is it possible to focus on art, build a loyal fanbase, and escape the publishing rat race? In this episode, Johnny B. Truant discusses the artisan author approach.
This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com
Joanna: Johnny B. Truant is the author of over one hundred and fifty books across multiple genres, including thriller, science fiction, fantasy, comedy, and nonfiction. His latest book is The Artisan Author: The Low-Stress, High-Quality, Fan-Focused Approach to Escaping the Publishing Rat Race. So welcome back to the show, Johnny.
Johnny: Man, it is so fun to be on The Creative Penn. It’s just like coming home. It’s just so great. So thank you for having me.
Joanna: Well, you’ve been on the show multiple times over the years, and the last time was a couple of years ago when you were pivoting into this stage of your author journey. So we are going to jump straight into the topic today.
Why The Artisan Author and why now? What were you seeing in the author community that made you want to write this book?
Johnny: I used to do a lot of author education. We had a podcast and a book and all that. Around the time COVID started, I stopped doing a lot of that and just focused on fiction.
When I came back to the 20Books Conference, the last one, so much had changed. People were really ramping up AI in different ways, the rapid release had gotten faster, and all the tactical stuff had gotten more tactical.
I just remembered thinking, “Boy, I always wanted to just write books my own way, at my own speed.” Despite going fast, I don’t like being forced to go fast and I don’t know if this is a game I want to play anymore.
You have to fit into all the very specific categories that the algorithms like to promote, and a lot of people are playing those games. In the midst of that, I did talk to another author. You may know her. She’s British and runs a podcast.
Joanna: Yes, it was me!
Johnny: I know that you had said—I don’t know if you used the word ‘artisan,’ but you definitely described a lot of the things that I’m looking at now, which is, “I don’t want to go in that direction either, and I’m doing more and more of what I want to do and trusting my true fans to be interested in it.”
Over the course of the next year, I started thinking more and more about that. What if instead of going into that faster, faster, rapid-release, kind of a death spiral sometimes—a lot of burnouts is related to that—
What if instead we acted like artists who are selling fine goods to very discerning customers?
I would just call them artists and readers. We don’t have to worry about price and we don’t have to worry about fighting the algorithms. We can just rely on a one-to-one connection to true fans rather than hoping the algorithms will find people for us.
Having known you for many years, our conversation was sort of, “Look, don’t give it all up because you are great at this.” I’ve been reading your writing for a long, long time, before you wrote fiction. I think what is nice about this period right now is that we do get to question things.
For a while, there were kind of rules. You guys had a book, what was it, The Fiction Formula or something like that, at one point?
Johnny: You know, it’s so funny because I work with Sean Platt. I was working with him a lot more in that nonfiction space, and Sean will do things like that. He’ll say, “Okay, we’re going to call it The Fiction Formula.” And I’m like, “But we’ve already talked about how there’s no formula.”
He’s like, “No, no, that’s the genius. It’s going to be called The Fiction Formula. There is no formula,” because he wants the catch.
Joanna: But the thing is, there almost was for a bit.
Like you said, we met again at the last 20BooksTo50k. That was actually a thing for a period of time. Now I kind of say, “Well, one book to 50k.” Like you said, you can, if you do fine goods to discerning customers, you can do one book to 50k. It’s a very different time.
It’s almost like at the beginning of the indie revolution, we got to reinvent the way things were done. I feel like that’s where we are again.
We are reinventing the way things were done because what is new becomes old.
I feel like where we are now, fifteen-plus years into the indie revolution, or maybe seventeen-plus years into it, now we can reinvent it all over again.
Johnny: Yes, and that’s something that I explored in The Artisan Author book. It was almost a little bit of a history lesson, not because I wanted to bore people with it, but because we were on this very sensible and aspirational trajectory for a while.
We came out of the old traditional publishing days where you had to query an agent and hope that you hit the right person at the right time and in the right mood. Instead, we were suddenly without gatekeepers and we could do what we wanted.
Then it started to be, “Okay, so if you write more books, you’ll make more money.” We helped to contribute to that with Write. Publish. Repeat.
Then it became that at all costs, with no governor on it. Like, let’s just go faster. Let’s forget about the caveats of trying to enjoy yourself and maybe trying to write art that you actually care about.
A lot of people just went to extremes with the rapid release thing, and that’s what I think really hit me when I went back to 20Books.
It was like when you watch a kid grow up and then you’re away for a year and you see that kid again, and that kid has gotten so big. It’s kind of like that. I came back and it was like, “Oh, I remember rapid release.” It was this annoying little thing over there, and then it had become this huge thing and had become almost default.
That’s what bothered me the most. It wasn’t that it was so dominant, it was that I knew that there were new writers coming in—not just at that conference or the Author Nation conference to follow it, but people who watch from afar, who listen to the podcasts and watch the YouTube videos.
I just thought of those poor authors coming in and how overwhelming this must be. “I finally finished the book I always wanted to write. Okay, now write six more and release them every three weeks.” It’s just terrible.
Joanna: It is. But I wanted to make the point that —
I’ve never done rapid release, and a lot of authors were never rapid release. It just became a loud segment of the community —
— and possibly true that the people who were making more income that way. As you say, also in the time that we’ve been doing this, people have disappeared.
Now, you disappeared, but you came back.
Johnny: You said that they’re loud and that more of them appeared. That’s part of the problem, really. Because they are loud—and by loud I don’t mean necessarily obnoxious, I just mean that you tend to talk about it a lot when you’ve found something that works like that.
It’s a vanishingly small percentage of authors, but because they are so loud, they’re the ones who usually speak or write books or whatever. So it looks to people as if that’s the norm, and if you aren’t making serious bank as a rapid-release author, then you’re just not trying hard enough.
It’s not; it’s this tiny percentage. I remember reading in one of Becca Syme’s books, she had done the research to determine how many books actually make money, and it’s the vast, vast, vast majority who don’t make any money at all.
Yet those people are being given the same advice as everyone else, as if that’s the majority and that’s the way the majority works, and it’s just not true.
Then if we come to what you mean by an ‘artisan author,’ what are some of the hallmarks?
Johnny: Well, the first thing is it’s art first and profit second.
I think that’s the key defining hallmark, meaning that you’re writing what it is that you want to write. You can define art however you want to define it. It usually just means, “This is the thing I want to do, and so I’m going to do it.”
But practically speaking, the biggest thing that I think is going to be attractive to people is you don’t have to burn yourself out. You don’t have to keep doing this.
When I came back this year, I gave a presentation called “The Artisan Author,” with the tagline “the low-stress, high-quality, fan-focused way to beat the publishing rat race.”
People came up to me after and they said, “I didn’t really know that this was an option. Thank you for giving me some clarity into the fact that it’s not rapid release or nothing,” which is what most people think. So, yes, there was a lot of appetite for it.
Joanna: What are the other things you are focusing on under that artisan umbrella?
Johnny: Well, certainly—and I didn’t really finish my thought, so I apologize—the idea is that release of pressure. “Take your time” is another one of the pillars. Connecting with fans is a huge one to me.
That leads to this weird kind of backwards logic where usually self-published authors want to think bigger and faster because a lot of us have this very strong entrepreneurial streak, and it’s almost eclipsed the artistic streak that people used to predominantly come into publishing for.
It used to be you came in because you wanted to write a book, and maybe you’d make money at it. Now it’s like, “Here’s a way to make money, and so I’m going to do it as quickly as I can.”
The customer focus thing is anti-leverage. Rapid release is trying to do as much leverage as possible. “If I make this one book, if I use the algorithms to my maximal advantage, then I can blow up without needing to do necessarily as much work.”
It’s very highly leveraged, and the artisan approach is actually the opposite, where it’s very, very one-to-one. So that means that you’re making individual connections.
So, I’ll give you an example. I do a lot of live selling, and I know that you wanted to ask about that. That’s a super high-quality bond. When I meet those people, it’s like I almost get them to like me before they even buy the book. So they leap very close to the fan end of the spectrum rather than the casual end.
I had somebody email me yesterday and say, “Hey, I bought one of your books at some open-air market here in Austin. I wish you had pressured me to buy the whole series because now I’m out of books. When are you doing this again?”
So tonight, he and one of his friends, I’m going to take books to them and I’m going to sell them. It’s nineteen total books between these two guys, but that’s the sort of quality connection to fans rather than a one-to-many connection. That slow scale, I think, is much more logical to people.
It’s something that we can actually imagine because it follows the normal rules of regular commerce and interpersonal communication in a way that rapid release never did, which was just anonymous algorithms.
This entire thing, the founding principle, is Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans.” We’re not looking to do that rapid-release paradigm, so you can’t do artisan things with those customers.
You need to invert the paradigm and say, “Okay, rather than trying for high leverage, I’m going to connect with people one-on-one. I’m going to create high-quality stuff, and then find the individual people who are interested in that and then bring them into my camp until I have theoretically a thousand of them,” according to Kevin Kelly.
Joanna: It’s amazing how well that has stood the test of time. That was, I think the original one was back in 2006, which again, would’ve been around the time when you were writing on Copyblogger and doing the online marketing stuff.
This is what’s so crazy, is you and I both come from that highly leveraged world where online marketing was the primary thing. Yet now, you’ve said in the book and you just said there about how you love live selling, and I find that very surprising.
I’m an introvert and I find it incredibly hard. I don’t know whether it’s also being a highly sensitive person, but I find a lot of visual stimulation just too tiring. I can’t look at all these people’s faces. I can’t deal with the noise.
I wondered if you could talk about how you discovered that you like live selling? What are your tips for people?
Johnny: Well, this is actually kind of funny because it is a really good fit for me, and in retrospect, I see why. It’s because I have a strong extrovert streak in me that a lot of authors don’t. So it is a little more natural for me, but I didn’t know that.
I was at the last Author Nation this year, and I actually had a presentation scheduled, but I hadn’t done any of this live selling. This is only six months old.
I talked to our mutual friend, Mark Lefebvre, and Mark was talking about how much he missed going out and doing book signings. I said, “Oh my God, I have nightmares about that. Just imagining being that poor author at the table who everybody’s trying not to make eye contact with.”
His reaction was so genuinely shocked. He said, “Why?” Someone that I knew and respected and who I thought I shared a lot in common with, really loves it, and was shocked that I wouldn’t.
What I started to realize is, yes, you can go out and you can be the sad author behind the table who’s just sitting there and everybody’s ignoring. Or you can take it as part of the art, and the puzzle of solving how to market these books has become such a fun part of it. How can I sell them?
So to answer the question, I’ve done everything from small farmer’s markets up to my first Comic-Con coming soon. I’ve done huge street festivals.
What I’ve started to realize is it’s just about being nice. I mean, that sounds so basic, but I don’t go out and say, “Hey, want a book? Want a book?” and chase people down the street.
Instead, the book people, they turn toward you.
They express interest, and so they’re already warm by the time you talk to them. You’re not having to go out there and be a carnival barker.
I just ask, “Hey, are you a reader? What are you into?” And we’ll start talking about books.
So if somebody’s interested in my Beam series, for instance, they’re looking at that.
I’ll say, “Hey, did you see the original Battlestar Galactica?” Oh yes, they’ve always seen it. Then I say, “You know how that was really a political power play drama that just happens to take place in space?” “Yes, I know that.” “Well, The Beam is a political power play drama that just happens to take place in blah, blah, blah.”
It becomes much more about having conversations, and sometimes they don’t buy, but that’s fine. I’ve met some really interesting people.
When you go in with that attitude of “I’m just going to go out and meet people who are interested in books,” that shift alone makes a huge difference, for me anyway. I don’t really care if they buy, although they tend to do so. It’s kind of amazing.
The things that have shocked me the most are learning about my customers in ways that I never ever could have before. I’ve learned which of my covers are most attractive. I’ve learned that my covers in particular are attractive enough, apparently, that people will usually buy a book without even reading the back.
I will talk to them, they’ll say, “Oh, that sounds good,” and they don’t ask the price and they don’t read the back, and they just buy it.
I’ve learned that there are things that I can recommend to people. So one of the things I get a lot is, “Oh, I would love to get back into reading, but I haven’t done it as much.” It’s like they’re apologizing to me.
So instead of saying, “Oh, well that’s too bad, see ya,” I’ll usually recommend something really fast-paced like The Target, which is like John Wick meets Fight Club. A lot of people go, “Oh, it’s a fast-paced short book that has that energy. Okay, I will do it.”
I would never see these things and I would never meet these people and I would never have people saying, “I want to buy three hundred dollars worth of books from you if you come down and meet me today,” if I wasn’t doing all this stuff.
Joanna: So, some practical questions. You have a huge backlist, and when you are doing these in-person sales at, say, a market, you’ve got to set up a table. It is only so big, and you’ve got to schlep all the stuff down, and books are heavy.
Give us a sense of what the physical setup is and how you decide which books to take out of your massive collection.
Johnny: Well, one of the key things in The Artisan Author book that I talk about a lot is, “it depends.” So I just want to say this ahead of time: I’m going tell you what I do, but it is not advice. It is not, “you should do this.”
I have several friends, some of them we have in common, who do a lot of conventions and they’ll say things like, “Take fewer books, just take a few, because it’s an overwhelming environment. Make your table really clean. Don’t bring everything.”
I’m going to bring absolutely everything I have to a Comic-Con, which is not the quote-unquote “official” way to do it. It isn’t what most people do.
It works really well with my style because I have such a broad backlist and because they’re interested in me first—which is an artisan principle, you’re trying to interest them in you, not just an individual book. There are people who will say, “Well, I don’t really like sci-fi.”
“Okay, well, do you like thrillers? Do you like urban fantasy? Do you like regular fantasy?” There’s always something else. That sense of visual overwhelm is actually a positive thing because it just looks like, “Wow, there’s a lot of stuff here.”
Typically, an outdoor booth space is ten feet by ten feet. I have to do a lot of them outside, which I’m not always super happy about, but that’s the way they are here in Texas. So I have a ten by ten tent.
For Comic-Con, it’s a little smaller, it’s eight by eight, and it’s just a puzzle each time to say, “Well, how should I arrange things?” When I’m outside, I typically do a corner if I can, because that allows me twenty feet of space rather than just ten to stack up all my books.
I have to adjust every single time. It’s different buyers, it’s different setups, it’s different locations. For me, it’s just about displaying the books, and then that attracts them.
Usually the book people come over with big eyes like, “Ooh, books.” They already like the idea of the books. They’re like, “Wow, I didn’t think there were going to be book people here.” So I just talk to them and see where their tastes lie, and then I guide them towards something that they might enjoy.
Joanna: Yes, so what you just said there I think is a really big point: they didn’t know there’d be book people there. So these are not book fairs in general, these are other types of markets.
Johnny: Yes. In the book, I have a section that’s like, “Finding Readers.” I divided that into multiple buckets where you’re either doing the passive thing, where you’re trying to find readers on Amazon or wherever.
The best ways to do this, I think, is what I call the third bucket, which is “creating customers out of nowhere” or something like that, because that’s what it feels like.
I’m going to somewhere where people are not expecting to buy books. They don’t know that they’re in the market for a book.
By the way, if you’re getting cold chills at the idea of selling live, that’s so not the point. This isn’t a live-selling book. It just happens to be something that I really enjoy and that works well for me. But there is some degree of personal connection in everything in that “finding readers out of nowhere” sort of thing.
If you let people know that you are an author, just casually in your personal life, eventually you’ll find that the word gets around, because authors are interesting to people.
Some of those people, they didn’t know they were in the market, but hey, “I just met an author. Maybe I want to buy one of their books.” That’s what all of those most effective artisan strategies are for me.
It’s like you’re fishing in a pond where nobody else is fishing. You’re just meeting people and nobody else is pursuing them. So when I’m set up at a street festival, nobody is there trying to buy a book, and then they go, “Oh, there are books.” And it’s like I don’t have any competition, and they self-sort. It’s a very cool thing.
Joanna: I like that. Perhaps it’s also less intimidating because when I saw your stall at Author Nation, you were in a room with hundreds of other authors with books. So it’s very hard not to have some kind of comparison.
I know Matt Dinniman, the huge LitRPG author, had a queue out the door. Whereas if you are an author and you are at a fair next to cupcakes or soaps or something, I suppose you definitely can be noticed by the people who want that. So I actually like that tip.
How does live selling work financially?
Johnny: Well, first of all, I want to say that yes, you do need to have more books than you’re going to sell, because that’s something that isn’t always noticed. At least that’s my philosophy, because a sparse table is kind of a sad table.
Imagine you went into Barnes and Noble and there were three copies left. No, you want those shelves overflowing. So in my house right now, I probably have five to six hundred books, and I’ll typically take a few hundred to any given event.
It depends on the event. I did a big event called the Pecan Street Festival here in Austin and I sold about two hundred and twenty books, but it’s more common at a smaller one to sell thirty or so. It’ll give you an idea of the scope.
What I’ve found is that as I’ve dialed this in, because I am iterating very quickly, I’m doing an event and then calibrating and learning. I also stepped up from very small markets to bigger markets.
What I’ve learned is that for me personally—and again, this is me personally, your mileage may vary—
My table fee, meaning what I pay to be there, tends to be ten to fifteen percent of my expected gross sales.
Because that’s such a reliable thing, I’m actually actively looking for ones with big table fees.
I want to pay as much as possible, because if I’m going to go out there for a weekend, I want something where I’m going to walk away with more money than I would otherwise.
You just kind of have to be aware that this is an area where if you did want to get into live selling, you do need to invest in yourself, but you can start very small. What I tell people is, go slow.
If you’re interested in this, you can split a table with somebody at an event if you are intimidated by the idea of having to be there the entire time, because you can come and go if you have a table mate.
You can start at a very small farmer’s market. The first farmer’s market that I went to locally here was thirty-five dollars. Compare that to the Comic-Cons, which can be near a thousand dollars.
If you just think small to begin with and you just take a limited stock, then your investment in the table fee, the equipment, and the books is much smaller.
I’ve just kept reinvesting. If I made three hundred and fifty dollars and I spent one hundred and fifty dollars, then that gives me two hundred dollars that I then go back and buy more books for the next bigger event. So you can step into it, and I would suggest that people do, if they’re interested.
Joanna: Tell us about the process of doing a Shopify store and any lessons learned from that.
Johnny: Well, again, did you see my shout-out? I did mention that Jo Penn has a really good “Minimum Viable Store” episode of a podcast. That’s kind of the approach that I took.
The thing about Shopify for me, I don’t know if this is true for everybody, is that it takes a certain amount of momentum to get it started, like a rock rolling down a hill. I have found that if I’m not actively advertising, my store traffic dwindles to almost nothing.
So given that you have to pay for the software every single month, it’s one of those things where I don’t know whether to recommend it or not. I tried to give a whole bunch of caveats to people and said, “If you’re ready to go in, or if you just want to have it established so you can build it, then great, but know what you’re getting into.”
There’s so much talk about “go direct” that I think there’s probably a lot of people who are investing all the time and money and hassle and mental headaches of building a Shopify store and then not getting the reward out of it to pay for it.
I also know so many people who I would consider artisan authors who do a lot of direct selling, and they’re largely advertising-driven. So that’s kind of the way I look at it.
If you can afford to start playing with advertising, it might be a better move financially, but if you just want to begin growing your store, you can do it over time. What do you think? Do you need to advertise aggressively?
Joanna: I don’t advertise, but like you and I, I have always done email lists and also launching. Where you do in-person sales, I always say, “Buying direct from me means buying from my Shopify stores.”
So my hardbacks and stuff are on my Shopify, the bundles are on Shopify, the special deals, the whole series—
I just have so much that is Shopify-only.
My workbooks and all of my website stuff, the podcast, my emails—they all direct people to those pages first.
So you are right, you need traffic. I don’t think you need to advertise because I don’t advertise to my stores right now, but I do send traffic from my other sources, like this show, for example.
Johnny: Right. Well, you’re kind of your own advertising too. That is a thing.
Joanna: It’s marketing. It’s not paid advertising. But you are right, you can’t just build it and they will come, but I don’t think you can do that anywhere. You can’t do that on Amazon, you can’t do that wherever.
Johnny: No, but what I love about this is that —
Every artisan author is different. The metaphor is, “learn to use a compass, don’t try to follow a map.”
The fact that your approach is already so different from my experience and some other people that I know is really cool.
You’re able to drive artisan traffic on your Shopify store, and I have focused so much on driving it in live sales. It’s just different pools, different buckets.
Joanna: Let’s come to one of the things in the subtitle of the book, which says “The Low-Stress Approach.” Low stress is a very interesting term to use, Johnny, because you taught marketing back in the day.
In the book, you say you don’t do social media anymore. There’s a lot of things that are stressful, social media being one of them for me, but marketing still matters.
What can you recommend for people who do want this low-stress approach to book marketing?
Johnny: So interestingly, I work much more now than I used to. Neither of us, I think, were ever doing rapid release, not by its formal definition, but it is such a high-churn thing. That low-pressure thing… I think there’s a huge difference between what you have to do and when you have options.
When I say that I work a lot now, I’m choosing to build something on my own timetable, and I can do it however I want and follow the results that I’m getting. What bugs me about rapid release is the “have to” of it.
I think that’s where the stress and the pressure comes from, because the algorithm demands that you keep producing, otherwise it falls apart. So, to be clear, the target I’m looking at as maybe not so great for a lot of authors is rapid release with an almost exclusive Kindle Unlimited focus.
There are plenty of people who use Kindle Unlimited who I think are artisan authors, or can be, because they just have that for their eBooks and they have a sensible funnel.
Typically it’s that myopic focus on largely Amazon-only because it’s exclusive, largely just eBooks only, and then America-only almost by default.
When you talk about international, that bugs the crap out of me that it seems like so many authors, including authors in other countries sometimes, are considering, “Well, I’m just going to hit the US market primarily.” Because, yes, Amazon has stores outside of the US, but it’s really the US that we’re focusing on.
So that sort of churn, that very specific thing… you don’t have diversification of assets, so you have to keep producing because that’s all you have. When I say low pressure, it means that if you wanted to take a two-week vacation, you could do it.
Meanwhile, I know rapid-release authors who are like, “Man, if I want to take a two-week vacation, I have to work really, really fast so that I have something to release while I’m on vacation. Otherwise, I’m going to get to the four or five-week mark and my whole empire is going to collapse.”
It’s that relentless grind and the fact that you almost have to do it forever—because when does the algorithm give you a break? I think that’s what’s leading so many people into this horrible burnout.
Joanna: Well then, can you comment on the lack of social media? Because—
I feel like another rule that people have at the moment is you have to be on social media to be an author.
Johnny: Yes, I don’t believe that at all. I don’t like social media.
By the way, that’s no judgment. I know plenty of people do like it. I just don’t, and so I don’t do the things that I don’t want to do. I think that an artisan author is kind of stubborn and says, “Well, I don’t want to do things that I don’t want to do.”
For me, I think that there are many different ways to focus. I had a guy next to me at a live stall recently, and he was just enamored with my displays and kept saying, “You have to do social media, man.” What I kept trying to tell him was, “I have X amount of energy and focus, and I can spend it wherever I want.”
At the time I was talking to him, I was choosing to spend it around the square in a small Texas town selling books. That was how I was using my energy because there are many different things that you could do that could make a lot of money, but you have to pick and choose them. Otherwise, I just think we get spread too thin.
For me, that’s just a choice that I’ve made not to do social media, but there are plenty of other choices. The people who do social media heavily might decide, “I’m not going to do advertising,” or, “I’m certainly not going to sell live.” So it’s just a different choice for me. I have opted out of that.
You’re right, everybody says you must do social media, and I’m here to tell you that you don’t. I don’t do it at all.
My off-Amazon sales—Kickstarter and live sales alone—are basically my bread and butter right now and are enough to live on.
Joanna: I’m almost completely off it, but I’m still on X for looking at things and I put some pictures on Instagram @jfpennauthor , but I’m just not on it every day.
I think more and more, as you say, part of the artisan approach is choosing what you want to do because it’s a lifestyle as well, right? It’s a lifestyle that we want, and we want to live this way, and we want it to be sustainable.
So you mentioned Kickstarter there, and of course I also love Kickstarter. What I love about it, apart from being able to do amazing books and gorgeous signed things, is that it’s more campaign-focused.
So you can do a big push for a couple of weeks and then you fulfill. So I like that kind of approach too, which I think works with taking a break and stuff like that.
Why do you like Kickstarter?
Because this is your second or third, something like that?
Johnny: No, it’s actually my sixth. The Kickstarter for The Artisan Author is my sixth because we were old school. Sean and I did Fiction Unboxed and then StoryShop back around 2014 or 2016 or so. It was a while ago, before Brandon Sanderson nuked Kickstarter with his books.
The reason that I like it… interestingly, I just thought it was a cool tool to play with originally. “Boy, I can do these cool, beautiful books and I can have a direct connection, and from a business standpoint, I can have a higher average order value” and that sort of thing.
What’s been interesting is that as I’ve really been thinking in an artisan direction, my brain has been there and I’ve realized, “Oh, launches don’t really matter in the way that they used to.”
For me, a typical book launch was on Amazon… now I think, “Oh, well, the Kickstarter should just be my launch.” Then I don’t really have to have a launch on the bookstores.
Now, you need some mechanism to get some reviews and stuff because that matters, but you can ask your Kickstarter backers to review your book on Amazon if you want.
The back-shelving of Amazon has kind of made me say, “Well, the Kickstarter is just my main tool now. That’s just how I launch.” And when it’s been launched, then it’s been launched and it becomes one more book in my catalog.
I don’t have to keep throwing fuel on that fire in the same way because the people who are coming back to me week after week, they’re self-fueling. I don’t need to hit them with some algorithmic thing on Amazon.
Joanna: Tell us what you are doing for this Kickstarter because this interview goes out as you are doing a Kickstarter.
This is actually kind of fun. I wanted to just do the Kickstarter for the reasons that I’ve already mentioned, and I thought, “Well, okay, I can create the audiobook and the paperback and the ebook and then I’ll have a nice hardback special edition.”
The more I thought about it and the more I did comparison shopping and market research, I realized—and I knew this—that usually for a non-fiction Kickstarter, you’re able to offer some sort of higher-touch service.
So I’ve kind of reframed—and stick with me on this because it’s a little weird—I don’t really like online courses because so many of them just rub me the wrong way. I know I made a bunch of them, and I’m just kind of burned out on that. I was like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could do a course, but I don’t want to do a course like that? That sucks.”
I was talking to my wife, who had coached me through something a little while ago where I was feeling kind of lonely out here, not being around people. She said, “Well, you always really liked college. You’ve talked about wanting to lecture at a college. Wouldn’t that be cool?”
Those conversations came together and I thought, “What if I were to do it like a college?”
I get that it’s a little weird, that it would be like an Artisan University, but rather than having a bunch of pre-recorded things with some sort of grandiose promises, it’s more like, “No, what if you were to go through and we were to treat the book like a textbook over a ten-week curriculum and have units and discussions and a final exam and all the sort of trappings of college?”
It felt like a really cool experiment. So it’s very different from the typical online course, but that’s the way I’m framing everything.
If you want to just self-learn and you just want to get the ebook or the paperback or whatever, that’s great. But then I have these many tiers of attending the course, from auditing it to doing high-touch accountability groups and almost like private tutoring. So it’s kind of cool. I’m really curious to see what happens and how people like it.
Joanna: And of course, people can just get the ebook if they want.
This is one of the important things about Kickstarter: to have different tiers for different ways that people might want to interact with you.
Johnny: Yes, and it’ll be available as a normal book too. If you aren’t into Kickstarter, you can just go and search for it. It’s on Amazon and Kobo and Barnes & Noble and all those places as a pre-order.
For people who really like the Kickstarter energy, I thought this would be cool. I kind of like the idea of doing the professor thing. I think that might be really neat.
Joanna: Where can people find you and your books and the Kickstarter online?
Johnny: Well, most importantly, the Kickstarter is at JohnnyBTruant.com/artisan, and that’ll redirect to the regular book after the Kickstarter.
Then I’m at JohnnyBTruant.com. There are links to my live selling schedule if you happen to be in or around Austin or anywhere I’m going, or if you want to check out my book catalog or anything like that.
Joanna: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Johnny. That was great.
Over the years, I’ve developed a set of terms that have become foundational to how I teach storytelling. A few I’ve coined myself, others I’ve adapted, and some I’ve simply emphasized so frequently they’ve become closely associated with my approach to character arcs, story structure, and theme. Whether you’ve followed my work through this blog or my books and courses, chances are you’ve come across many of these ideas and maybe even adopted them into your own writing process.
Back in the early days of Helping Writers Become Authors, I published a crowd-sourced glossary of general writing terms. That original post brought in a wealth of contributions and turned into a collaborative resource I still point writers toward to this day. But as my own language and frameworks have evolved over the years, I realized it was time for a new version that reflects the specific tools and concepts I teach most often and rely on in my own work.
In the sections below, you’ll find a curated glossary of the core storytelling terms I use throughout my teachings. These include concepts like the Lie the Character Believes, the Ghost, the Flat Arc, and many others you’ve likely seen referenced in my materials. Rather than alphabetizing them, I’ve grouped them in a rough chronology so that if you read them straight through, they build to express the big picture of my writing philosophy.
Whether you’re brand new to writing or simply looking for clarity on some of the terms I throw around regularly, I hope this glossary serves as a helpful reference and maybe even a little inspiration! If you’re seeking the definition of a writing term you don’t see here, be sure to check out the original glossary of writing terms, which contains many more helpful descriptions.
The Ultimate Writing Glossary of K.M. Weiland’s Terms
Ideation & Outlining
Outlining
Outlining is the act of crafting a guide to the general structure, arc, and meaning of a story—usually before writing the first draft. It is sometimes used synonymously with the idea of “plotting” as opposed to “writing by seat of your pants” (i.e., “pantsing”) or “discovery writing.” My approach to the outlining process is less of a rigid or skeletal plot structure and more of a free-flowing brainstorming “out loud” process in which the shape of the story is thoroughly explored before shifting into the intricacies of writing the narrative in the first draft.
Dreamzoning is “daydreaming on steroids,” a form of intense, purposeful daydreaming used to generate story ideas. Unlike casual musing, dreamzoning uses focused imagination to actively visualize scenes, characters, and scenarios. It’s a fun, powerful technique that allows your subconscious creativity to freely explore possibilities. By setting aside time to “zone out” and vividly imagine story moments, you can discover inspiring concepts and solutions that might not surface through analytical brainstorming alone.
The Hook is the story’s opening question or curiosity that “hooks” readers’ attention from page one. The Hook sets the tone and promise of the story, ensuring the audience is invested from the very beginning. It is also the first structural beat in the story—the first “domino” in the line of dominoes that form the plot.
The Inciting Event is the critical turning point early in the story (usually halfway through the First Act or around the 12% mark of the narrative) in which the protagonist first encounters the main conflict. It’s the Call to Adventure (see below) that upsets normal life and thrusts the character toward the story’s central challenge. This is the catalyst that first introduces the protagonist to the main plot dynamic. The protagonist may not fully engage with the conflict yet, but the Inciting Event introduces the problem or opportunity that will eventually require a committed response. The Inciting Event is a pivotal turning point that sets up everything to come.
If you divide the Inciting Event into two halves (as all major structural beats are divided), the Call to Adventure represents the first half, in which the protagonist is presented with a new opportunity, challenge, or “adventure.” The Call to Adventure symbolically asks the protagonist to step out of the Normal World and enter the fray of the plot. The Call to Adventure establishes the stakes and promise of the journey to come, even if the protagonist doesn’t immediately answer it.
The Refusal of the Call is the closing half of the Inciting Event, in which the protagonist reacts with hesitation or outright refusal to the Call to Adventure. It highlights reluctance, fear, or attachments that make the protagonist initially resistant to engaging with the main conflict. For example, the protagonist might doubt personal ability, fear the unknown, or feel obligated to remain in the Normal World. This moment of refusal adds realism and stakes by showing what the character stands to lose and that the coming conflict can’t be taken lightly.
The First Plot Point is the major turning point that ends the First Act (around the 25% mark) and propels the story into the Second Act. It is often called a Threshold or Door of No Return because it thrusts the protagonist into a new and irrevocable direction. After this plot point, the protagonist enters the Adventure World or main conflict in the Second Act, leaving the Normal World behind. The stakes are raised, the antagonist’s presence becomes clear, and the protagonist can no longer go back to life as it was before.
This beat represents the first half of the First Plot Point. It refers to the moment when the protagonist becomes irrevocably committed to the conflict. From here, there is no going back to the old life. This is where the protagonist metaphorically crosses a threshold into the main story world or conflict (either entering a new setting or seeing the old setting changed in some significant way). The Point of No Return ensures the protagonist can’t simply quit the conflict. Circumstances or decisions have now locked the character into pursuing the plot goal and confronting the antagonistic force.
Representing the second half of the First Plot Point, the Key Event is when the protagonist is fully drawn into the story’s main conflict. This is where the protagonist fully “accepts the Call” and cannot turn back. Usually, it is a proactive decision on the character’s part in response to the sometimes involuntary events at the Point of No Return.
The First Pinch Point is an important structural turning point occurring in the first half of the Second Act (around the 37% mark). It emphasizes the threat of the antagonistic force, shows what is at stake for the protagonist in the conflict, and introduces important new clues about the nature of the conflict.
The Midpoint is the Second Plot Point in a story’s structure. It occurs in the middle of the book, halfway through the Second Act, at the 50% mark. This is where the protagonist experiences a Moment of Truth, which allows a better understanding of the antagonistic force and the external conflict, as well as the internal conflict driving the character arc. It signals a shift from the reactive phase of the first half into the active phase of the second half.
As the first of the two beats that make up the Midpoint, the Moment of Truth is a pivotal scene in which the protagonist is confronted by a revealing insight or reality that challenges previous beliefs or the Lie the Character Believes. Here, the protagonist witnesses the story’s thematic Truth. For the first time, the character sees things as they truly are, even if only briefly or incompletely. This means the character now understands something fundamental that will trigger a change in tactics or attitude. The Moment of Truth serves as the pivot of the character’s inner arc. From here on, the character will begin to act on this new knowledge. The Moment of Truth raises the emotional stakes by highlighting what’s at stake for the character internally.
Whereas the Moment of Truth focuses on a character-based or thematic insight, the Plot Revelation (as the second half of the Midpoint) emphasizes information that dramatically alters the plot’s trajectory. The two revelations are intrinsically related, with one usually inspiring the other. In the Plot Revelation, the protagonist often discovers something that reframes the conflict (such as the villain’s true plan, a hidden identity, a secret weakness, or any game-changing information). This revelation empowers or challenges the protagonist while escalating the stakes by making the conflict more personal or urgent. From here, the protagonist can take more informed, decisive actions.
The Second Pinch Point is an important structural turning point that occurs in the second half of the Second Act at the 62% mark. Like the First Pinch Point, it emphasizes the threat of the antagonistic force, shows what is at stake for the protagonist in the conflict, and introduces important new clues about the nature of the conflict.
The Third Plot Point occurs at the 75% mark, marking the end of the Second Act and the beginning of the Third Act. This is where the protagonist experiences a Low Moment of defeat and is faced with a choice about whether the conflict so far has been worth the effort. This beat proves whether the character will embrace or reject the Lie the Character Believes. From here, the character will enter the final confrontation with the antagonistic force.
As the first half of the Third Plot Point, the False Victory is where the protagonist appears to succeed, only to discover this “victory” is misleading or short-lived. The False Victory highlights both how far the protagonist has come in the character arc and how much the Lie the Character Believes is still impeding progress and evolution. This beat is crucial because it creates a final crucible to show the character how to fully grow and gain the perspectives and skills necessary to succeed in the plot.
Often referred to as a “Dark Night of the Soul,” the Low Moment represents the second half of the Third Plot Point. This is where the protagonist hits rock bottom in both the inner and outer conflicts. The protagonist is confronted with the consequences of failure after the False Victory. This is a moment of crisis in which the character faces the Lie s/he has believed throughout the story. This beat sets up the revelation or resolve required to move into the Climax. Here, the protagonist will realize something important (often finally rejecting the Lie or embracing the Truth) and feels empowered to try again.
Climax
This is the finale of the story, featuring the final decisive confrontation between the protagonist and the antagonistic force, determining whether or not the protagonist will succeed or fail in gaining the main plot goal. The Climax begins in a turning point halfway into the Third Act, starting around the 88% mark.
This is the definitive moment in which the overall goal is reached or not reached. This is the moment when the protagonist defeats the antagonist or vice versa, thus ending the plot conflict.
This first beat of the Climactic Moment represents the culmination of everything the protagonist has learned so far in the story. In order to reach for the plot goal, the character will have to prove willing to make some sort of sacrifice, even if it is just the death of the “old self” who held to the Lie the Character Believed throughout the story.
The second half of the Climactic Moment shows whether or not the character’s sacrifice was sufficient. The character will end the plot conflict with either a definitive success or a definitive failure.
This is the final section of the story—usually the last two to three scenes in the final chapter. This is where any final loose ends will be resolved after the main conflict has already been decided.
This is the initial setting in the story, meant to illustrate the characters’ lives before they meet with the story’s main conflict. Symbolically, it represents the First Act. The Normal World may be destructive to the protagonist (in which case, the protagonist must learn to move away from it and live without it), or it may be healthy (in which case, the protagonist will defend it). The Normal World may be a definitive setting, which will change at the beginning of the Second Act. However, it may also be more metaphorical, in which case the physical setting will not change, but rather the conflict will alter the setting around the protagonist.
Symbolically, the Adventure World represents the Second Act, in which the character enters the “adventure” of the story’s main conflict. This could be shown as a literal adventure, but symbolically indicates any conflict that creates the plot in which the character is engaged. This could be a romantic relationship, a murder investigation, or a family secret. It can be shown as an entirely new setting that is different from that of the Normal World in the First Act, but it may also be indicated symbolically through conflict-induced alterations in the original setting or the character’s state of being (i.e., falling in love).
The Underworld represents the Third Act, in which the character experiences increased pressure to synthesize the lessons learned in the Adventure World in order to favorably resolve the plot conflict. The symbolism indicates the psychological transformation required of a character in order to change enough that what was impossible at the beginning of the story (reaching the plot goal) may now come into reach.
The New Normal World represents the Resolution at the end of the story, in which the changes wrought in and by the protagonist stand in contrast to the Normal World of the First Act.
Chiastic structure (also called “ring” structure) indicates a structural approach in which the two halves of the plot mirror or reference each other in some way. Although chiasmus can be applied intentionally, it is naturally inherent within the classic plot structure outlined above, in which beats such as the Inciting Event and Climactic Moment form natural pairs that mirror or resolve each other in some way.
Structural timing indicates the ideal placement of turning points or plot points throughout the story. The beats mentioned above (i.e., Inciting Event, First Plot Point, First Pinch Point, Midpoint, Second Pinch Point, Third Plot Point, Climax) divide the story into eight equal parts. However, structural timing need not be exact. It is predominately a question of pacing. If the pacing works, so does the timing.
Conflict is the engine of opposition that presents obstacles to the protagonist, thus creating the plot. The best way to think of conflict is simply as an “obstacle.” It need not be a confrontation between people (although it can be); rather, it is simply whatever opposes the protagonist’s forward movement throughout the plot.
The plot goal is whatever the protagonist is pursuing that is then interrupted with conflict (i.e., obstacles). Although the goal may be something concrete, it can also influence the story through something as abstract as an intention. From a structural perspective, what is important is simply that the character has reasons to keep moving forward, even if part of that movement is the act of discovering what the character is moving toward.
In narrative terms, a Scene is a fundamental unit of story in which a character pursues a specific goal in a continuous time and place, encountering conflict that yields an outcome. Structurally, the Scene can be broken into two halves: a scene (the action that happens when a character has a goal, then conflict interferes with that goal, resulting in an outcome) and its sequel (the character reacting to the previous outcome, then facing a dilemma, and finally making a decision that will determine the character’s goal in the next Scene).
The goal in a scene is the specific, concrete objective the POV character wants to achieve in that scene. It sets the scene’s purpose. A strong scene goal is pertinent to the plot, meaning it’s a logical step toward the character’s larger plot goal. For instance, in one scene a character’s goal might be “sneak past the guards” and in another “convince my friend to help me.” The scene goal focuses the character’s actions and gives readers a clear expectation of an outcome. The scene goal is what the protagonist (or POV character) is trying to do or get in that moment of the story. The pursuit of that goal then generates conflict when obstacles arise.
Scene conflict is the challenge or opposition the POV character faces while trying to achieve the scene goal. Scene conflict is essentially the obstacle that creates tension in the scene. If the scene goal is what the character wants, then the conflict is why the character can’t immediately have it . Conflict can take many forms: another character with an opposing goal (e.g. a guard actively preventing the protagonist’s escape), environmental difficulties (e.g., a storm, a locked door), internal hesitation, or any combination thereof. The important thing is that the conflict directly correlate to the scene goal.
The outcome is the result or turning point at the end of a scene’s main action. It answers the question: did the POV character achieve the scene goal or not, and what happens as a result? In order to keep the story moving, the outcome in well-structured scenes typically leans toward a complication or setback. Each scene’s disaster sets up the next scene’s goal. A strong outcome/disaster either denies the character’s goal (“No, they fail”), gives it to them with strings attached (“Yes, but…”), or creates greater unforeseen consequences (“No, and things get worse”). Not every scene must end with a disaster, but even wins should introduce new problems.
A “yes, but…” disaster is a type of scene outcome in which the protagonist technically achieves the scene goal, but a new complication creates a partial or hollow victory. The character achieves the scene goal only to find it doesn’t solve the problem and/or creates an unforeseen issue. For example: Yes, the detective finds the needed clue, but it implicates a friend as the suspect. This outcome tests the protagonist’s resolve since the character achieves the goal but now must deal with the consequences or the realization that this win isn’t final.
Sequel
The sequel is the second half in scene structure. It represents the phase that follows a scene’s action with an aftermath segment in which the character processes what just happened and formulates the next move. In contrast to the action-oriented scene, a sequel is introspective and transitional. Characters catch their emotional breath, react to the previous outcome/disaster, think through their new dilemma, and decide on a new goal. For example: If a scene was a battle ending in the protagonist’s defeat, the subsequent sequel might show the protagonist’s despair (reaction), consideration of alternatives or what went wrong (dilemma), and then a resolve to train harder or seek help (decision). The sequel provides a realistic emotional continuity (so characters don’t just jump from crisis to crisis without reacting). It allows for character development and thematic reflection and sets up the next scene’s goal in a logical flow.
The reaction is the first stage of the scene sequel, in which the POV character responds to the outcome of the previous scene. In this phase, the character isn’t yet thinking ahead, but just processing feelings. If the previous scene was a big setback, the reaction might be despair or panic. If it was a success with complications (“yes, but…”), the reaction could be mixed feelings of triumph and worry. Often, reaction is shown through interior monologue or a quiet beat (e.g., after a narrow escape, the character trembles and acknowledges fear). This validates readers’ emotions as they experience the consequences alongside the character. The reaction is usually brief but important, as it humanizes the protagonist. Only after this cathartic beat can the character move on to rationally consider what to do next (the dilemma). Skipping the reaction can make a story feel rushed or the characters unfeeling. Strong reaction segments strengthen pacing, especially after high action or drama.
The dilemma is the second stage of the sequel, in which the character, having emotionally reacted, now engages in thinking through options and potential consequences. In this phase, the protagonist faces the problem or choice created by the previous scene’s outcome and asks, “What do I do now?” In the dilemma, the character may weigh pros and cons, consider different plans, or grapple with tough decisions. This stage is inherently reflective and can showcase the character’s values and internal conflict. The dilemma shows the logical thought process that bridges what just happened to what will happen next.
The decision is the final phase of the sequel. After reacting emotionally and pondering the dilemma, the character now decides what to do next. This decision becomes the seed of the next scene’s goal. The decision prevents the story from stagnating or the character from wallowing in the aftermath of the previous scene’s outcome. Instead, it pushes the narrative onward. The decision is often accompanied by a renewed sense of purpose or change in strategy for the character. It is the bridge between one scene and the next, transitioning the character directly into the next scene’s goal.
The Lie the Character Believes (often just “the Lie”) is a false belief or misconception the protagonist holds at the beginning of the story. The Lie is the central inner flaw in the character’s worldview, which will be challenged by the story’s events. This Lie or limiting perspective could be personal (e.g., “I’m worthless” or “I can’t trust anyone”) or about the world (e.g., “might makes right” or “love equals weakness”). The Lie is what must change in order for the character to grow.
The thematic Truth (often just “the Truth”) is a comparatively more expansive perspective that stands in opposition to the protagonist’s Lie. It represents the central message underlying the story’s plot and is the lesson or reality the character needs to discover in order to change positively. For instance, if the Lie is “I am unlovable,” the thematic Truth might be “You are worthy of love as you are.” The thematic Truth is not usually stated overtly to the audience, but underlies the character’s journey and the story’s resolution. It is what gives the story meaning beyond the literal events.
The Thing the Character Wants (or “Want”) refers to the character’s external, conscious desire. This is something the character thinks will create happiness or solve problems. Typically fueled by the character’s Lie in some way, the Want is what then creates the more concrete plot goal. For example, if the character’s Want is to be rich, then the plot goal might be to become a successful stock broker. The Thing the Character Wants is not the same as the Thing the Character Needs. The Want is often misguided or insufficient because it is founded on the limited perspective of the Lie (e.g., wanting wealth because the character believes the Lie that “money equals worth”). The Want itself won’t genuinely fulfill the character without addressing the deeper Need/Truth. The interplay of Want vs. Need creates the internal tension that drives a character’s arc. Identifying the Thing the Character Wants helps ensure the external pursuit of the plot is tied to the character’s internal journey.
The Thing the Character Needs (or “Need”) is the deeper, often unrecognized, Truth the character must achieve in order to be whole or resolve the inner conflict. The Need is what will actually fulfill the character or fix the internal problem, as opposed to what the character thinks will (i.e., the Want). The Need is usually fulfilled by overcoming the Lie and embracing the thematic Truth. The Need is moral or psychological, a lesson the character must learn or a change the character must undergo. The Third Act frequently features a choice between Want and Need. Identifying the Need clarifies the theme: the Need often is the story’s thematic Truth. It ensures the character’s personal transformation (or lack thereof) is meaningful. When the character attains the Need (even if the character doesn’t get the Want), the story is able to deliver a sense of growth and resolution.
A character’s Ghost is the traumatic or formative event in the backstory that continues to haunt in the present story. The Ghost (a term I first learned from John Truby) is an old wound that greatly influences the character’s motivations, fears, and the Lie the Character Believes. The Ghost is the baggage the character carries. The Ghost typically isn’t a direct part of the plot conflict, since it happened before the story began, but it drives how the character reacts in the plot. In the structure of a character arc, the Ghost can be thought of as the root cause of the Lie. Understanding the character’s Ghost helps writers craft more authentic character behavior, since it adds context to choices and motivations.
The Impact Character is a strong catalyst for change in the protagonist, influencing the protagonist’s inner conflict. The Impact Character (a term from the Dramatica system) plays a crucial role in influencing the protagonist’s inner journey by representing an alternative viewpoint—usually, the thematic Truth. The Impact Character challenges the protagonist’s Lie and catalyzes change. Classic examples include mentors, love interests, best friends, or even antagonists with an essential perspective to share with the protagonist. The Impact Character typically embodies the lesson the protagonist needs. The key is that the Impact Character provides the “impact” necessary to jar the protagonist out of complacency. By spurring epiphanies, posing probing questions, or exemplifying a different path, the Impact Character externalizes the story’s theme and makes the protagonist’s internal dilemma invisible through dialogue or interpersonal conflict.
The thematic principle is the foundational concept or proposition underlying a story’s theme. It is the story’s core thesis or unifying idea. The thematic principle is a concise statement of what the story is about on a thematic level, often encapsulating the conflict between the Lie and the Truth in more universal terms. For example, a thematic principle might be “justice vs. mercy” or “true love is stronger than pride” or “greed leads to self-destruction.” The thematic principle is more specific than a one-word theme (such as “love” or “power”) and more nuanced than a blunt moral. It is the principle that is ultimately proven or disproven by the story’s events. The thematic principle is a story’s central argument boiled down to a single guiding idea. Once the writer knows this, it becomes easier to ensure that subplots, conflicts, and resolutions all reflect this principle to create a cohesive narrative. In essence, the thematic principle is the story’s heart expressed in an idea. It’s not usually stated outright in the text, but by the end, it should be clear in the story’s resolution.
The thematic metaphor is the symbolic “language” a story uses to exemplify its theme via the story’s external plot. It is a way of expressing the story’s theme through imagery, scenarios, or concepts woven into the plot and setting, rather than through direct statement. All stories are, in some way, a thematic metaphor, in that the external conflict is a representation of the story’s deeper inner conflict. In some stories, such as fables or allegories, the symbolic nature of the external plot becomes quite obvious. In more realistic stories, the thematic metaphor may be less abstract. For example, in a story about the destructive nature of obsession, a spreading wildfire might serve as a thematic metaphor for the character’s burning obsession consuming everything. Thematic metaphors can be found in recurring symbols (like seasons, objects, or motifs) or in the story’s premise itself. A classic instance is Moby Dick: the white whale is a literal antagonist but also a thematic metaphor for the unknowable, nature, or God.
A Positive Change Arc is about a character who overcomes the limited perspective of the Lie and expands into accepting the thematic Truth. For example, if the protagonist believes the Lie that “money is the only measure of success,” this will be challenged throughout the narrative by a healthier Truth, such as “love and integrity matter more than money.” In a Positive Change Arc, the plot tests the Lie and gradually reveals the Truth to the character. The character will end by embracing the thematic Truth.
In a Flat Arc, the protagonist begins the story already in possession of the story’s central thematic Truth. Rather than undergoing a dramatic internal transformation, as in a Positive or Negative Change Arc, the Flat Arc character remains internally stable throughout the story. The arc instead revolves around the protagonist’s influence on the external world; the protagonist acts as an Impact Character, confronting a widespread Lie within the story world and catalyzing change in others. Although the protagonist may face personal struggles or moments of doubt, the character’s core beliefs remain intact. The journey is about standing firm in the Truth and acting as a model to others. The Flat Arc is thematically powerful because it dramatizes how one person’s commitment can ripple outward into meaningful transformation in the world.
In a Negative Change Arc, the protagonist begins in relative stability but ends in personal or moral ruin. Unlike the Positive Change Arc, in which the character overcomes the Lie and embraces the thematic Truth, the Negative Change Arc features a character who either rejects the Truth outright, fails to understand it fully, or twists it to justify harmful actions. This arc often explores tragic or cautionary themes, showing how disillusionment, fear, or pride can lead a character deeper into the Lie. There are several variations of the Negative Arc—including the Disillusionment Arc, the Fall Arc, and the Corruption Arc (see below)—all of which chart different paths of internal descent, ultimately highlighting the consequences of resisting integrity and growth.
The Disillusionment Arc is a type of Negative Change Arc that mirrors the Positive Change Arc with a protagonist who begins the story with a deeply held belief in a Lie. However, unlike in a Positive Change Arc, the Truth the character uncovers by the end does not bring hope or healing. Instead, the character comes to see a painful reality behind personal illusions, often realizing that the world, a trusted person, or even personal ideals were not completely true. Although the protagonist gains clarity, it comes at the cost of innocence, purpose, or emotional well-being. This arc is often quieter and more introspective than other Negative Arcs, leaning heavily into themes of loss, ambiguity, and the harshness of truth that offers no clear redemption.
The Fall Arc is a tragic form of the Negative Change Arc in which the protagonist also begins the story believing in the Lie—with potential for growth—but makes increasingly destructive choices that lead to moral or personal downfall. This character often believes a Lie that distorts the understanding of self or the world. Rather than confronting it, the character doubles down out of pride, fear, or ambition. The Fall Arc is marked by a progressive unraveling. As the character rejects the thematic Truth, these actions isolate the character, corrupt personal values, and ultimately cost everything. The Fall Arc is a powerful arc for exploring the consequences of hubris, moral compromise, and the refusal to change.
The Corruption Arc is the darkest variation of the Negative Arc. In this arc, the protagonist not only falls into ruin but embraces it. Rather than being challenged by the Lie, the character actively adopts it as “Truth,” often finding a twisted form of empowerment or control through this descent. The Corruption Arc charts the transformation of a character who may begin in a place of relative neutrality or even good intentions but gradually chooses self-serving, harmful, or malicious actions. This arc is especially powerful for exploring the seductive nature of power, the erosion of empathy, and the conscious rejection of moral truth. Unlike the Disillusionment or Fall Arcs, which can evoke sympathy, the Corruption Arc tends to leave the audience with a sense of dread, horror, or moral reckoning.
The Life Cycle is a developmental framework that maps the evolution of a character’s internal growth across a lifetime of thematic journeys. Rather than focusing solely on the Hero’s Journey, this cycle presents six mythic and successive journeys (alternating between feminine and masculine) that reflect different seasons of human experience. At each stage, the character embodies a specific transformational archetype—Maiden, Hero, Queen, King, Crone, and Mage—and undertakes a corresponding arc that reflects the psychological and thematic challenges of that life phase. The Life Cycle also encompasses six Flat Arc periods that precede each transformational journey—Child, Lover, Parent, Ruler, Elder, and Mentor. Throughout the entire Life Cycle, characters may also also face or embody corresponding shadow archetypes (both passive and aggressive) and archetypal antagonists (both inner and outer). This cyclical view offers a rich, mythically resonant structure for deepening character development in a single story or across a larger series.
The Transformational Archetypes—Maiden, Hero, Queen, King, Crone, and Mage—represent a progression of Positive Change Arcs that reflect key developmental milestones in the human experience. These archetypes align with the life seasons of a character’s journey, each offering its own unique challenges and opportunities for growth. The Maiden and Hero embody early-life arcs centered on discovering identity, testing limits, and learning to act with integrity and courage. The Queen and King transition into midlife roles of stewardship and service as the character matures emotionally and ethically by taking on increasing responsibility for others. Finally, the Crone and Mage represent elderhood, with wisdom, legacy, and spiritual clarity coming to the forefront. These arcs are all Positive Change Arcs, in which the character overcomes a limiting Lie, embraces a thematic Truth, and transforms internally in a way that benefits not only the self, but often the broader community as well. Collectively, these archetypes trace a powerful map of human maturation through storytelling.
Flat archetypes portray characters who already possess a firm grasp of the story’s thematic Truth and remain internally steadfast throughout the narrative. Instead of undergoing personal transformation, these characters serve as stabilizing forces or guides, influencing others to grow or change. Within the framework of the Life Cycle of Archetypal Character Arcs, Flat archetypes alternate with the transformational archetypes, representing the periods of integration that take place after each transformational journey. Flat archetypes appear not only in the early and mid stages of life (as with the Child, Lover, Parent, and Ruler) but also in the later stages (with the Elder and Mentor). Though their arcs are Flat in structure, these characters play pivotal roles in helping others confront Lies, embrace Truths, and fulfill their own transformational journeys.
Shadow archetypes represent the distorted or wounded versions of each transformational archetype. Rather than embodying the thematic Truth, shadow archetypes operate from a place of fear, repression, or misused power, often doubling down on the Lie. Shadow archetypes are presented as pairs that reflect both the passive and aggressive expressions of certain inner drives—for example Damsel/Vixen (distorted Maiden), Coward/Bully (distorted Hero), Snow Queen/Sorceress (distorted Queen), Puppet/Tyrant (distorted King), Hermit/Wicked Witch (distorted Crone), and Miser/Sorcerer (distorted Mage). When written with depth and nuance, these archetypes not only challenge the protagonist but also reflect who the character risks becoming if the Truth is not embraced.
Archetypal antagonists are deeply symbolic forces that represent the collective resistance to an archetype’s thematic Truth. Unlike shadow archetypes (which reflect the personal, often internalized distortions of individual characters), archetypal antagonists function on a mythic or systemic level, manifesting as corrupt institutions, cultural illusions, existential threats, or even metaphysical forces—as well as internal catalysts. These antagonists are presented in symbolic pairs (reflecting both structural roles and thematic opposition), which successively oppose each transformational archetype. The Maiden faces Authority and the Predator, the Hero faces the Sick King and Dragon, the Queen faces the Empty Throne and Invaders, the King faces Rebels and a Cataclysm, the Crone faces the Tempter and a Death Blight, and the Mage faces the Weakness of Mankind and Evil. These archetypes are invaluable for stories exploring epic, allegorical, or deeply thematic stakes, allowing writers to pit their protagonists against challenges that are not just physical, but symbolic and mythic.
Whether you’re brand new to my approach or have been using these terms for years, I hope this glossary gives you a deeper understanding of the language behind your stories. These concepts—many of which I’ve refined over time or developed to meet the nuanced needs of modern storytelling—are more than just vocabulary. They’re tools to help you think more clearly, write more intentionally, and craft stories that resonate on both structural and thematic levels. As always, use what serves you, adapt what inspires you, and keep building your own creative lexicon as you go. Happy writing!
Are you struggling to get reviews for your book? Wondering how to navigate the different types of reviews, from customer feedback to professional blurbs? Joe Walters from IndependentBookReview.com gives his tips.
Today’s show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna
Joe Walters is the author of The Truth About Book Reviews: An Insider’s Guide to Getting and Using Reviews to Grow Your Readership, and also runs IndependentBookReview.com, which focuses on reviewing indie books.
You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
What are the three different types of book reviews?
How to get customer reviews, whether you’re a new author or more established
Why blurbs / editorial reviews are still worth getting and how to use them
Pitching influencers, book bloggers, and more
What kind of reviews can you pay for, and what can you definitely NOT pay for?
Handling negative reviews, and the importance of getting feedback before publication
Joanna: Joe Walters is the author of The Truth About Book Reviews: An Insider’s Guide to Getting and Using Reviews to Grow Your Readership, and also runs IndependentBookReview.com, which focuses on reviewing indie books. So welcome to the show, Joe.
Joe: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Joanna: It’s good to have you on. So first up—
Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.
Joe: I started writing back in college and fell in love with it through Ray Bradbury. I wanted to be a high school English teacher, but I learned pretty quickly that teaching was a lot of work when I came home, and not the same as discussing books in college.
So, I decided to become a volunteer reader for a literary magazine called Indianola Review. We were print and digital, and I would read short stories with a team and vote on whether they would be published. I absolutely loved that.
I moved away from teaching and became a server so that I could have more time to read and write. While I was serving, I found a job in Oregon as the marketing director at a small press called Inkwater Press.
By some miracle, I got that job and had to figure out what book marketing was. It’s a long game, and I read your book and so many others about how to do it. I got my feet wet, figured out how to market and sell books, and how to get authors who I knew cared about their writing read by more people.
Then I had to move from Portland, Oregon, and come back home to Pennsylvania. But I didn’t want to stop being in publishing, so I started Independent Book Review.
I knew that indie authors needed a platform for book reviews, and I knew I could do a good job with it.
I started building that and worked freelance for two other indie presses, Paper Raven Books and Sunbury Press. I was targeting book reviews for them, doing metadata, book descriptions, author bios—anything you could think of for book marketing.
I was doing all of that for those presses while building Independent Book Review. A couple of years ago, Independent Book Review became my full-time job. So every day, I’m editing and promoting reviews, and it’s truly the best job I’ve ever had.
Joanna: I love that. I love that you have loved books and stories so much that you’ve dedicated so much time to it. But why indie books then? Because you obviously worked in the more traditional side as well, and you come from literature at university and all that.
Why did you choose indie books?
Joe: I just knew how much they needed it. It has nothing to do with quality why they’re not getting picked up by major review companies or major blurbers. Their books are still great.
They still get editing and great cover design, but they don’t have big teams or a lot of money behind them pushing the books. I knew how much I could at least be another voice for them.
“Indie” really means all of the authors that you know down the street, your friends. It’s very rare that you’re friends with Stephen King.
I’m trying to help the little guy who loves writing and books and just wants to get his work out there.
So, I’m all indie all the time, that’s for sure. Except for my leisure reading—sometimes I dabble elsewhere.
Joanna: We all read around. When you are a big reader like we are, you hardly ever look at the publisher, right? It’s not like we go shopping by publisher, but you are right in terms of who reviews stuff. Then your own book—
What kind of writing have you done, and tell us why you wanted to do this book?
Joe: I’ve always been a fiction writer. I’ve been writing short stories for a long time. I’m still working on a novel I started 10 years ago, and it’s not there yet. I wanted to finish that book before I got my book review book out, but then I just had to get the book review book out.
I couldn’t wait on my little 10-year-old protagonist anymore. I had to jump in and offer my expertise to the indie community for book reviews.
Mostly, when I was working for presses, I just got the question a lot: “How do you get book reviews?” “How do you get certain types of book reviews?” So, big media, blogs, podcast interviews, customer reviews—I got all of these questions all the time. I wanted to create a resource for all of those authors.
I enjoy writing about it too. I’ve been writing book marketing blogs for years, and I always thought that was my best chance of making jokes. So I filled my book with jokes and as much experience and knowledge as I have, and put them all in one place.
You’re going to get specific platforms to try pitching. You’re going to have book review resources in my book. I just tried to gather all of the things in one place instead of authors and presses searching forever to figure out what works.
I tried to compress everything I know into one document, and now I’ve got it with The Truth About Book Reviews.
Joanna: It is super useful. We are going to come to the content of the book in a minute. Given that this was, I guess, your first self-publishing experience, how did that go?
Did you learn anything that made you understand why being an indie is difficult?
Joe: Oh, too many things.
First of all, the timeline. The hope I had for finishing a book in like three months definitely got sidetracked. With the amount of things I have to do for Independent Book Review and in my everyday life, three months was impossible.
Initially, I said, “Oh, this book’s going to be out in January,” and here we are with a July 10th release date and I’m still sprinting. So that is difficult.
Also, I tried to upload my ebook for KDP pre-order about two weeks ago with a different subtitle, and they shut me down four or five different times before I had to change it. I even told my wife, “I’m not changing the subtitle. I like it too much. I’m not keyword farming or anything. I’m not cheating.”
My book is about books. The subtitle was originally “An Insider’s Guide to Getting Book Reviews and Using Them to Market Your Book.” Pretty straightforward, I think. But you can’t have “book” too many times in the title and subtitle.
I had it three times, so I cut one out. I said, “Getting Reviews and Using Them to Market Your Book,” and they didn’t even like that. So I had to get rid of it. There are no “books” in the subtitle now, but at least it’s up for pre-order.
Joanna: This is so interesting. With my very first book, I also put up something—this was in the early days when there was only really Amazon in terms of self-publishing. I had something like “From Idea to Amazon” as a subtitle, and they shut that down because, of course, I used their own company name, and I understood that.
The word “book” does seem a little extreme, especially when it’s about book reviews. But this is the point, there are all of these things that are difficult to do.
So let’s get into the content of the book. It is super useful. So authors do obviously talk about book reviews as if they’re one thing, but they’re not all one thing.
What are the different types of book reviews and where can they be used?
Joe: I separate them into three different types of reviews. I’ve seen other marketers separate them into four, but let’s stick with three for now.
The first one in my timeline is blurbs or editorial reviews. Basically, those are like testimonials for your book.
You ask authors or experts in your niche to read an early copy of your book and provide a few sentences of praise for it so that you can use it on your marketing material. That could be putting it on your book cover.
For example, if you get a big notable name, you put J.F. Penn right on the front cover, and bam, that’s helping other readers and browsers see that this could be a book for them.
You can also put it on your Amazon page itself in the editorial review section through Amazon Author Central, or you can do it with Amazon A+ content, which is graphics on your Amazon page. I love those. You can also use it on things like your website and on social media graphics.
One of my favorite things to do is to use it in future pitches. If I reach out to a different review platform and I have a blurb from a notable company who said this book was incredible and gave it a starred review, then that really works wonders for helping that recipient think maybe this book’s quality has already been gate-kept in a way that indie authors aren’t always.
It’s a way for readers to see, “Okay, somebody read this book and somebody said it was good.” So those would be blurbs or editorial reviews.
The second type of review I consider media or trade reviews. Media reviews, to me, are any reviews in the media. I’m going to count social media because it has it in the name. I think as long as you’re getting publicity for it, that is a media review. You can get it on social media. Podcasts aren’t always necessarily a review, but it’s media.
Then trade reviews are from trade review publications—publications that focus only on books, as opposed to bigger media like People that focuses on culture and fashion and all sorts of cool stuff in addition to books. You can use those in different ways too.
The first of which is publicity. Share that link with your audience. Then you can put it on your websites as well. Just like blurbs, you can pull a quote from your larger review and use it with newsletters, websites, and social media. You can also put it in distributor backends like PublishDrive or IngramSpark.
The third type of review is the most common and probably the most difficult: customer reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo.
You’re getting those reviews for your product page so every browser that comes sees that you have 150 reviews and can scroll through them to find out what everyday people are saying about it. So that is a totally different strategy than the strategy that you would use for media reviews.
Joanna: That is a great overview.
It’s interesting because I’ve certainly always focused more on customer reviews than anything else because they help the algorithms, they help the social proof, and they help with advertising. It’s very hard to advertise a book with no reviews.
The comments I get from authors now are, “Oh, well, it’s all right for you. You’ve got X number of reviews.” And I’m like, “Yeah, we all start somewhere.” So if someone listening is like, “Okay, I need to get customer reviews on, say, Amazon or Goodreads,”—
What are some tips for getting those customer reviews for new authors with new books who might not have an ARC review team?
Joe: Everybody does start somewhere. It is difficult and time-consuming, most of all. So much in publishing is you’re either paying for it with your dollars or your time, and with customer reviews, so much of it is your time.
My favorite way to get customer reviews is using comp titles. Even if you wrote the most unique book you’ve ever read, other people have written unique books. You should have been reading other books similar to yours while you were writing it or before, but you can check them out now on the bestseller pages on Amazon.
You can find books that are similar to yours, and then find out where those books have been reviewed. If you’re looking for customer reviews, head over to their Amazon page and see if they’ve been published in the last 10 to 15 years.
You don’t want to go too deep, and you probably don’t want to pick books that have a thousand-plus reviews, but maybe in the 100 to 500 review range. You can scroll down to those customer reviews and check out if those reviewers have profiles.
If they have profiles, they might share public social media accounts or websites, and they like to be pitched for free reviews. So that’s definitely one of the best ways that I’ve found to get new customer reviews.
You can also do the same thing with smaller blogs. Smaller blogs can turn into customer reviews pretty often.
If you search a book just like yours and you Google it or you ask ChatGPT to find where they’ve been reviewed and you pay attention to the lesser-known ones, then you can give yourself a pretty good shot of pitching for a customer review from those places. Asking for the blog review first and seeing if it can convert into a customer review.
Then there’s also building a launch team. I know if you are just starting out, you might not have a big list of supporters who you know will be reading your book, but—
You can definitely still build a launch team with your personal connections.
Anybody who you’ve worked with in a writing workshop or something in the past—as long as they’re not Facebook friends with you, so they shouldn’t be really close people to you—you can build launch teams by recognizing who you’ve interacted with in the past and who might want to support you.
Ask them to read an early copy so that they can help out in that first week of publication. I did that with my newsletter a lot. I built a launch team through my newsletter by just creating a form for people to sign up and putting it in my automation sequence. I ended up getting 20-plus people to offer to review the book.
So there are options. They’re all going to take time.
You can ask people inside the book itself with a link to review the book at the very end, right before the back matter.
You can also try paid resources. You can’t pay for customer reviews, but you can pay places like Pubby, where you can read other indie author books and get your book reviewed in return. They work around it in that way.
Then you can try things like BookFunnel, StoryOrigin, and NetGalley. PubNook is another one like Pubby. There are options; it’s just about time.
Joanna: This is so important.
You did say it there, but just to emphasize, you cannot offer something in exchange for a review. So when we’re offering our book to people, we are saying, “Here’s my book.” I always just say, “If you like it and would like to leave a review, I’d really appreciate that.”
Even with our ARC lists, we can’t say, “Here’s a free book in exchange for a review.”
It has to be somebody’s free choice to do a review. And as you said, you can’t pay someone to do a review. There are lots of these services, but that’s not allowed. So as you say, there are ways around it, but we have to be clear.
If I send out an email to my review list, my ARC team, maybe one out of three, or sometimes one in two, will actually leave a review within the period. So even people who’ve signed up to say they will do a review… I guess what I’m saying is don’t get annoyed with people if they don’t.
Everyone has things on their to-do list, haven’t they? So we do have to be careful about how we’re asking for these things.
Joe: Yes, I said it multiple times in my book: really, don’t get annoyed at these people. They’re offering to read your book; that is the best part. So if they leave a review, that is super helpful, but if they disappear, that’s okay too. Don’t chase people and be annoyed. Do not chase them.
Joanna: These lovely book bloggers do all this stuff basically for the love of it, and they just get so many pitches. So, yes, it is one of those sort of frustrating areas, but also really important.
So let’s say, like me, when I was a new author, I did make a lot more effort. There’ll be authors listening who have an email list, they have a lot of books. The more backlist you have, the more difficult it is to try and tell people which book you need reviews on.
What can we do to get consistent reviews over years, especially on backlist books?
Because basically, you need to get reviews regularly in order to keep things sort of moving.
Joe: This is a good problem to have, really. But you do still have to stay on top of it even though you have less time to pitch one-on-one.
My favorite way, the easiest way, is to make sure that there’s a page at the end of the book that includes an actual clickable link. What I like to do is create a redirection link before your book is available. My redirection link is independentbookreview.com/reviewlink. I just use that through WordPress.
Right now, the ebook is not published, so if I were to redirect that link to my ebook review page, it would just be dead. So right now, pre-publication, it’s taking you to a Goodreads review page, which you can have beforehand.
Once the book gets published, you go over to the redirect, you change the link, and then you don’t have to edit the ebook or anything. All the person has to do is click that link when the book is already out.
You should have changed it to the ebook review link, so you don’t have to edit anything. It’s just automatically clickable. So that’s one of my favorite ways to do it, for sure. Then you don’t have to do any work after that.
I also like automation sequences in emails. You can set up a special sign-up page for those who read your book. Let’s say you have a specific link that you send them to in your bio or in the front matter.
They sign up via a specific form that separates them in your email company, and you can have a review request that automatically goes out to whoever signed up for that 30 days after, for example. You already know that these are the people who came from your book. I like automation sequences in emails, for sure.
And then, make it easy to find on your website. All you need is “Contact for review copies.” It’s very simple. Have an email if you want, or a contact box. You can also have a Google Form or a Jotform for people to click and say, “I want to join my ARC team.”
They sign up, put their information in, and you will already have somebody to send it out to the next time your book comes out.
Joanna: I like those, good tips there. So let’s come to the blurbs or the editorial reviews because this has very much been a sort of traditionally published thing. Indies have never really done this as much.
“Expecting authors, agents, and editors to secure blurbs can create an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent.”
I thought that was interesting because it seems to suggest that there’s a sort of move against these kinds of blurbs and editorial reviews. So what are your thoughts on when these are useful?
How can we get them in an authentic way rather than just always pitching famous names?
Joe: Yes, I love that article. Somebody said it finally. I feel like it’s so true. Rewarding connections over talent—blurbs are connections.
Stephen King is one of the most prolific blurbers I know. I don’t know if he reads all those books. I would love to ask him, but I just don’t know. It’s about putting their name on your marketing. If they get to put their name on your popular book cover, that’s positive for them.
The thing is that most readers, I would say, don’t really understand the connections part of it in the same way that literary inside-circle people do. I know this, other writers know this, authors know this, that some of these blurbs mean that maybe they share an agent with that author or have the same indie press.
But it’s still about needing more content, and blurbs are content. You can’t be the one who calls your book spectacular, so putting somebody else’s name on there is beneficial.
Connections are good too. I’m a person who runs a book review site. If I see that somebody has a connection with someone as influential as Ta-Nehisi Coates and the book is in the niche, then it gets my brain going.
It’s like, “Oh, maybe they were in the same writing program, maybe they have the same agent, maybe they were in a panel together.” Those are still beneficial. That means that that book could get good publicity, like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s books get good publicity.
I like them. Bookstores and librarians still like them. I understand it from the Simon and Schuster side because their books are already getting into bookstores and libraries. They’re succeeding there. We need as much help as we can get as indies, so I still like them.
Media and trade reviews can also be used as blurbs, so you don’t necessarily have to have these crazy good connections. Although, of course, it’s really helpful to have connections. All you need to do is get reviewed on these other platforms, and you can use them in that way.
In terms of getting them authentically, just having an actually marketable book and story, I think, is the most important. You have to have the recipient believe in that product before they endorse it.
Sometimes blurb writers don’t read every word of every book, and so they want to be able to trust it just from the outset.
So you have to look at it and be like, “Okay, this doesn’t include any problematic tropes in the description, or the cover isn’t already bad.”
There are a lot of things that go into it, but make sure it’s marketable right away, and then just be genuine in your pitch. And maybe read their books before you pitch them.
Joanna: I mean, this is what I was going to say. The worst thing is I get so many pitches all the time, and most of them are completely inappropriate.
They’re just not targeted at me, either my non-fiction or my fiction, and that is the most frustrating thing.
It’s better to send three proper emails to people who you know are a good fit than just scatter-gunning.
Joe: Absolutely. And we can tell too, when you say, “I’ve read your book” or “I read your website,” and then you use a generic example that is in every book, make sure it’s so pointed.
If you’re reaching out to a romance author and you’ve read one of their books, don’t just say, “Oh, the love story was so sweet.” No. Say something like, “Timmy and Sarah in the locker room.” Be so specific.
Make sure that they see it and recognize, “Okay, they actually did read it, and I like that scene too.” So hit their feels a little bit by being really specific.
Joanna: Definitely. I think that’s a really good tip.
It also has to be a good fit with the genre. Reading a book is not like listening to a song. This is not like a three-to-five-minute job. This is reading a book, which for most of us, we have so many books on our TBR list, that taking time out to read a book is significant.
The other thing I guess is the amount of time. I think one of the reasons traditional publishing is much better at this kind of thing is because they have such a long lead time. They might give people six months, whereas most indies are like, “Oh, it comes out next week.” So doing it a lot further in advance, I guess, would be another tip.
Joe: Yes, absolutely.
Joanna: Okay. So then what about influencers and other media? We don’t have any connections with these people. Everybody wants a big-name TikToker to do a review on their book on their channel.
How can we research and pitch influencers?
Joe: I think first, you have to have a good platform. Not necessarily a big follower platform, although it would help, but make sure wherever you’re pitching social media influencers, in particular, that your platform is actually good at curating the content.
If you think of it in terms of a collaboration, they want their stuff to get seen by your people too. So build up your people, make sure that the actual content is likable, lovable, unique, stands out, and is good, shareable content, first of all.
Then, if you are looking for Instagram in particular and you want to DM influencers, you’re going to have to find a way to get them to follow you. I think that would be the biggest piece of it. So seek out not necessarily relationships, but engage with their stuff.
Make sure they see you in the comments. Make sure you are being genuine and trying to form connections rather than just pitching someone cold because if you pitch somebody cold who doesn’t follow you on Instagram, you’re going to get buried in their message requests. So definitely try to work with that first.
It’s going to take a ton of time, but it’s time that maybe, if you’re on social media already, you are already spending there. So I think those things make a big difference over time.
Get started early. Don’t just start a month before publication.
Even if you do start a month before publication, you can still make it work as long as you are forming a connection over time.
In terms of finding those people, you just have to spend time on your platforms. Whichever platform you think would be most beneficial to you, spend time on it. See who is being successful. Search your keywords, search your comp titles, search your categories, and let the TikTok algorithm start to show you more book stuff.
The only way to reach out to and find these people is to find them on those platforms first.
Joanna: So there’s a whole load of people going, “This sounds like a ton of work. I don’t want to be doing this. This is an absolute nightmare.” So what are the lines around paying for reviews? We mentioned that there are some ways around this.
I guess also tell us about Independent Book Review, because I think you have both options, don’t you? So tell us about that.
How can we navigate paying for specific types of book reviews, and what are some good ways to do that, while avoiding the scams?
Joe: Yes. First, it is a time nightmare sometimes. I wrote this book to be the most helpful for authors to recognize what they’re up against and where they should be putting their time, because realistically, there’s just more time than you have to spend getting book reviews.
It’s also about not putting too much pressure on yourself. Recognize how much work this is, but don’t take shortcuts by trying to pay for customer reviews. You cannot do it. You don’t want your account banned; you don’t want the other people’s accounts banned. So make sure you put a full stop there.
Don’t try to get around it by getting Facebook friends or the person who lives in your house to write a review for you. Skip out on all that.
But you can pay for other review services. You can pay people to do research for you. I already mentioned how many minutes you can spend just on Amazon pages trying to find customer reviewers, and if you don’t have that much time because you have to write your next book, you can pay people to do it.
You can find marketers or assistants on Reedsy, which is a good source. Fiverr can have some good assistants as long as you do your vetting. Then you can use services like Pubby, which I still like a lot, because you get to read and help other indie authors and help yourself in the process.
For editorial reviews, which are blurbs that you use in your marketing material from authors, experts, and review companies, you can pay for those.
You can one hundred percent pay for publicity.
When you pay for an editorial review by a book review company like mine, you are making sure your book is read, assessed, and given an honest review by experts—the book reviewers.
You are making sure a reader puts your book on the top of their list, and you’ll end up with a 400-word or more book review from Independent Book Review. It includes a summary and, if applicable, praise and criticism. So it really depends on how they like your book.
The only thing is, you don’t want to pay for too many editorial reviews. You shouldn’t pay every book review company you come across because you’re going to lose a lot of money that way. It can go from $100 to $500 to $600. So make sure you recognize your budget beforehand.
If you feel like you’re spending too much time pitching—if you are pitching too many media and trade reviews and not getting any of them, or only getting one, and you really want to have blurbs by launch day—you can pay companies like mine to give you a chance for a couple of sentences of a blurb. It can help.
I think that you should probably have three to five editorial reviews on your Amazon page before publication, but every author is different, every publisher is different. Although I do think having that validity helps.
Joanna: It can also help your confidence. You mentioned NetGalley before. I think a lot of indie authors have a difficult time with NetGalley because it is so dominated by traditionally published books.
Again, it’s not necessarily the quality, but the reviewers themselves sometimes have a bit of an attitude towards indie books. So I would say that NetGalley can be quite difficult and that it is potentially a better idea, as you say, to focus on other types of reviews.
One thing we do need to cover is, everybody wants reviews, but what if they are one-star or two-star, or even three-star reviews? Obviously, we would love everything to be a five-star or a four-star review. So how do we handle bad reviews?
How do we handle negative reviews in general, whether it is an editorial review or a customer review?
Joe: Yes. First of all, breathe.
For customer reviews in particular, these people are not experts. They’re not editors. Well, I mean, they’re experts in that they read all the time and provide critical analysis of books, but they’re not here trying to improve your book.
They’re speaking to other readers, and they have personal reading experiences. That means that they could be coming at it with bias, with prejudices, with incorrect information.
My favorite way for dealing with negative customer reviews is to just get so many of them that the numbers don’t affect you. Keep chasing them. If you have five negative reviews out of 20, get to 50.
If you took your time with that content, if you really worked hard on it and you don’t even agree with these customers, then the numbers will even out. The more people you get, the more it evens out. So keep working. Don’t stop.
If you feel like the customer review is abusive or it’s about a product that’s not even yours—so they’re reviewing a TV instead of your book—you can hit “report abuse” under an Amazon customer review. They might not necessarily take it down, but you can try.
Don’t respond to them, for sure, no matter where they are—Amazon, Goodreads, or if you had emailed them asking for a review in the past.
With media and trade reviews, if they are negative or mixed, I get a lot of people who are nervous about publishing it on my website if it is a mixed or critical review. I recommend publishing it anyway. I think it’s helpful to be Googleable.
It’s helpful because not every reader that makes it to my site reads every word of every review. Sometimes they scan. It’s easier to scan with your eyes than it is to read every word on a digital screen.
So they might not even read the negative part, or if they do read the criticism, maybe they don’t agree with it and just decide to read the book anyway. It’s just more content for your readers and your audience to engage with.
If there’s a negative review, try to take your emotions and yourself out of it for a little bit. It’s impossible, I can say it all I want, but try. These are not meant to tell you you’re doing something wrong. They’re meant to speak to other readers. That’s it.
You can definitely think about them, but don’t beat yourself up about them. Keep chasing good reviews. Keep working.
Joanna: I also, same as you, consider that you should just drown it by getting more reviews.
Joe: Yes.
Joanna: Say you get 50 reviews and they’re all one-star, then there is something wrong. Either there’s probably something wrong with the book, or you’ve really put it in the wrong place.
So let’s say you’ve put up a book under “Christian Sweet Romance” and it’s full of hardcore violence and swearing and all kinds of other things, then you’ve made a mistake in terms of positioning your book.
So if you’ve positioned it well and it is a good product, then, like you say, you will get some one-star reviews, but you should mainly get alright reviews, I guess.
Joe: Yes, and indie authors sometimes can run into a problem where they haven’t gotten feedback before publishing. It is just so important to actually hear criticism before you get going. Reviews are not the time to get your criticism, even though it does happen.
Sometimes criticism can be actually helpful to learn if you did something wrong. You can fix it with this book if you wanted to edit it again, or you can just fix it in your next one.
Reviews are informative. They’re about your author journey, about how you are presenting your book, if you’re putting it in the right categories. Listen to them. It’s important.
Joanna: That’s interesting you say that because I’ve always paid for professional editing, so I’ve always had feedback and critical feedback before publishing. But you are right, there are a lot of people who don’t do that anymore.
So that would be, I guess, another tip. I still believe in professional editors. I think it’s really important to keep improving our craft, but also for that very reason, as you said, it’s better to have other eyes on your book before publishing.
Now, all of that has been super useful. And of course, you do have various things at Independent Book Review—
Tell us a bit more about Independent Book Review?
Joe: First and foremost, IndependentBookReview.com is a site for readers. So if you’re looking for cool indie books, that’s what I tried to do. I tried to put together book lists, starred reviews, the best in indie publishing. So definitely start reading indie books and come to IndependentBookReview.com for it.
But then for writers also, you can submit your book for free if you’d like. You can buy an editorial review and guarantee it in a certain amount of time. Or you can get group beta reading, which we also offer.
Basically, I have a team of booksellers, librarians, reviewers, and bloggers who will read your book before publication and share what they consider to be the most important takeaways from a reader’s standpoint, not necessarily from an editor’s standpoint. So you can get group beta reading with us too.
My book will be available through there too. Not direct fulfillment, but if you want to go to independentbookreview.com/thetruth, you can just go ahead and find it there.
I also run the Write Indie newsletter, which you’ll find on my website too. Really, just go to IndependentBookReview.com, you’ll figure it out.
Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Joe. That was great.
Joe: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It means a ton.
These days, it’s easier than ever to write stories that look like stories. I’m talking about stories follow beat sheets, mimic bestselling formulas, and say all the “right” things. But more and more, I see authors tempted to make creative choices based on convenience rather than imagination or integrity. When that happens, we have to ask: are we saying anything real?
Intentional storytelling—the kind that grows from a writer’s unique vision and voice—is at risk of being quietly drowned out by franchise formulas, AI-generated content, and the pressure to produce faster than ever. If you’ve ever felt like you’re just going through the motions instead of creating something that truly matters, you’re not alone. Let’s explore what’s being lost, and what we can reclaim.
What Intentional Storytelling Is Not: Avoiding Formula and Empty Content
How Modern Media Incentivizes Unintentional Choices
These days, I think most people are at least somewhat dissatisfied with the general scope of popular media, particularly movies and TV. Of course, there are stellar exceptions and of course older generations (of which I am suddenly shocked to find I am one!) tend to look back on previous eras of entertainment with no small gloss of nostalgia. But for the past decade, I have looked out onto the entertainment landscape and been increasingly dissatisfied, on a personal level, with what I’m seeing. Although multiple factors play into this (including nothing more than my own evolving perspectives and tastes), I feel the growing trend and temptation away from intentionality is one of the prime culprits.
This is a trend that affects far more than just storytelling. Despite its many benefits—and perhaps its inevitability—the rise of automation, driven by the ever-accelerating pace of life, presents storytellers with ever-growing temptations to take shortcuts. We’ve now reached the point where the most obvious example is the ability to simply have AI write a whole book for you based on nothing more than a premise. But, really, this is just an extreme example at the end of a long line of such shortcuts.
In the interest of identifying what intentional storytelling is, let’s first examine what it is not.
Why “Just Following the Formula” Falls Short
Intentional Storytelling Is Not:
Copy/Paste Beat Sheets – Using structure as a paint-by-numbers formula rather than a flexible framework guided by theme and character. (This is not to say such beat sheets can’t be used for inspiration or troubleshooting, but by themselves, they’re dead forms.)
Formulaic Structures – Plugging characters into a pre-set pattern that forces them to act according to the plot rather than allowing plot to emerge organically from character development.
Focus-Grouped Characters or Themes – Designing stories to appeal broadly instead of deeply.
Although I hope the examples in this list are self-evident, they are also quite general. There will always be instances when some or even all of these things add desirable aspects to a story or offer an author guidance or assistance. However, taken by themselves or without calibration, they all point to the two deepest markers of unintentional writing.
Quite simply, unintentional storytelling is either lazy or fearful.
In the one case, the writer is “filling in the story’s blanks” in some way that fobs off the responsibility of making choices or discovering originality, thus eliminating the need to dig into the depths of one’s own truths. In the other, the writer may be fearful that not following certain trends or using certain tools may endanger relevance and, in some cases, livelihood.
Tools vs. Crutches: Knowing the Difference
This is not to say most of these tools can’t be used to simplify the storytelling process or to help the professional author keep up with the demands of the market. For example, structural beat sheets can be a tremendous learning tool. Producing content and writing “what sells” is, at least to some degree, just part of the devil’s bargain of profitable art. Writing tropes is, to some extent, unavoidable.
It’s less important that examples such as these be avoided altogether and much more important that they be used with intention. To the degree any tool or opportunity is used without intention, it risks weakening the whole. This has always been true for writers, even of something so small as unintentional word choices. But as the ability to craft whole stories with much greater speed and ease becomes more accessible and, frankly, more tempting, it is vital for authors to maintain artistic integrity in every choice they make for their stories—from the words to the tools to the characters to the plot.
What Is Intentional Storytelling? Defining Purposeful, Authentic Narrative Craft
At its simplest, intentional storytelling is paying attention to everything. It is about becoming aware of every choice you are making for your story—from plot, theme, and characters to the color of your protagonist’s dress or the name of her dog. It’s about choosing narrators on purpose and for a reason. It’s about vetting settings. It’s about honing word choice to perfection.
Why? Some of those things—like plot and theme—obviously matter, since they are your story. But why does something as inconsequential as a color or a random setting really matter?
Cohesion is about ensuring every piece of a story is part of a greater unified whole.
Resonance is about the effect of that whole: how every small piece sings together to create an effect bigger than itself—a note of magic that resonates to the audience as a feeling, a sense, something supra-linguistic communicated beyond words or images.
How Subtext Reflects the Integrity of a Story
Ultimately, what we’re talking about is the creation of subtext. Stories are subtext. The stories that truly work—the stories that stay with you long after you finish them—are stories in which the subtext worked. And the subtext only works when the context is contrived of intentional choices.
It’s important not to confuse “intentional” with “conscious.” Although consciousness always brings intention, intention exists beyond consciousness. Although we often speak of brainstorming stories, stories are always first and foremost an act of dreaming—an act of the subconscious, the imaginal self, the symbolic mind.
What AI Can’t Do for You (Unless You Know Yourself First)
When it comes to AI, the subject is certainly complex. As someone who makes a living from creative work, I understand firsthand why AI feels threatening. The landscape of my own livelihood has been impacted significantly these past few years, raising many anxieties about an unknown future. In the spirit of learning about something before forming opinions about it, this year I’ve been experimenting with it in many different ways, particularly looking into how it can help me on the business end of things (i.e., left-brain pursuits such as SEO, research, business brainstorming, and marketing copy) and have often found it helpful. However, my chief concern with its advent is that in relying on it for right-brain activities, it may easily interrupt our dreaming selves and, indeed, do too much of our dreaming for us.
To know the difference requires, first, a keen attention to one’s own imaginal workings and, second, a perhaps even keener attention on the intention of the choices we make for our stories, the origins of those choices, and above all their resonance with ourselves—or what I have always called our “story sense.” This is that deep and true part of ourselves—intuition, sixth sense, gut feeling, subconscious—that knows when something is ours or not—when something is true for us or not.
As you seek intentional storytelling, you can move beyond vigilance and awareness to a deeper intimacy with your own personal truths and symbols. Although left-brained, logic-based brainstorming remains a helpful process for most of us, it cannot replace the right-brained raw creativity of simply imagining. I use a process called dreamzoning to intentionally shut off my logical brain and go deep into my imagination. I’ve rather come to feel that this act of dreamzoning is one of the most subversive approaches an author can take in these times. (Although I offer guided meditations to help with this process, you need nothing more than a little time alone to stare into space.)
Ultimately, storytelling with intention is nothing more than storytelling with honesty, integrity, discipline, and bravery. It begins when we first look deeply into ourselves and write with honesty what is there—no matter how unformed, ill-formed, frighteningly personal, vulnerable, or imperfect—rather than simply mirroring back what we see in others’ stories.
We follow that with the integrity—the wholeness, the cohesion—of making choices that align with those depths, with what feels right for us, with what serves to produce a story that has its own integrity, its own wholeness.
Then comes the discipline of staying with it, even when it’s hard, even when it seems there must be an easier way, a more fun way, a more profitable way, a less scary way. Staying in service to our own integrity is the surest path to any of these things. But even when it seems anything but, we must keep asking the questions that tell if we are indeed staying true to ourselves, our visions, and our stories—not our egos’ stories, but our deepest stories.
And then we face it all with courage—because there is no other way. Storytelling—real, true storytelling (okay, honestly some fake storytelling too) is the most frightening thing in the world. To write with truth requires the incredible vulnerability of feeling deeply into our most primordial selves. To then write well requires the supreme and often painful effort of teaching our brains new pathways, organizing our unruly and chthonic dreams into the straight line of language and communication.
If we fail from time to time in our intentionality with every piece and moment of our stories, it is little wonder. In the end, the only thing that matters is that we keep coming back to the deepest and most honest parts of what we are trying to create and share.
Why Intentional Storytelling Matters More Than Ever in an AI-Driven Content World
Intentional storytelling has always mattered. But I write this post now because I feel it is more important than ever. Storytelling is the soul of culture, and perhaps as writers some of us have lost our souls a bit lately. The demands of content creation can make it easy to lose touch with the inner muse. Tools like AI can make this slide even more tempting. However, any assistance automated tools render us (in any aspect of life) can rob us of intentionality only insofar as we are out of touch with our own deep knowing and imagining.
How the Creative Landscape Is Changing
Many authors these days are asking themselves the hard questions. As the landscape of the artistic world—to say nothing of the world at large—changes so dizzyingly around us, it becomes ever more important for us to ask these questions. All humans are innately storytellers. But those of us who purport to shape and share our stories through the life-changing portals that are books and movies—perhaps bear a somewhat greater responsibility.
This is not a challenge to step away from the workings of modern life, but rather a challenge to experiment with every moment, to test and try and see and respond—to evolve when evolution is the truest and to stand fast when standing is truest—to allow ourselves the spontenaiety of each moment rather than the dogma of easy answers or quick fixes.
Why the Story Still Starts With You
Intentionality is not, nor ever will be, the easiest path for writers to take. But, truly, storytelling was never meant to be easy. As writers, it is our special sleight of hand that allows us to open portals into the depths of life under the guise of adventure and romance and mystery. There’s no such thing as “just” a story. That’s the trick. That’s the magic. But it only works when we, as storytellers and magicians, are in deep service to the integrity of the story itself.
Two Questions to Guide Every Writing Decision
All you have to do is keep asking yourself these two questions:
Why? Why did I make this choice? Why did I put this in my story? Is it the easiest answer—or is it deep and true?
How can I go deeper? How can I write something that is more honest, more real, more of my dreaming self?
However you answer those questions—whether with certainty or with more questions—they are the beginning of a deeper relationship with your craft. Intentional storytelling isn’t a destination; it’s a continual practice of listening inward, trusting your creative instincts, and honoring the story that wants to be told through you. The path may not always be easy, but it is always worth walking one meaningful, intentional choice at a time.
In Summary
Intentional storytelling isn’t about rejecting tools or structure. It’s about using them with awareness, discernment, and, above all, honesty. In a time when it’s never been easier to churn out content that looks like a story, the real work of writing lies in remembering why we create in the first place. Every story worth telling begins not with trends or formulae, but with the deep, sometimes uncomfortable truths we carry inside ourselves.
To write with intention is to choose meaning over ease, depth over noise, and wholeness over quick results. It’s an act of quiet rebellion in a culture of speed and automation. We honor the sacred nature of story by treating it, not as a product to be packaged, but as a portal to something true, resonant, and lasting.
Key Takeaways on Intentional Storytelling:
Intentional storytelling means making every creative choice with honesty, integrity, discipline, and courage.
Tools like beat sheets and AI must be used with discernment and integrity.
The rise of algorithm-driven content makes it more important than ever to return to the source: your own imagination, values, and story sense.
Asking “Why?” and “How can I go deeper?” can reconnect you to authentic, resonant storytelling.
Want More?
If you’re feeling the pull to reconnect with your deeper creative self—to get out of your head and back into your story’s heart—my Archetypal Character Guided Meditations can help. I designed these immersive sessions to support you in finding the “dreamzone”: that quiet, intentional space where imagination flows freely, unshaped by algorithms or outside noise. In these times when technology offers us faster answers, my idea is for these meditations offer a return to deep, slow creativity. You can find them in my shop!
Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What does intentional storytelling mean to you—and where in your own writing process do you sometimes feel most tempted to trade depth for ease? Tell me in the comments!
Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Spotify).
Have you ever dreamed of turning a passion for storytelling into a profitable, long-term career? How do you build multiple successful author brands without burning out? What marketing strategies actually work in today’s fast-changing industry? Ines Johnson shares her journey and the secrets to her success.
In the intro, 5 phases of an author business [Becca Syme]; Lessons from writing every day for two decades [Ryan Holiday]; What the First AI Copyright Ruling Means for Authors [ALLi Podcast];
Write and format stunning books with Atticus. Create professional print books and eBooks easily with the all-in-one book writing software. Try it out at Atticus.io
Ines Johnson is a romance author with over a hundred books spanning paranormal, urban fantasy, contemporary, and erotica, as well as sweet romance under another pen name.
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
From funk band upbringing to TV, teaching and writing
Writing faster as a trained screenwriter
Staying within your lane — depending on your goals
The business of writing, and planning income and progress
AIDA for marketing — Attention, Interest, Desire, Action
Joanna: Ines Johnson is a romance author with over a hundred books spanning paranormal, urban fantasy, contemporary, and erotica, as well as sweet romance under another pen name. Welcome to the show, Ines.
Ines: Hi, Jo. Thank you so much for having me.
Joanna: I’m excited to talk to you today. First up—
Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.
Ines: I grew up in a funk band; that’s always my truth. My father was the bass player, and one of my formative memories was of him explaining music composition to me.
He explained how the keyboard had its part and would tell a story, the drums had a part and would tell a story, and then finally the vocalists came on and they told a different story.
He showed me how all of these worked together to make the story complete, to be the characters. It was from that moment I knew I was supposed to be in storytelling. I thought I was going to be a singer, but my daddy said, “Oh, sweetie, no, you’re not going to be a singer.”
So I started first in television, and then I found my way into novel writing. I worked in cable television for a number of years for National Geographic Television, on the Explorer show, which was before they had a channel. I loved that; we met so many fascinating people from all around the world.
Then I started to work in children’s television. While I was working in children’s television, I was also an avid reader, which I have been since I was very young.
There are pictures of my youngest aunt corralling me and my cousins off the city bus and into the library. Going to the library and being able to take books home was the best thing ever.
But my godmother, who lived a few blocks up the street, had a pantry where you’re supposed to keep boxes of pasta and cans of beans. She didn’t have that. Instead, she had all these teeny tiny little Harlequins and Silhouettes; that was my second library.
She said I could take and read whatever I wanted, and I did. She didn’t try to censor me because, back then, the love scene was when the waves would crash!
I read those books and it became an absolute addiction for me, and it stayed with me even when I was working in television. When I went on to work in children’s television, I was reading Twilight in between reading scripts for the show.
The writing bug bit me. I would be writing screenplays in Final Draft, then switch over to Word or eventually Scrivener and work on a novel. It took me years for that first novel to be recognizable as a piece of literature. It has not seen the light of day, but that was fine.
After the first one, I wrote the next one in a year, the next in six months, the next in three months, and now I’m a whole lot faster than that. But I always like to preface my “speed” with the fact that I’m a trained screenwriter. We would do 13 scripts per season, two seasons per year. That’s a normal pace for me.
My brain doesn’t think it’s supposed to take a year or more to write a novel. No, you need to have this full script, this part of the story, done in the time you have.
Joanna: That is really interesting. I think people who come from screenwriting or journalism are fast writers because they’re used to deadlines. It’s a job, you do the work, and there are the words. I get that.
When did you first decide to self-publish?
Ines: I first self-published in December 2014. I published a three-part serial, as it was really popular to do serial books back then. It was the era of KU 1.0, where you got paid the same no matter how long or short the book was.
That worked for me because that’s how my mind is; I don’t think in terms of a feature film, I think in episodes. So I started to write these shorter stories, and they did well, and then I just wrote more and more.
At the time, I only wrote romance, but I didn’t understand genres or tropes. I started writing a dystopian, then a sci-fi, then a paranormal. I was going all over the place, and each time I was building a new audience that wouldn’t follow to the next genre.
The people that read the dystopian were not interested in the contemporary, and so on. It didn’t make sense to me until other authors pulled me up by my bootstraps and said, “Girlfriend, let me give you some advice.”
That’s the beautiful thing about the romance author community. They told me,
“It’s fantastic that you keep finding an audience, but you want to try to retain them. One of the ways to do that is to pick a lane and stay in it.”
I was crisscrossing too many lanes on the highway to keep my readers.
That’s when I decided pen names were for me because I didn’t want to limit myself, so I just made more than one.
Joanna: I know that people don’t cross over and it’s so weird, isn’t it? Because I think many writers, myself included, read so many different genres. So I don’t really understand people who only read one.
How have the pen names worked for you and how do you keep multiple names going?
Ines: For the folks that are listening, I think the vast majority of readers probably read a handful of books a year. Indies aren’t focused on the masses like that. We’re very focused on the ‘whale readers,’ the ones that read a book a day. I’m a whale reader; I read one to two books a day.
A lot of these whale readers are often mood readers, so you don’t necessarily have to pick a lane and stay in it forever. For a period of time, they may only want one specific thing. Right now, I’m in a contemporary mood. Next week I’ll be in a historical mood, and after that, I might be in a sci-fi mood.
However, if you want a faster route to profitability, picking a lane is a strategy that works. It’s just a strategy, and it’s a strategy that works if you’re looking at profitability.
If you are an artist, then you don’t have to listen to this advice. You have to determine what you want out of your career, and that’s the lane you need to pick.
If your goal requires you to be a very focused genre writer, then you do that.
If you are a different kind of writer and you want to write across various spectrums, you just need to set your goals accordingly.
Find the right readers, and then stay on your beautiful highway.
Joanna: Apart from focus, what are the other mistakes that either you’ve made yourself or that you see others make?
Ines: The main mistake I see… well, one person’s mistake can be another person’s boon. I feel that if you understand who you are, what you want, and what your goals are, you make fewer mistakes. They just become opportunities.
For me, you are not going to see me talking about politics in my books. I’m trying to escape it as much as I possibly can. But I see other authors who embrace it wholeheartedly, and the readers love them for it.
I see authors who post very personal things on social media. I am not that girl. I keep a lot of things close to my chest. You’ll feel like you know me, but you couldn’t tell a lot of actual facts about me after a conversation.
I don’t suffer from that because I know what my limits are. For other authors, that’s a mistake for them because they go too far. I really think it becomes about understanding who you are and what you want because this industry changes so fast you will get whiplash.
The thing that stays the same is you, your goals, and why you’re doing this. If you can keep that close to your chest, any potential mistake becomes an opportunity that you can really see and dig deep into to make the best of it.
Joanna: You mentioned you started in KU, but now you are selling direct as well as publishing wide. A lot of people think all romance authors are just KU authors.
Tell us about selling direct and wide.
Ines: I started in KU because I didn’t understand how to upload to the other retailers. Eventually, I learned, but I’m always looking at my goals, and my pen names have different goals.
My Ines Johnson pen name mostly writes paranormal and fantasy. My Shanae Johnson pen name is the queen of wholesome romance. She sticks to her lane. Those are my two main pen names.
Shanae can be wide because if you look on Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, or Google Play, you can see genres like contemporary western, military, and small-town romance. Those are universal.
Genres like paranormal romance, paranormal women’s fiction, and reverse harem were born on Amazon. Those specific categories were born there.
So I’m always watching not only what the industry is doing but what the readers are doing and where they are.
Shanae could go into KU with her clean and wholesome romance, but why, when there are readers everywhere? Ines could come out of KU, but why, when the readers for her genres are concentrated right there?
And yes, I am selling direct.
I sell more print books direct than I do on Amazon, and the margins are better for me there.
When you’re selling direct, you have to think about how you are different.
Amazon can’t do everything. Amazon can’t sell you the ebook, the audiobook, the print book, a special edition, and a swag pack all in one bundle.
For one Kickstarter I did for a spicy romance, I sold the ebook, the print book, and the audiobook. I also sold a webinar. Inside the book, there were some spicy scenes that dealt with rope play, so I got an expert to come on and give my readers a special demonstration, and they all got some rope. You can’t do that on Amazon.
You can give a completely different experience. You can have tea parties. You can build a book box with all kinds of amazing goodies. A friend of mine who’s really crafty made objects for her readers to go with the book. You can’t do that on Amazon.
Direct is an experience. It’s about bundles and creating an experience you can give your readers.
Joanna: You’ve got a Kickstarter campaign coming for Page Turner Planning.
Tell us about that and any tips for people who want to run a Kickstarter.
Ines: You really have to know yourself, your why, and your lane.
My number one strength on the CliftonStrengths chart is discipline. I like doing the same thing over and over again. My number two strength is achiever. I have to achieve; I have to evolve; I have to win something new. For the longest time, those two just clashed.
I’m a planner. Every day I get up—and I have a number of journals—every day, I get up and I record my data. It costs me about $2,500 to $3,000 a month to cover my living expenses, which is about $80 a day.
So I sit down in my little journal and I go through and check the dashboards to see how much I’ve earned, and I write the numbers down. I’m not just writing it down from Amazon because I’m wide, so I write all the numbers down.
I don’t put it in a spreadsheet; I just write them down, and that calms my mind. It reminds me, “Yes, you can do this self-employed thing. You can do this small business thing. You are fine. You have made the money to cover your expenses. You’re good. Now, go have fun.” And that’s where my muse starts to write the book.
When I’m on retreats, people look over my shoulder and ask me about my planners. I record my word count, what’s going on in the story… I have tons of different journals for all this information. It’s really anti-anxiety for me.
Two years ago, I started a little mastermind where I was showing people how to write with pacing, how I marketed, and all the prep work I did before the book was even out—how I set up my Instagram, my website, my newsletter.
I also knew I needed to go to the bank and get a DBA, which became an LLC, then maybe an S Corp. Because I have a couple of degrees in education, I figured out how to deliver the information in a logical sequence.
I would talk to them once a week about what they should be thinking about in their writing, their business, their branding, and their marketing.
As I was supposed to be writing Page Retention, the second book in my Page Turner series, I looked back at all this content from the mastermind—more than 52 weeks’ worth—and said, “This is a book.”
I turned that two-year-long experiment of helping people write their book, build their business, and market themselves into a planner. And that’s Page Turner Planning.
Joanna: That’s really useful.
How does a Kickstarter work? Why is the pre-launch page so important?
Ines: Kickstarter says you’re going to pull some people from your audience, but you’re going to pull a lot of new people to you. These new people don’t know you, so you have to introduce yourself and build trust.
I’m asking you for money for something that came from my brain. In this instance, it’s a product that will benefit you, but you don’t know me. I could be making all this stuff up.
So the pre-launch page is to give you sneak peeks and to build trust. Once you have those things, people are more likely to come on board and give you a try.
Joanna: What other things did you learn from your past Kickstarters that might help other people?
Ines: The first thing is fear. I was terrified to run my first Kickstarter. We’re both introverts who probably like to sit in our houses and write our books. I don’t like to put my business out there, but when you do something like Kickstarter, you’re putting your business out there for everyone to see, whether it succeeds or fails.
My very first Kickstarter was with my sweet pen name, Shanae Johnson, who has a huge audience. I got 30 backers. I limped my way to funding that Kickstarter and was all kinds of confused. I was very hesitant to do a second one. I had to do a lot of mindset work before I did the Page Turner Pacing Kickstarter.
The best thing I did was talking about it before it launched. These people didn’t know me. I had to show them that I knew what I was talking about first. Once people saw that and I was giving them free tidbits to try, that’s what worked.
Having tiers where they could just try something out and see… over 700 people backed that Kickstarter, Joanna. I’m still breathless over it. I had to have a moment to convince them, or maybe I convinced their friends, that I know what I’m talking about and that I’m really here to help.
Joanna: In terms of book marketing, what have you kept doing since 2014, and what have you changed?
Ines: I get these bursts of energy where I figure something out and I just want to tell everybody, because I truly want us all to win. So when you see me showing up on Instagram or TikTok, it’s because I figured something out and I want to show everybody. But then once I’ve told you, I go away.
I’m always writing. You will not find me without a piece of paper and a pen. So things like Substack really work for me because I have so much to write about on the nonfiction side.
In terms of marketing —
My number one piece of marketing advice is to find one new reader every single day.
I might find them using an AMS ad, a Facebook ad, an Instagram post, or at a book signing. Every day, I’m looking for just one new reader.
To distill what I learned in television, we used a formula called AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. That’s really what marketing is to me.
How are you going to get people’s attention?
You could use a startling statement, music, or color theory. We learned so much psychology on how to keep you in your seat.
Then, interest starts the storytelling bit of your advertising. Then you play on people’s desires—we mostly deal with emotional desires. And finally, you have to tell them to act with a call to action. That’s what marketing boils down to, whether you’re on TikTok, Instagram, or hand-selling in person.
Joanna: What has stayed the same? I still have an email list, which has been the core.
Do you think Substack has replaced email marketing for you?
Ines: My Substack is purely nonfiction, but I email my fiction list every week.
The thing that has stayed the same for me is consistency. I consistently publish. I’m consistently telling stories. I’m consistently talking to my audience.
I don’t stop. I’m consistently promoting.
Things in this industry change, but the part of you that doesn’t change is your goal to succeed. You just have to change how you’re going to succeed based upon what is moving and shaking in the industry. It’s that consistency and just showing up and using AIDA.
Joanna: How much is paid advertising a part of your marketing strategy?
Ines: It’s very much a part of my marketing strategy. I am always looking for where the readers are. If you tell me I can go on Facebook, where there are a lot of readers who read the books I write, and all I have to do is pay some money to talk to them, I’m going to pay. How else am I going to find them? It gets harder.
I’m thankful for paid advertising. Yes, I’m going to do social media. Yes, I’m going to do paid cost-per-click marketing. Yes, I’m going to do paid newsletters. Yes, I’m going to purchase a table at a signing event because guess who’s there? The readers.
My dad always says it takes money to make money, so I came into this business knowing that I was going to have to spend. I have my thresholds and I know when it’s not worth it, but I don’t think we can expect to come into a business and just start making money for free.
Joanna: You’ve been doing this for over a decade and have seen people leave the industry.
Why are you still here and still so upbeat?
Ines: I’m unemployable, Joanna!
But it really goes back to my dad and that lesson I learned about how story works. I feel that’s why I succeeded: because I understand how story works at a granular level. That’s what I try to tell people.
It’s because I studied the art form that I so love, and I never stop studying. I feel like every book I write is me practicing a new lesson. What am I going to study today?
Maybe I watched a television show and they did something with an unreliable narrator, and I think, “I want to try that.” I will break that down, looking for the structure, the way that I was taught to look in screenwriting, and then I will write that book.
I think I’m still here because I understood structure and I’m a consistent, permanent student of the structure of story.
Also business. I came from corporate television—National Geographic, Discovery Channel—so I always understood that I will not be a success unless I find the audience and get my product in front of them.
Joanna: Let’s come back to romance. It still feels like there’s some kind of stigma in the mainstream.
What do you say to authors who love romance but are scared of writing it because of what people might say?
Ines: Joanna, this is when my feral Gen X is about to come out. Seriously, if you are afraid, I don’t think you should do it.
If you don’t believe in “feel the fear and do it anyway,” then don’t do it. Do something else, because the romance readers will smell it on you. We are also feral creatures.
I so often forget that there is a stigma outside of Romancelandia because the party inside is so loud, it’s on and popping, and we’re all cheering each other on. We don’t come outside a lot, and when we do, we’re like, “Why are you guys out here? Come inside, it’s great in here!”
So, if you are not in the Romancelandia community, get yourself there. But if, after you see what it’s like, you’re still scared, don’t do it. That’s fine. You do not have to write romance. You can write something with a romantic element, and that might do better for you.
Joanna: If someone wants to come inside Romancelandia, how do they do that?
Ines: If you have a romance bookstore in your area, go. I just did my first trip to The Ripped Bodice in New York, and when I walked in those doors, I was like, “Oh, I’m home.” That’s what it feels like.
Go to the romance section of your library; you’ll find a friend. Go to the romance section of your bookstore; trust me, you will find a friend. I don’t know what it is about the people in this world, but as soon as we see you next to us and you pick up a book, we have something to say! “Girl, not that one. You need to read this one instead!”
If that’s not enough, or if you don’t have a bookstore with a romance section, look up romance conferences. Look up Romance Writers of America; even though they’ve struggled, there are still pockets of groups and chapters that have broken off that want to talk to you and will welcome you inside.
I really feel like it’s like when you get a new car and all of a sudden you see your car everywhere on the road. If you speak romance into the world and say you want a romance book sister, she will find you.
Joanna: We are out of time.
Where can people find you and your books and your Kickstarter online?
Ines: If you are an author, you’ll want to go and read my Substack. I’ve got tons of content there, so go to ineswrites.substack.com.
If you want to read any of my books, you can go to ineswrites.com for the paranormal and fantasy—all spicy, so gird your loins! If you want to read something clean and wholesome that you can share with your mom or your auntie, then you’ll go to shanaejohnson.com.
The Kickstarter should be findable on Substack or my site, but the direct link is ineswrites.com/kickstarter for the Page Turner Planning campaign.
Joanna: Thank you so much for your time, Ines. That was great.
There’s nothing like a sharp-tongued, quick-witted character to light up a scene—especially when the stakes are high or the tone is dark. From sarcastic sidekicks to roguish heroes, witty characters often steal the show. But when the humor feels forced or out of character, it can suck the life right out of a story. So why does some wit dazzle while other attempts fall painfully flat?
In the last few years, there have been a rash of movies (mostly summer blockbusters) that try really hard to live up to the witty legacies of films such as Indiana Jones and the original Star Wars, only to fall sadly short.
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), 20th Century Fox.
Why is this?
Often, it isn’t the jokes that are to blame. Words that might have been hilarious coming out of the mouth of Han Solo fall flat on their faces coming out of the mouths of other characters.
So what’s the difference?
In a nutshell: character.
The secret to pulling off a witty character is putting the emphasis not on the wit itself, but on the character.
As we’re planning or writing our stories, it’s easy to say, “You know, it would be fun to have a witty character. A wisecracking hero or a bumbling sidekick.” So we stick ‘em in. But our immediate problem with this decision is that we may be trying to force the humor, instead of allowing it to emerge organically from the character.
Humor grows all the more funny in context. And when that context is a fully developed personality, the humor is then able to offer not just a bigger laugh, but a deeper understanding of both the character and the plot.
If your characters are nothing more than smart mouths, readers will instantly perceive they’re cardboard cutouts, stuck in to garner a quick laugh. Some readers will forgive you for this, particularly if you do indeed happen to be able to write hilarious dialogue. But others may resent it as a gimmick and go looking for something that manages to combine both entertainment and depth.
When you craft characters who are fully realized—whose humor springs from their worldviews, flaws, and relationships—that’s when the wit lands with authenticity and impact. Humor can become more than a joke; it can be an insight. So next time you write a snappy one-liner, ask yourself: is it something this character would say, or something you wish someone would say? Instead of just sticking witty words in characters’ mouths, create complete personalities from whom the wit can flow realistically, organically, and engagingly
For more on writing authentic humor, see these posts:
Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What’s your best advice for writing witty characters? Who is a favorite example of one done right in fiction? Tell me in the comments!
How is the rise of AI changing the world of audiobooks for authors and narrators? Can a synthetic voice ever capture the nuance of human performance, and what does it mean to write for the ear, not just the eye? Jules Horne talks about the seismic shifts in the audiobook industry and how you can adapt your writing process for an audio-first world.
Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.
Jules Horne is a Scottish playwright, radio dramatist, poet, and fiction writer. She also writes nonfiction for authors, including the very useful Writing for Audiobooks.
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
The biggest industry shifts in audio, including the move to subscription models like Spotify and the impact of AI narration.
An honest assessment of the quality of AI voices—what are the ‘tells’ and how quickly are they improving?
Practical tips for adapting your nonfiction book for audio, from handling visuals and numbers to structuring for listener retention.
How to write fiction with an “audio-first” mindset, focusing on sentence length, dialogue tags, and the rhythm of your prose.
The potential for hybrid and multicast productions using a mix of human and AI voices.
Marketing and selling your audiobooks, including direct sales vs. platform exclusives.
Joanna: Jules Horne is a Scottish playwright, radio dramatist, poet, and fiction writer. She also writes nonfiction for authors, including the very useful Writing for Audiobooks. Welcome back to the show, Jules.
Jules: Hello, Joanna. Thanks very much for having me. It’s great to be here.
Joanna: It’s great to have you back. It was 2019 when you were last on the show. So first up—
Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and aspects of audio and performance.
Jules: Audio was never really a big thing in my life, but I did start writing very small and did a bit of, I guess, very junior theatre. When I studied literature at university, I got totally put off because it was so daunting.
I got into playwriting when a theatre company came to our local area and offered engagement workshops. That eventually led to some writing commissions. I ended up writing some stage plays and a few BBC radio dramas, which was really lovely to do.
I also worked in radio news writing and presenting for a while, so I did a bit of recording voice and writing for voice. I did a lot of presenting, so you kind of got a real feel for the flow of audio.
I loved editing different people’s voices; that was really fun, and the techie side. I think that led to an interest in audio first and also a real feel for voices in general and editing. It’s been a long-term interest of mine.
Joanna: As I mentioned, you were on the show in 2019 when we talked about writing for audiobooks, and you’ve updated the book since then. I wanted to come back to it because things have really changed over the last five and a half years.
What are some of the biggest industry shifts in terms of audiobook growth, publishing, subscription platforms, and technology changes?
Jules: It’s been astonishing; it’s just been extraordinary what’s happened in the last few years. We thought it was fast then, but what’s happened very recently has just been whoosh.
For many years, Audible and ACX were the dominant distribution platforms, with such a monopoly. All that time, audiobooks have been growing really, really strongly as a publishing niche with high growth and new markets taking off. It’s still really going strong.
I think one of the big things that’s changed is it has moved from one-off purchases to subscription models, similar to Netflix or Prime for TV and films. That’s been for a good few years now.
Then Spotify launched its audiobook tier in 2023, which was a bit of a game changer. It puts audiobooks alongside music and podcasts, and it really widens the audience.
Of course, that comes along with some worries for authors because Spotify hasn’t been great for musicians, with tiny royalties there. So, time will tell how that plays out.
Then of course, there’s AI, which is affecting every kind of sector. It has been expected for a while that Amazon would open the gates to AI voices, and now that’s happened. You can very simply upload your ebook as usual and then add an audiobook with virtual voices.
That’s bound to have a major impact on publishing and, of course, on livelihoods for audiobook narrators and actors. So, that’s a huge development in this last while.
Joanna: Any technological change has a lot of benefits and a lot of downsides. You mentioned Spotify and the worries over potential royalties, but from my personal perspective, I often think about these places as, yes, some income, but also marketing and reaching a much wider audience.
As a listener myself, I moved over to Spotify for podcast and music listening years ago, and then I moved my audiobook listening over. Now I wouldn’t go back because I listen quite differently and use the Spotify search engine and their algorithm.
It’s like we are meeting listeners where they are.
Yes, there are some good things and some bad things, but you can’t stop the change.
Jules: Absolutely. I think the widening of listenership and different people suddenly being introduced to your books in ways they wouldn’t have before is huge for authors. So, yes, definitely one to consider.
Joanna: We’re in a time where a lot of people say, “For some reason, I don’t read,” as if that’s something to be proud of. But a lot of people do listen. A lot of people listen in the car, when they’re exercising, or whatever they’re doing. I listen when I’m out walking.
I think having our books in audio is so important, and yet it has been very expensive, hasn’t it?
So again, the trade-off is that for a lot of authors, it’s not human or AI; it’s AI or nothing because they couldn’t have afforded it.
Jules: That’s right, and I think the thing with reading is really interesting too because more and more people are recognizing listening as a form of reading. The attitude to it being “just listening” is changing as well. People are imbibing books in different ways now.
The cost of AI is really approachable, and if that’s the only option, then that’s one that authors will definitely be considering. Particularly with KDP, where they’ve made it such an integral part of the overall indie publishing experience.
They’ve made it really simple to just upload, continue, and then you can preview some voices and try it out. You can try it out with different voices. It is quite extraordinary, and I think a lot of authors will probably choose that route.
Joanna: Just to timestamp this interview, we’re in the middle of June 2025. Just last week, I got an email from ACX with a survey. It included a whole load of questions around what I might want from AI voices.
It feels like even though the virtual voice is through the KDP dashboard and is quite simple, there might be something else on the horizon. Did you get that or what do you think?
Jules: I didn’t get that one. What were the questions? That’s really curious.
Joanna: They were things like, “Here’s a list of things that you might be interested in. Rate them in order of what you want.” And one of them would have been a lot more control of the text and the audio quality and sales platforms, like how to do much more marketing of things.
It was really interesting because I was like, “Oh, this seems very, very positive for the future.”
Jules: Yeah, that’s a really interesting one too, because the marketing side with ACX and Audible has been really difficult for authors, hasn’t it? You can’t really, unless you’re a vendor on Amazon, advertise your books, and you can’t price them. These kinds of things.
So I wonder if that’s maybe in the offering too. That would be great.
Joanna: People seem to criticize the AI voices, for example, and say, “Oh, well they’re not very good.” And it’s like, well, they’re a lot better than they were six months ago, and in six months’ time, they’re going to be even better.
I wanted to ask you about this because you are very experienced in all this different voice stuff, different elements of human voice performance. So I think your ear is probably very attuned.
Honestly, what do you think about some of the quality of these AI-narrated voices?
Jules: I think the quality’s changing super fast. What maybe sounds a bit monotonous now—and I think that’s the main quality that AI voices tend to have now—I think that’s going to change really fast.
When you hear some of the higher-end products in that space, like ElevenLabs, you realize the way things are evolving. It is quite astounding.
At the moment, there are very clear tells, and I think most people will be able to pick those up. Although, having said that, like in film imagery, it’s starting to get quite blurred as to whether you can tell or not.
I did test my partner on a couple of examples: “Is this an AI or is this not an AI?” And what’s really astounding is sometimes he thought a human voice was an AI.
Joanna: Mm-hmm.
Jules: Which is kind of, “Oh heck.” And that’s happening with photos and with films too. You remember that thing about food photography where people were saying the AI food photography looks much more appetizing and realistic. Where’s that heading?
Technically, it’s often things like the emphasis on the wrong syllable. I hear a lot of downward inflections. If you listen to the KDP examples, you hear this: “Once upon a time, there was a…” The rhythm and the pitch go down in quite a regular way, and over time that can get almost sleepy.
People often have much more variation; they go up at the ends of sentences and they go down. A lot of the AIs are kind of going down at the end. I’m hearing that a lot, and that might be somebody’s natural inflection, but I think it’s quite a pattern when you listen to the voice samples in KDP.
The other thing I notice as tells, but you have to listen blooming hard to hear these and really be on the alert for them, is emphasis on the wrong syllable. One I heard was like, “salt pans” rather than “salt pans,” or “hot to the touch” rather than “hot to the touch.” It might just slightly misplace the emphasis in a phrase.
I listened to your book; I think your voice clone is absolutely amazing.
Joanna: That’s a higher-end ElevenLabs voice clone.
Jules: Yes, and it sounds absolutely uncanny. Your voice timbre and the inflections in your voice are just amazing. All I could hear very occasionally was a slight misemphasis of something like “salt pans” rather than “salt pans.” It was that kind of thing, but that was the tell for me. Otherwise, I don’t think I’d have known.
Joanna: It is interesting. Coming back to what your husband thought, I sometimes listen to a sample of someone, an author reading their own work, and think, “Oh, I quite like his voice.”
Then after maybe half an hour, I’m like, “I can’t listen to this anymore.” So I feel like the level of judgment we have for human narration is also pretty similar.
As you mentioned, the wrong emphasis. I listened and directed almost every single line of that book, Death Valley, and we worked really hard. It’s very interesting because if I had narrated that myself as a human, I might have used the same emphasis and you would’ve thought that was different.
When we are proof-listening to humans, these things come up, don’t they? There are always things you might disagree with in terms of the way things are said.
Jules: Absolutely, and there are natural inflections in certain kinds of accents which might be indistinguishable from the way that an AI would say it. It might have a downward pattern, or that thing in lots of British English now where people have that rising inflection at the end.
I as a speaker of Scots wouldn’t know whether an accent which is from South Carolina or something is authentic or not. I think if you’re at a distance from the accent that the book is read in, you probably couldn’t tell.
Some of the Scottish accents, for example, because I’m really close to it, I’m finding, “Ooh, that doesn’t sound very authentic.” But with a lot of American accents, I really wouldn’t know where it was from or whether it was authentic or not.
I think conversely, that would happen for them with British accents. So it’s all about context. Often I’ve heard that if people are primed that it’s AI, then they listen in a different way than if they don’t know. So I think the blur is just something that’s going to get more and more blurry.
Joanna: I agree, and as you say, I label everything so people will know whether it’s human me or voice clone me. I also feel like people have different expectations of what they want from audio.
You mentioned the BBC radio dramas you’ve been involved with. Now, the expectation there is an incredibly high-quality human production, possibly with famous actors.
Compare that to me out for a walk listening to a nonfiction book on Spotify near a busy road. I have a completely different expectation of the content and the production than for a BBC radio drama.
There are different levels, aren’t there?
Jules: Yes, you’re listening in different ways and for different reasons, and there are different genres. You might be listening for information or for entertainment, and these things will change how you listen.
A lot of audiobooks narrated by AI are more towards nonfiction, which seems to me a sensible use when people are listening for information. Why does it have to be a very highly performed, highly characterized kind of voice?
Whereas if you’ve got a novel with lively characterization, you want to hear that spoken in a particular way. If it leaps off the page, you want it to leap off in the audio experience as well. So I think they’re very different contexts.
Joanna: Again, with a radio drama, there’s the multicast production, maybe with sound effects. This is something that for indie authors has been almost entirely impossible because of the expense and the technical skill you need to edit a multicast radio drama.
What are your thoughts on multi-voice with AI? Is that going to make it more accessible to people?
Jules: I think it’s open to experiment and to people trying these things out because these are new possibilities that are coming in.
I really am interested in what that might mean for radio drama because that definitely means huge implications for actor jobs, which is a massive concern. In film, you’re seeing people using avatars and artificial sets. It’s really quite seismic throughout the creative industries.
For indie authors, it is an opportunity to try some things out. I don’t know whether many people have yet tried that multi-voice with AI voices, but things like the voice changer are quite transformative. It’s really fun to actually try that out.
With that, you get the expressiveness and the inflections of your own emotion put across, so the spacing and the intensity are in there, but you can change the timbre and the voice quality. That’s really interesting.
I wonder if indie authors, and indeed producers in the radio drama sphere, might be starting to experiment with that kind of thing because it certainly gives you the option of a massive cast, which you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.
In film, you’ve got CGI, and in some ways, people have been able to build crowd scenes that they wouldn’t have had the budget to do. What are the options then in the sound world? It’s a really interesting time.
Joanna: I can see, for example, maybe you keep the big-name actors because they’re the ones on the headlines, but then there might be 20 other voices in the production. Perhaps somebody would’ve just narrated a couple of lines, like the police person coming to the door.
I think at the moment it’s “this whole book is AI narrated” or “this whole book is human,” but I can see a sort of hybrid approach with multicast-type production.
Jules: I can, but actually I think it’d be a real pain to edit. With an actor’s versatility and different performance skills, I think there’s a bit of a difference for me between a trained actor with massive performance skills, which are just brilliant to hear, and someone who’s maybe got a beautiful voice but hasn’t got the performance background for a novel.
I think I’d be looking for that in a narrator every time. I just think they’ll do a superb job of that, and part of the interest for the listener is also hearing your Stephen Frys or actors who have got that kind of really engaging versatility and a lovely voice.
I just think that’s a more immersive and compelling experience for me. I don’t think it’ll ever quite go there, and I think actors will actually do it more effectively. It’s just that it does cost a lot more.
Then your editing costs, your production cost, I think would be quite high doing multi-voice with short-fire dialogue. I think that would be quite epic to achieve.
Joanna: But again, that might be now. There are already famous people licensing their voices, and also the estates of the dead. You mentioned Stephen Fry, who is still alive as we record this and is a wonderful writer, actor, and voice.
Is it likely that Stephen Fry will license his voice, or that his heirs and successors will license his voice after he dies?
I often think of David Attenborough here.
Jules: Oh gosh.
Joanna: His voice is super famous, isn’t it? As British people, it’s like this voice is iconic. I cannot see how the BBC won’t be trying to license Attenborough’s voice.
Jules: Oh god, that’s a terrible thought. I can’t imagine him doing it. I think he’d be horrified if his estate and the family did it. That would be such a betrayal, but I guess some people are going there and considering it. I did spot one on ElevenLabs which was somebody who had licensed their voice, who does a lot of audio online.
Joanna: ElevenLabs has Laurence Olivier, Deepak Chopra, Maya Angelou…
Jules: Wow. Have they really got famous voices in there?
Joanna: Burt Reynolds, I’m just looking now. Richard Feynman. They’ve got these iconic voices. They’ve got John Wayne.
Jules: Oh my goodness. What would John Wayne make of that? What would Laurence Olivier make of this?
Joanna: This is the thing. I think it’s very hard. You fast forward a decade, and goodness knows, this will be either completely normal or something else. It is a very interesting time.
Jules: Yes. I’ve certainly had my mind blown by listening to some of these voices and understanding what’s possible. It is really mind-blowing.
Joanna: Regardless of whether we work with human narrators or AI narration, we still need to keep in mind principles around writing for audio. It’s not a case of, “Here’s the existing book in text and it will just be perfect in audio.” So, let’s start with nonfiction.
What are some of the things we need to keep in mind if we are trying to adapt a nonfiction book into audio?
Jules: For nonfiction, the main thing is there are lots of visual elements that are in nonfiction books like graphs, layout features, and header hierarchies. For that, you need to find some kind of workaround, such as maybe one of these PDF uploads, or just cut these elements.
You need to look very carefully at what visual elements don’t translate well into audio.
Numbers are another thing that’s a little bit tricky because they’re hard to take in. Your brain just doesn’t hold more than five or seven things at one time. There are certain radio conventions like rounding up and down.
Also things in radio like putting somebody’s job before their name, like “the company boss, Fred Bloggs” rather than “Fred Bloggs, the company boss,” because we take the context in best first and then go into the details. I think context and details is a useful concept in audio writing generally.
Other techniques that are really good are forward flagging. So, “Up next, you’ll hear…” You hear that a lot on the radio so people are a bit better oriented. Then backward flagging: “So, we’ve just heard about wombats and now we’re moving on to koala bears.”
That kind of structuring and giving signals so that people are better oriented is pretty important in nonfiction in particular.
Joanna: You mentioned lists of numbers. I go further and say lists in general. Sometimes I’ll be listening to an audiobook and there’s clearly a list of bullet points in the text, but the way it’s read sometimes just doesn’t work.
I think rewriting lists into a more coherent paragraph can work. I guess the overall point is you are adapting for audio, so sometimes you will actually have to rewrite sections.
Jules: Absolutely. What I’ve found more productive over the years is writing audio-first, and then I don’t have to spend time doing that work of rewriting. I did find that I needed an awful lot of cuts and then some rejigging, as you say. Now I actually write audio-first, then I don’t have to do that editing.
Joanna: But what do you mean by that?
When you’re saying, “I write audio-first,” what do you mean?
Jules: I always read it out loud as I’m writing and test it for whether it will work on air. I’m writing it as a kind of performance. The sentences are shorter. I won’t use really awkward words. I’ll make sure the order of information is right, just so that it unfolds well for the listener.
There are things like mental backflips, where asides are a bit trickier with audio, so I’ll probably avoid that kind of structure.
So, definitely reading it aloud, and to be honest, I think that that actually improves your writing anyway because it gives it more clarity. I just find that has been really helpful for me as an editor.
Joanna: For me, I often use a lot of references in my nonfiction books at the end of the chapter. Part of my adaptation is removing a lot from the narration. Some people are quite religious, like, “No, you have to read every single line that’s in the ebook.” And I’m like, well, no, you don’t.
It’s not even abridged if you don’t include things like resource lists or appendices. As you mentioned, you can do a download PDF.
Jules: Exactly, because they’re not going to make very compelling audio. They’re just going to sound like that long list of things. URLs are terrible as well. It’s great to just put those into a PDF, which most of the platforms now allow you to upload.
That adds value as well to what you’re providing for the readers. I think that’s a really legitimate way to solve that.
Joanna: Although as a listener, I never, ever download the PDF.
Jules: True. But we know it’s there if anyone does want to.
Joanna: On URLs, if there are URLs you do want to say, I use pretty links on my site to make an easy-to-say, easy-to-read URL as opposed to the super, super long one. But generally, it’s hard to listen to and unless someone’s taking notes, it doesn’t really matter.
Jules: Good call. And “www” is so hard to say, so you can just take that bit off and just say, “yoursite.com.” You don’t need to have the “www.” That’s already saving you loads of syllables.
Joanna: That’s an interesting thing around human narration versus AI narration. With human narration, sometimes I will pick up on things, whether it’s me or another professional, and I will have read a different word, a word that’s not even there, or I would never have said “www” out loud because I just assume it wouldn’t be read.
Of course, with AI narration, it is going to read every single thing. It’ll be really literal.
Jules: Absolutely.
Joanna: So you do have to take it away. I will add there, one of the benefits is if there is a mispronunciation across the whole book, you only have to change it once with AI and it will update the whole thing.
Jules: Oh, that’s very handy. For character names and all that kind of thing.
Joanna: Yes, that is super useful. Okay, so let’s come back to fiction then.
If we are writing for audio-first, what are some tips for fiction?
Jules: I think some of these points are general, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. So things like order of information and clarity and not overloading, so that there’s too much for the listener to take in at once.
Remember the context that people are listening in rather than reading. They’re very often doing something else. They might be in the car, or there might be noises in the background, or they might be rushing around doing jobs in the house. So, it really needs to be very clear. You can’t emphasize that enough.
Some kinds of fiction are more reflective and maybe have lots of long sentences. Long sentences can be hard for a human narrator to read really effectively. So look at the length of sentences.
I heard some plays being read in my early days, and it was quite horrendous because I realized my sentences meant the actors couldn’t breathe. That’s a really useful tip for fiction.
That reading out loud tip I think is really important. Also, you can maybe cut some of the “he said, she said.” Depending on whether it’s a straight narration of a novel or a character performance style of audiobook, you might be able to cut some of the scaffolding.
Joanna: In fact, one of the most annoying things as a listener is the repetition of words or sounds. A lot of early writing advice was, “Oh, just use ‘he said, she said’ always, because it disappears on the page.”
It might disappear to the eyes, but it doesn’t disappear to the ear. So as you say, get rid of “he said, she said” and use action tags like, “Morgan walked to the window” and then starts speaking. You don’t have to use the word “said.”
On your breathing point, another editing tip I found with AI audio is you just add in more punctuation.
It might be incorrect punctuation according to written editorial, but it’s punctuation that helps with the direction of the AI audio.
Jules: Absolutely. I do that as markup in the script anyway. You wouldn’t put that in the printed form, but I used to use a lot of slashes and things and extra commas religiously to make sure the breathing was clear. So I would absolutely do that for an audiobook.
If you go into the studio, if you’re reading your own, it might not be the same as your printed book, but I would have a version where all those things are in there. It saves you a lot of time later on. It saves you fluffing quite a lot.
I think the other thing that’s important for fiction is where you land in sentences. There’s kind of real estate within sentences, which includes the beginnings and ends of sentences.
Sometimes I used to read student fiction and quite often something like the murder weapon might be buried in the middle of a paragraph and slightly go under. Whereas if you build up to something and then it’s “the knife,” that’s kind of resonant.
It’s something from poetry; the use of lines and where things land can be really powerful on air. It’s really worth thinking about that when you’re writing, using those powerful places because they give such clarity to what’s going on and make it easier to follow.
Joanna: I actually think that people have to be listeners in order to understand this. If you don’t listen to audiobooks and then you’re trying to make an audiobook—
You need to be listening to audiobooks in order to understand what sounds good.
Jules: Absolutely. I think you have to do your research and listen to books in your genre and get the feel for it and really look closely at the writing.
I learned a lot from reading writers really closely and working out what they’re doing, what tricks and techniques they are using. I think that’s a really valuable thing for getting into audio-first writing.
Joanna: I also just wanted to mention that, as we record this, it’s not out yet, but the ElevenLabs Version 3 is going to have direction available in square brackets. So you can say [whispered] and the dialogue will be whispered, as opposed to you having to write, “she whispered.” You can direct the voice within the text.
So that is going to be hopefully available, I guess, let’s say autumn 2025 maybe. So that’s certainly going to be interesting.
Jules: It sounds really interesting. It reminds me a bit of music where you have the annotation for music notes and then you have an extra layer on top, which is the expression, what’s emphasized and what goes loud and what goes soft. So it’s kind of aligned to that. I think that’s a really interesting development.
Joanna: I think the other thing I’ve heard about is, at the moment we’re talking about doing a lot of direction in the text, but essentially—
At some point, you should just be able to upload a book and it should be able to do all of that itself. There’ll be a lot more tools and help with it. What do you think?
Jules: I’m not sure about that. I’m a bit skeptical because I just think human performance has got lots of expressive possibilities that I don’t see AI easily being able to reproduce. So I’m kind of on that fence at the moment. But also, knowing how much things are changing, it’s really hard to tell.
What I noticed in ElevenLabs is that you have these sliders. I thought that was really intriguing, that there are different sliders where you can move different parameters.
It’s not just a case that you have that voice and that’s what you work with. You can also tweak it and have it at low or high intensity and kind of change things.
So it’s interesting what you were saying about working with your producer there and the degree of control that you have within that, which I think people are maybe not aware of. It’s not just a case of uploading it and there it is, but there are lots of tweaks you can do on the way.
Joanna: Yes, I mean, there’s a total spectrum of what you can do in audio. What I would like is the stratification of audio rights, where you can license a book for human narration and you can license a book for AI narration and then multicast.
So it’s not just one thing; you can have different variations and then different price points as well.
People expect to pay more for a multicast human actor audio than they do for AI narration.
Jules: I think that’s similar to what’s happening with books. Special add-ons and special formats that are really sort of artisanal command a premium price. So, I think similarly with audio, that may happen there as well.
Joanna: I just want to pick up there. You said artisanal, whereas I would say artisanal. This is a classic case of two humans actually pronouncing a word differently, and that also speaks to how difficult it is to direct a human or an AI.
Jules: Absolutely. The same word pronounced differently by different people in different countries. It’s a really interesting consideration in audiobooks for lesser-known languages or lesser-known dialects because it’s an opportunity to maybe hear them more.
Or voice clones could be used for that kind of thing and maybe give more airing to lesser-known dialects. So maybe more variety in the kinds of audiobooks that people can produce.
Joanna: When I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair a few years ago, I heard a Ghanaian publisher, and she was basically saying, “You are all discussing this about English language audiobook production. You have this developed market, you have all the structural stuff that you need to have a really strong audiobook culture. We don’t have that, and now we are going to build it.”
In the English language, we have a long history of doing this, so there are a lot of people in the industry. But there are countries where there’s nothing in their native languages. So I think this is another opportunity, as you say.
Jules: Absolutely. I think that’s an awesome opportunity. It’s been the same with books as well. I think access to the means of production is really opening up things for people, and I think that’ll just give such great variety for listeners. I think that’s only positive.
Joanna: Before we finish, you are obviously an author and you also produce audiobooks. How do you recommend authors try and sell more books in audio?
What are some of the ways that you market your audiobooks?
Jules: At the moment, that’s not too easy because I’m with Audible solely, and it’s usually on the back of the print and ebooks. So what I would do is advertise that through Amazon and get some audiobook sales on the back of that.
Sometimes I’ve given out QR codes and that kind of thing, but by and large, they’re just advertising on my site and I use the marketing via Amazon ads. I’m hoping that there will be more chance of audiobook-direct advertising in the future because that’ll make a huge difference.
One thing I’ve never done, which I’m interested in—I think you do this, Joanna—is it’s possible to sell books on your own website as well. Some authors are withdrawing from being with Amazon and only selling their audiobooks themselves.
Some authors have taken it into their own hands. So there is that possibility as well. Services like BookFunnel let you have your fans who want to buy your books and buy direct.
Joanna: Yes, it is actually the most profitable way to sell audiobooks, especially in bundles. For example, at CreativePennBooks.com, you can buy bundles of my audiobooks. So you get a good deal, I get more profit, and I get paid immediately.
If you go wide, to me now, going wide means having your own store plus all the other things as well. Whereas you can’t do bundling on Audible because of the credit system. Of course, if you go non-exclusive with Audible, your royalty drops precipitously. So it is definitely a choice, but it can certainly be done.
Okay, fantastic.
So tell people where they can find you and your books online.
Jules: I’m online at www.method-writing.com and you can buy my ebook and print books there, and my audiobooks are on Amazon.
Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jules. That was great.
Jules: Thanks for having me, Joanna. It’s a pleasure.
Is the high cost of audiobook production holding you back? What if you could create a high-quality audiobook for a fraction of the traditional cost?
In this conversation, Simon Patrick explores the world of AI narration with ElevenLabs, discussing how you can gain complete creative control, and even license your own voice clone for a new stream of income.
Simon Patrick founded Ten Times Better Books to support his daughter, Abby Patrick, as one of ElevenLabs’ first users and beta testers. He has produced several of their most popular AI voices. He now develops courses and AI audiobook solutions for independent authors at Novel Productions.
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
Costs vs benefits of human vs AI narration
Features of ElevenLabs — realistic and expressive voices, creative control, ownership of final audio files for wide distribution to platforms like Spotify.
Joanna: Simon Patrick founded Ten Times Better Books to support his daughter, Abby Patrick, as one of ElevenLabs’ first users and beta testers. He has produced several of their most popular AI voices. He now develops courses and AI audiobook solutions for independent authors at Novel Productions. Welcome to the show, Simon.
Simon: Thank you, Joanna. It’s such a joy to be speaking with you. Your podcast and books were foundational to my daughter, Abby, becoming an author and me learning to be her publisher and all that’s happened since.
I love your Patreon @thecreativepenn. It’s the best money I spend every month, frankly. It’s just a great community to be part of, so it’s such a joy to be sharing some of what I’ve learned.
Joanna: Oh, thank you so much. Behind the scenes on the Patreon, Simon has done a video demo of ElevenLabs. Today, obviously, we’re doing audio-only. So first up—
Tell us a bit more about your background and why you decided to get into AI-narrated audiobooks.
Simon: Okay. Well, I’ve got 25 years of experience in marketing and design. I still am halftime head of communications for an international charity, but we’ve always had our own businesses too.
My wife and I ran a small home education tuition publishing business. We’ve home-educated our three kids, which brings me to Abby, my daughter who brought me into your world of book publishing.
She was going to college, studying early years education, and was just bored out of her mind. She asked if she could drop out of college to be a writer instead. She’d been writing a book since she was 15. To the astonishment of her friends and some of ours too, we said yes.
Let me add, it was responsible parenting. We made her finish the term, stick it out, and do the work experience. By Christmas 2019, she’d left to pursue finishing her book based on the deal that —
If she learned to write, I would learn to publish for her.
Joanna: Wow!
Simon: So I attended the first Self Publishing Show in that crazy spring of 2020. I think you were there too, just a few days before the pandemic shut us all down. I’ve listened to hundreds of your podcasts, read your books, done some of the Self-Publishing Formula courses, and learned to be Abby’s publisher.
Since then, I have used those skills and connected with a few other authors, so I probably publish a book or two a month, something like that.
Audio has always been the stumbling block. I love audiobooks. As a family, we must consume hundreds of hours a month of them. There are incredible narrators like Ray Porter and Daniel Rigby, who self-narrates his own Audible exclusives, and my absolute favourite, a guy called Jeff Hayes, who narrates incredibly.
They’re amazing talents, and I don’t think AI is going to touch them because they bring so much humanity to the performance.
But to ordinary authors and publishers, those narrators are inaccessible. I don’t even want to think about what they cost.
For Abby, who is still just starting out, any professional narration would cost her three to four thousand dollars for her books. The math just doesn’t work. While there are options like a royalty split with ACX, Audible’s publishing platform, I struggle with that.
Firstly, you’re tied in exclusively to Audible for seven years, and we’re big fans of going wide.
Secondly, you’re only getting 20% of the royalties when it’s being split. I just don’t think for us, they’re ever going to make that money back. So all of that is what led me in early 2023 to be searching for AI audio options.
ChatGPT was going crazy, you were demoing all of that at the time, and I figured there must be some kind of AI audio option that would let me take control of the process and hopefully produce good audiobooks way more cheaply than current options. That’s when I discovered ElevenLabs.
Joanna: There’s lots to unpack there. First of all, as you mentioned, there are some incredible human narrators, and we want to acknowledge them. I’m also a human narrator myself.
For most authors, especially indie authors or new authors, it’s not a choice between human or AI; it’s AI or nothing because they can’t afford the fees.
As you said, a lot of the time you don’t know if you’re going to make the money back. So I think that’s really important to acknowledge.
There are lots of AI narration options now. It is hard for authors to decide which platform to use.
So what is ElevenLabs, and why do you think it’s the best option for quality and also for publishing reach?
You mentioned ACX, and there’s obviously AVV, the Audible Virtual Voice. Most people might think, “Well, maybe I should just do that.”
Give us an overview on why you made that decision to go with ElevenLabs.
Simon: Absolutely. ElevenLabs continues to be the most realistic AI platform out there. They kicked off about two and a half years ago. I was one of their first users, and even back then, they were so much better than everything else.
There were lots of programmers wanting to do clever things with APIs and websites, but I just wanted to make audiobooks with these things. They were actually listening, which is remarkable in the publishing industry sometimes.
About a year and a half ago, and for reference, we’re in June 2025 right now, they launched ElevenLabs Studio. It can take a whole book, like the ePub that I’ve worked on for Abby or a Word document, you can drop it in and have it convert it chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph into a great-sounding audiobook.
The high quality and natural-sounding elements of it are why I was first attracted to them. The expressiveness is just another step above.
The comparison with Amazon’s Virtual Voice is that it’s so much more pleasant to listen to, but it doesn’t just sound better —
What I love about it is the complete creative control it gives me. There are thousands of voices I can pick from, a whole library of voices.
They’re real people, people like me, actually, who have recorded their voice and then licensed it to ElevenLabs and get paid a small amount. Then when it’s used, there’s actually compensation to those who’ve licensed their voices to it.
It’s not like the large language models like ChatGPT where the whole universe seems to have been scraped and compiled into this thing. They’re being super diligent about making sure it’s all kosher, that it’s real people’s voices and they’re getting compensated.
Beyond that, the tools they’re building give you control. They’re incredibly open to listening to feedback, which has been brilliant. I’m talking to the programmers regularly. They’ve got a great Discord where they’re asking for feedback.
With the tools, I can spend time perfecting the book. I can get the dialogue just the way I want it. I can create a duet audiobook with a male narrator for male POVs and a female for female POVs. I can even do multi-cast and assign different voices to each character in the book.
Probably most importantly, I can download the whole thing as WAV files or MP3s.
The big difference with something like Amazon Virtual Voice is that I own what I’ve created with ElevenLabs.
It’s a commercial license, so I can put them into BookFunnel’s audio delivery service, I can put them on my website, you can add them to a Kickstarter, stick them on YouTube, or just give them away for free if I wanted to.
In terms of publishing reach, they’re doing a lot. We were kind of stuck with either self-publishing, YouTube, or Kobo, who are superstars and super open. But one of the game changers that’s happened in the last few months is you can now add them to Spotify, which has come in as the big disruptor for Audible and Amazon.
You’ve done that recently with the book that we produced together. How’s that been?
Joanna:Death Valley, which has been on the feed, you can listen to a couple of chapters, and that’s using my voice clone. We’ll come back to the voice clone in a minute.
As you mentioned, I think it’s mainly the ownership of the files and the Spotify distribution.
At the moment, it really is only Google’s auto-narration and ElevenLabs that you can use legitimately on Spotify through Findaway Voices. You cannot use the AVV files anywhere else.
So I think that’s incredibly important because, of course—
We can talk forever about how to make audio, but it’s also about selling audio, isn’t it?
Simon: And for anyone who’s dealt with KDP or Audible customer services, I probably don’t have to say what the experience was like. So another reason I love ElevenLabs is their support has been brilliant.
There’s this Discord I mentioned where there are dozens of super helpful and patient people giving input. Their customer service team replies quickly, it’s personal, they’re helpful, and they’ve got amazing documentation.
Stepping back a little bit, the fact that we can create well-narrated audiobooks for a hundred to two hundred dollars plus a few days of learning and production on each one is just incredible.
I took my two boys to a local Comic-Con recently, and there was a self-published author there with a single beautiful book. He’d clearly poured his heart and money into this thing.
There were beautiful cover bookmarks and giveaways, and then I saw he had an audiobook. We got talking about it. He’d got it professionally narrated, and he opened up and said it cost £7,000.
I honestly wanted to cry. I genuinely get emotional about it even now. I want us as authors and publishers to put our time, energy, and money into creating incredible stories and getting our words out into the world and just make everything around that as simple as possible, using tech where we can.
Joanna: I just want to comment on this because one of the reasons we timestamp these episodes is because I’ll have people email me and say, “Oh, but you said this,” and I’m like, “Yeah, but when did I say that?”
For example, in 2014 when I started audiobook publishing on ACX, they were the only thing out there, and they were the bee’s knees. We had a much higher royalty rate, there were very few audiobooks around, and you could make that money back. The amount of money you mentioned, you could make back quite quickly.
Now, I know some people will be saying, “Oh, but I make that money back.” And I’m like, “Well, yeah, if you are an established author, absolutely.” If you have a popular series, if you know that you already make that kind of money from audiobooks, then you can.
We are in a different era in 2025. There’s a lot more audio, and of course, AI is a double-edged sword. There is going to be more audio than ever before.
The question is, how do we make that money back?
If we lower the costs, then we also lower the amount of revenue we need to make to offset that.
Simon: And you know, it’s going to move on fast, but now is an extraordinary time. I love good audiobooks, and the fact that AI can help me make those now is very exciting to me.
Joanna: It’s super fun. You and I both have a reasonably technical background, so we can use these tools. To be fair, you said wonderful documentation. I am terrible at reading documentation. I just jump in and give it a go.
There are people who don’t know anything about AI audio. How does it work?
Can you give a few key elements and tips for authors if they want to use ElevenLabs for AI narration?
Simon: Yeah, I’ve got five tips for you. First, go in and check it out. There is a creator package that you can get for half price for the first month. I would say for exploration, it is worth getting for $11 just to have a little bit of a play with it.
Getting familiar with the platform can be a little intimidating because it does lots of different things, like voice changing, sound effects, and dubbing video.
We are really only interested in the Studio tool. As soon as you go into that Studio tool, it will start to feel familiar. You can click “Create an audiobook,” drop your ePub in there, and basically instantly see how this thing works, breaking it into chapters, applying a voice, and clicking play.
The warning though is this creator package, at $22 a month, is not good enough to create professional audiobooks. This is my first tip: you need the Pro package, which is $99 a month, because that is what outputs 192 kilobits per second.
That’s the technical specification that you need to go on BookFunnel or Spotify. You only get that by using the $99 a month package. You get about 10 hours of audio creation in that, so for a lot of people, that could make a book. The hours roll over, so you can either wait for month two and have enough hours to do it.
As soon as you’re done with your book, you can downgrade to a $5 a month package, so don’t worry, it’s not trapping you in there. Just know that you need the $99 a month Pro package to produce your audiobooks.
My second tip is to —
Really spend time choosing or making your voice.
You had an experience with this, Joanna, where you try out a voice, commit to it, and then realize two or three chapters in that you don’t like it. I’ve had that experience too.
So use that first month on the creator package to really play with voices. Generate your first chapter in five or six different voices. Really get familiar and comfortable with a voice that you want to use so that you’re not wasting time and credits when you get into producing something.
Third, don’t get overwhelmed; have fun with it. It’s amazing hearing your book come to life in audio. I feel if you give it an hour, the Studio tool is pretty intuitive. If you have the level of tech ability to do something like typesetting in Atticus or Vellum or use Scrivener, you can absolutely master using Studio.
My fourth tip, and a warning, is that it still takes time. This isn’t some one-button wonder. Your novella, Death Valley, was six and a half hours long. That took 18 hours of editing.
Joanna: And this is where people get confused because with AVV, the Audible Virtual Voice, there is no control. You literally do click one button and it goes live. There’s almost no point in proof-listening to it because you can’t actually change it.
With Studio, you have such fine control that you can add pauses, a breath in the middle of a sentence, or change the emphasis.
You kind of direct it with Studio, don’t you?
Simon: That’s the word I use, yes. Directing. It’s like you’re directing an audiobook. If you are doing non-fiction, it is borderline a one-click wonder. It will deliver it amazingly, and you need to listen to it once, and you’re good to go.
If you’ve spent a year or two writing a book, think about the effort we put into making it look good in the typesetting and the covers. A day or two to listen to it, refine it, and make it represent your vision is not time wasted. I’m only interested in high-quality audiobooks that do the story justice.
I want to be proud of it. I want Abby to be proud of it. I highly encourage people, particularly fiction writers, to be prepared to spend two or three days working on the book. It is so rewarding to get something that comes out the other end that you are proud of.
Joanna: And just on the proofing, if you work with a human narrator, you will be doing proofing. You listen to the audio, find the timestamp, explain what you want changed, and send it back to the human to rerecord.
The process is probably pretty similar in terms of the amount of time taken, but you can do it yourself, and there are areas that help.
For example, if there’s a character name, you can fix that once for the whole audio, can’t you?
Simon: Correct. It’s a pronunciation dictionary for any words. It really struggled with “croissant.” It does little random things. I think our favorite was when it pronounced “desert” as “dessert.”
Joanna: It just would not stop wanting some dessert! What are some other tips?
Simon: My fifth and final tip right now, and this is only pertinent to those listening as this is broadcast, is if you are wanting to do an audiobook for your fiction book, you should wait.
If you’re doing non-fiction, the existing models are amazing. But last week, their Version 3 model was released, and it is a game-changer.
The initial reactions are, “I can never go back to Version 2.”
Version 3, from an expression and liveliness perspective, but also from a control and direction perspective, is changing the game. It wasn’t even supposed to come out for a couple of months, so they’re moving forward with this fast.
The real reason to wait is it’s got one massive feature upgrade that I’ve been waiting for for at least a year: You can add emotion tags. Previously, if we wanted someone to whisper, sometimes it would figure it out from the text.
Other times, we would literally be adding, “he whispered,” “she shouted,” “he said excitedly.” We were kind of gaming the system.
Now, we can add tags in square brackets to the text like [whispers], [shouts], [says thoughtfully], [says in a British accent].
There is this whole world of things it can do that allows us to work much more effectively as a director, particularly for dialogue and emphasis. There is even a button that will read the text and put in suggested tags throughout the book. The AI is reading those instructions but not reading them out loud.
So it is the big breakthrough in terms of us creating audiobooks that sound exactly how we want them to.
Joanna: That is really good. I’m looking forward to that as well. Let’s wind it back for people. You mentioned non-fiction quite quickly.
For non-fiction, what do I do about the table of contents, URLs, or images in my text?
Simon: When you upload the ePub, you can just delete those bits.
I feel like people forget that you have control. You can completely change the front matter, the back matter, and the bits around it to be something that’s going to work most effectively when it’s delivered on the platforms you want. And you can create different versions.
Joanna: And I think it’s really important for people to remember with audiobooks that it is an adaptation, however you’re doing it. It is a different product.
With Death Valley, for example, I would say to you, “Oh, well, let’s just rewrite that sentence,” because it would be easier for me to rewrite it and it will keep the same meaning.
Simon: Exactly. You have that luxury as the author, which is why people doing it themselves is wonderful. When producing your book for you, I can’t take those liberties.
Joanna: So let’s come to the voice clone idea because, of course, you mentioned earlier that you’ve licensed your voice. We used my voice clone for Death Valley, and I am still on the fence as to whether or not to license that publicly.
What are some tips for people who want to license their voice or do a voice clone?
Simon: For me, it’s been amazing getting this bonus income that I totally didn’t expect. For Abby, it’s been life-changing. She is the most popular English British female voice. She’s called Amelia on ElevenLabs. She’s earning enough from her voice that she could quit a toxic job and go full-time writing. It’s extraordinary.
So, in terms of tips, if you are recording your own voice, whether you are going to use it yourself or think about sharing it with others, first of all, the quality of the recording is essential.
You want to be using a good microphone in a quiet place. There are lots of tools to clean it up, but nothing is going to compare to something that’s recorded well.
When you are delivering your voice, the delivery needs to be varied but consistent. I generally get authors to read their own book. You want to give variations in terms of tone and volume, from whispering through to high energy, as though you are reading to an engaged audience.
You do not want to put on character voices. That’s really important. The AI will pick up on the variations in your delivery, but it gets very confused if you’ve done character voices because it doesn’t know how those fit in with how you speak.
A cheat code for improving the quality if you don’t have a really good mic or a quiet area is Adobe Podcast. It’s a free service with an enhanced speech function. You can put your recording in there and massively improve how it sounds.
The tip is to not put it out at a 100% treatment; you want kind of 70% to 90% of their enhanced speech applied, or else it sounds too obviously affected by AI.
Joanna: And right now, my J.F. Penn voice is my voice, and I’m the only one who can use it.
There’s another step if you want to license it and put it in the voice market, isn’t there?
Simon: Yes, and the first challenge of that is genuinely a moral evaluation. If you want to monetize your voice, you have to decide if you are prepared for your voice to be used to say almost anything.
ElevenLabs has controls to stop things like hate speech or sexual content, but to really monetize it, you have to switch off a feature called “live moderation,” which prevents things like swearing.
As soon as you turn that live moderation on, your voice becomes unavailable for most uses that would make money, like audiobooks or conversational AI.
The second option to consider is the notice period. You can choose to have the right to instantly withdraw your voice or set a notice period of up to two years. They pay more if you’re prepared to have a longer minimum period.
As a producer, I am not going to start using someone’s voice for an audiobook series if I might not have it to use in three months’ time. I instantly filter for anything less than a year’s notice period and generally only pick two years.
If you want to monetize your voice, you have to turn live moderation off and give a two-year notice period, in my opinion.
A final tip would be to be safe. Do not publicly share your voice’s name and connect it with you as a person. Forget about voice recognition for telephone banking, for example.
Also, do your research. See what voices are most popular, what descriptions work best, and think about the sample you provide.
Joanna: As we head towards a close, we do need to quickly come back to —
ElevenReader. It’s an emerging place to publish audiobooks, too. You can also upload e-books, and then listeners can choose the voice.
Back in 2020, I wrote in my book on AI that at some point there will be an app where listeners can choose whatever voice they want to listen to my book in, and this is it.
Simon: It’s super exciting. It’s an app you’ll find on your iPhone or Android store. It’s the consumer-facing side of ElevenLabs. You can drop in pretty much any content, like PDFs, e-books, and webpages, and it turns any text into speech. Right from the beginning, it’s also offered books for direct sale.
Joanna: We have to mention that Melania Trump has used a voice clone of her quite distinctive voice to do her memoir, also called Melania. She has basically said this is the future of publishing. “Here’s my AI voice clone, and it’s on ElevenReader.”
I thought that was a tipping point for me because it means that it’s going mainstream.
Simon: So you can see it like Audible or Spotify, except you can choose what voice you want to narrate it. For authors, it’s an amazingly simple way to offer an audiobook.
You don’t even have to go through the studio production process. You can just sign up to ElevenReader publishing and upload your book. Boom, they’ll review it and publish it.
Joanna: I would say to people, you must —
Read the terms and conditions of any site that you ever upload anything to.
Also, if your e-book is in Kindle Unlimited and exclusive to Amazon, you can’t upload that e-book to ElevenReader because it’s exclusive.
Simon: And we have just taken Abby’s books out of Kindle Unlimited so we can put them in ElevenReader this week.
Joanna: Before we go, you have courses coming and you also offer services to authors.
Tell us about those and where people can find you online.
Simon: Wonderful, thank you, Joanna. First, I’d be a very neglectful father if I didn’t mention that Abby’s latest book, Stolen Legacy, went live yesterday. You can find Abby Hope Patrick and her Deadly Ever After series on Amazon and, very soon, ElevenReader.
You can find my voice on ElevenReader; I’m “Christopher” on there.
The courses are something new. We’ve started a new website called Novel Productions. The first course will be “AI Audio for Authors” and will cover everything people need to know to get themselves not just onto ElevenLabs, but all platforms.
It’s also going to have training on how to record your own voice clones and monetize them if you want to. I was about to publish it, and then Version 3 of ElevenLabs came out, so I don’t want to train anyone on anything that’s not going to be the best in a couple of months.
So right now, if you go to Novel.Productions, there will be a waiting list that you can sign up to.
Regarding services, you were my first beta tester outside the books that I publish myself. We’re still weighing up how affordable we can make it. I’d rather teach people first, and if they don’t want to then do it themselves, we’ll see how we can help.
Are you looking for new ways to connect with readers and market your books? Have you considered using podcasts but aren’t sure where to start, or if they’re even effective anymore? How can you turn a simple podcast interview into a powerful tool for building your author career? Matty Dalrymple talks about how to leverage podcasting for long-term success.
This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com
Matty Dalrymple is the author of mysteries, thrillers, and nonfiction, and is the host of The Indy Author Podcast. Today we are talking about her new book, co-written with Mark Lefebvre, The Podcast Guest Playbook: Turning Conversations into Connections and Community.
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
Why podcasts offer a deeper connection with potential readers compared to short-form video
How to pitch podcast hosts effectively by providing value and demonstrating familiarity with their show
Tangential topics and creative angles fiction authors can use to land interviews on a variety of shows
The importance of building authentic, non-transactional relationships with hosts and other creators
Practical tips on how to prepare for an interview and gain confidence as a podcast guest
Why it’s never too late to start your own podcast and how it can benefit your writing process
Jo: Matty Dalrymple is the author of mysteries, thrillers, and nonfiction, and is the host of The Indy Author Podcast. Today we are talking about her new book, co-written with Mark Lefebvre, The Podcast Guest Playbook: Turning Conversations into Connections and Community. So welcome back to the show, Matty.
Matty: Thank you. It is lovely to be here.
Jo: Matty’s been on the show before. I need to check when it was. It was in 2020, which is obviously like a lifetime away now because it was the beginning of the pandemic. It is like a completely different life. But you did talk a bit then about how you got into writing.
What does your author life and business look like now?
Matty: Well, I think this had just become true in 2020, that I am a full-time author, podcaster, and publisher. Since then, I’ve continued to add to my two fiction series, the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels and the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers.
I’ve also been working hard on my nonfiction books for authors. We’re going to be talking about my new book with Mark. Back then we had been talking about Taking the Short Tack, which is the first book I co-authored with Mark.
Since then, I have also co-authored two books with our mutual friend Michael La Ronn on being an author speaker and on, appropriately enough, co-authoring nonfiction. So, yes, continuing to add to the portfolio.
Jo: And of course, you’ve got the podcast and—
You are also an advisor for the Alliance of Independent Authors, right?
Matty: That’s right. I’m the Campaigns Manager, so I’m responsible for ALLi’s campaigns which are: Open Up to Indie Authors, Ethical Self-Publishing, Self-Publishing for All, and Publishing for Profit. That has been super fun. I’ve been doing that for just over a year now.
Jo: Fantastic. So yes, multiple strings to your bow. So let’s get into the book. I guess the first thing is, are podcasts even useful for book marketing in an age of short-form video? We’re all told that it’s all about TikTok and BookTok and social media.
What is special about podcasting that makes it worth investing time in?
Matty: Well, I think that the strength of podcasts is the depth of the connections you can form.
I have to say, I’m not super familiar with BookTok. When TikTok first came out, I spent about 35 seconds on it and I found it so not for me that it was clear I was not going to be providing content for TikTok or BookTok, and I probably wasn’t going to be consuming that content either.
I think that obviously some authors are getting great connections on BookTok, but it doesn’t feel like a deep relationship. It feels more like entertainment.
The strength of podcasts is that you do have a chunk of time—you know, 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour—to dive into your topic in depth, to describe your book, but more importantly, the stories behind your book in depth.
The benefit that those other platforms don’t have at all is the benefits that come from forming a relationship with the podcast host, which is something that Mark and I spend quite a bit of time discussing in the book. I think that’s kind of an underutilized benefit of podcasting.
Jo: A few things there. I mean, the in-depth conversation… people listening to this are people who listen to podcasts. So that is the kind of audience. But you are right, it gives people time to decide whether they even identify with this person in a deeper way.
I get so many of my book recommendations from podcasting. I think, “Well, that was interesting,” and I’ll go and listen to their book or read their book. You obviously interview people all the time for your show, and you are also a listener to shows.
How does podcasting translate into book sales, since that is an important reason for it?
Matty: It is about letting people know about a book or a new book, but I think more importantly, it’s about letting listeners know about you as an author.
The advice that Mark and I give very strongly is that if you go into a podcast interview with the mindset that what you’re looking to get out of this is book sales, it’s not going to be as effective, even for book sales, as if you go into it with the opinion that you’re there to provide value to the host and to the host’s listeners.
Then book sales and many other benefits are going to come from that. You intrigue people about your book by talking about it in a thoughtful and in-depth way, by sharing information. If you’re writing nonfiction, you want to get the word out about that.
I have learned this from you: you can share lots and lots of information from your nonfiction book on podcasts and people will still buy your book because they want it in even more depth than you can provide in a podcast interview.
They want it there for easy reference. They want it as an acknowledgment of the value you’ve provided. So going into that with that service mindset rather than a sales mindset, I think is the most important thing for getting sales.
Jo: Yes, I totally agree. Let’s talk about fiction as well, because you are a fiction writer. Both of us write fiction and nonfiction, but I do think it is harder for fiction authors to find appropriate podcasts to pitch and to talk about different angles.
So what’s your advice to fiction authors who might feel like it’s not so worthwhile?
Matty: Yes, I agree that it is more of a challenge for fiction authors. I think the thing to keep in mind for those authors is, first of all, to find the podcasts that are focused on your genre.
I think certain genres are easier for that. I write in the general crime fiction genre, and there are a number of podcasts that are focused on that, that are specifically targeted to crime fiction readers.
I think that there are probably other genres where there isn’t maybe that same breadth of availability of podcasts focused on reaching readers of those genres. I think in all those cases, the thing to do after you’ve identified the target podcasts is to think of the stories behind the story that you can tell.
We don’t recommend that you go into an interview with the idea that you’re going to share a summary of the plot of your book. That’s just not going to be interesting to anyone and may deter people from buying the book if they’ve heard what they think is the whole story.
Readers love to hear about the fiction process. Fiction readers love to hear about the research you put into your book, or if your characters are based on real people, or even if you can come up with interesting answers to the “where do you get your ideas?” question. That can be great fodder for these conversations.
Think of those things as what you would chat about if you met a reader who loved the same genre that you write in. You might, in your podcast interview, not even focus on your own book. You and the host might get into a really interesting conversation about other books in your genre.
Listeners will think, “Oh, that person had such an interesting take on horror, or on thriller, or on romance,” and now they want to see what your take is in your own book. So I think there are lots of angles that fiction writers can take that make for an interesting and engaging interview.
Jo: And for me, it’s about place. I have my Books and Travel podcast as well. As this goes out, the episode that should be up is on cruise ships and the mystery author Wendy Jones who writes cozy mysteries set on cruise ships.
She was an entertainer on cruise ships, and so we have an episode all about being on cruise ships and cruise ship life. Actually, she writes cozy mysteries, so some percentage of that audience will go on and have a look at her books, but it is that tangential thought.
Wendy pitched me on Books and Travel and said, “My books are set around cruise ships. We could talk about that.” And I’m like, “Yes, that is interesting.” Which was a much better pitch than maybe pitching me on this show to talk about cozy mysteries, because I’ve done that before.
So I think it’s thinking tangentially. What are the themes? Like you mentioned characters.
What are the topics that you have in your fiction book that might be appropriate for a different podcast?
Matty: Yes, and I can imagine that a very successful pitch for the Books and Travel podcast would be, “Here is an aspect of travel that maybe you haven’t hit before, and I think that your listeners would really be interested in this.”
Some listeners are going to have been on cruises and will be intrigued for that reason. Some of your listeners will not have been on cruises and are probably equally intrigued for different reasons. So emphasizing how this topic is going to help the host and be interesting to the audience.
Jo: Yes, exactly. You mentioned it before: providing value to the host and the listeners.
In the end, it’s not about you, the guest, even though it is about you. It is about giving value. So let’s talk about that.
What are some other tips for pitches that will land an interview and make the host want to talk to you as soon as that email arrives?
Matty: In addition to emphasizing the value you provide, I think the other key aspect of a successful pitch is making it clear that you understand the podcast you’re pitching. That this is not a generic pitch.
You are sending the pitch and you’re describing the value based on what is obviously your experience with that podcast.
For example, “Knowing that your listeners are interested in travel, I have an interesting spin on travel that I can share with them,” or “I think this would be a great follow-up to a previous episode where you talked about the Caribbean. I cruise to the Caribbean and I think this would be a nice companion episode.”
Sometimes I’ll get pitches… as listeners of The Indy Author Podcast will know, I love the nautical metaphor for the writing craft and the publishing voyage. Every once in a while, I’ll get a pitch that is completely based on a nautical metaphor that is instantly attention-getting to me.
So I think that combination of providing value and then demonstrating your familiarity with the podcast you’re pitching is important. No generic, “Dear Sir or Madam” kind of pitches.
Jo: Or “Dear Podcaster.”
Matty: “Dear Podcaster.” Or even worse, when it’s personalized, but wrong. I got a pitch for The Career Author Podcast once, and I was like, “That sounds fascinating, but that’s not my podcast.”
Jo: I think some of the worst pitches at the moment are from traditional publishing. I don’t know about you, but I just get these—they’re literally, they get my name right, but then they just copy and paste a press release and say, “You would love to interview this author.”
They’re not even really pitching for a podcast. They’re just scatter-gunning.
What are some of the things that people should find out about the host before they email?
Matty: Well, one thing I wanted to mention, because you had mentioned getting pitches from publishers or PR firms. I get a lot of pitches from PR firms and people are always really interested to hear that I actually set a higher bar for inviting a guest on the podcast if I’m being pitched by a third party.
It makes it very difficult for me to really get a sense of who the person is. I also feel as if third parties don’t necessarily always have the same incentive or ability to communicate the essence of the person they’re representing as the person does themselves.
So I think sometimes people who are thinking about pursuing podcast appearances think, “Oh, it’s going to look much more professional if I have a PR firm or my assistant approach them.” But for me, that’s not true. Hearing from the person directly is more attractive to me.
I think some of the other things to do or not to do are to be very flexible about what you’re asking. I can encapsulate many of the aspects of an unsuccessful pitch easily.
If the pitch is, “I have a new book, can I come on your podcast and talk about it?” That’s just wrong in so many ways. First of all, my podcast is not that kind of podcast.
My podcast is specifically with guests who have demonstrated expertise in an area of writing or publishing through writing a book about it, or writing an article about it, or speaking at a conference about it, and they’re demonstrating their expertise for books outside their own books.
That’s really the key for The Indy Author Podcast. You can’t come on just talking about your own book; you have to discuss what you’ve learned from your own experiences that can be generalized to my listeners.
And so, “I have a new book, can I come talk about it?” is also not demonstrating any value for the people you’re pitching. You’re only emphasizing what you’re trying to get out of that.
Summarizing what I was just running through:
Make the contact direct, emphasize the value, emphasize your familiarity, and mention other episodes from that podcast —
that you think would be good companions. I think that combination is the recipe for a successful pitch.
Jo: I like having a few bullet points, maybe three to five, that show there are multiple angles. You can obviously mention your book in the pitch. For example, you’d say, “I’m the author of The Podcast Guest Playbook, and here are some topics we could cover.”
I’ve definitely said yes to pitches like that because they’ve given me different angles that are potentially interesting—
Rather than a generic, “I’ve written a book,” you can say, “I’m the author of this book, and these are the angles we could cover.”
You could pitch The Podcast Guest Playbook on all kinds of levels—to an entrepreneur podcast because they are people who want to go on these shows, or to professional speaking podcasts—but on each one, you would have different bullet points as to how that might apply to that particular podcast.
I would also say, on referring to previous episodes, I think this has become a bit of a copy-and-paste hack that I get from so many now. They will literally say, “Dear Joanna, I really enjoyed the episode on The Podcast Guest Playbook with Matty Dalrymple, and I think you would like this book on flower arranging.”
They’ve literally just chucked in the last episode without thinking about it, and it makes you read the first sentence and then you’re like, “Oh, delete.”
Matty: Yes, unless there’s a legitimate connection, don’t do that. The benefit of making a connection is if you’re acknowledging, for example, that the host has had a guest on about podcasting previously, and you’re acknowledging that you recognize that, and yet you feel like your topic is different enough.
That’s another way of acknowledging that. I’m glad you also reminded me about the flexibility aspect. The idea of providing different options is great. Then the other aspect of flexibility is that a lot of authors want to have their podcast appearances grouped around a book launch.
First of all, I think that’s not always realistic because I know you, for example, record your episodes way in advance. I also have a backlog of episodes. There are a whole bunch of considerations for podcast hosts about how they order the podcasts.
For example, I might have had a couple of episodes that are focused on publishing, and now I want to make sure that I get back to craft. So I need the flexibility to do that. Being insistent about when your episode airs is not good form.
I also think, in general, there is a benefit to not grouping a lot of podcast appearances around a book launch.
The danger is that if I was pitching podcasts to promote one of my mystery novels, I might pitch a bunch of mystery reader-focused podcasts, and if I landed them all around the launch of the book, it’s very likely that a lot of those listeners overlap and they may be hearing me on several podcasts in a short period of time.
Now, if you have different aspects you can address about your book, then you can make sure that even if someone hears you on several podcasts, they’re not hearing the same thing over and over again. But still, for podcast hosts, it’s not appealing to know that their show is number four of seven appearances you have lined up.
So you can really make a benefit out of what might initially seem to be a challenge by not trying to group all your appearances around a launch.
Jo: I absolutely agree, although it’s a double-edged sword, especially these days with Kickstarter, because people do want things within a window. So maybe say to the host, “This is my window.”
As we record this, my show’s booked out for the next six months. I get all the time, “My launch is next week.” I’m like, this just doesn’t work. We put this in the calendar four months ago.
Let’s be really brutal about it. I got a pitch even this week that said, “I’m still writing my first book, and I would love to come on your podcast to talk about writing.” I literally didn’t know what to say to this person. Maybe you could give us some tough love, Matty.
Why is that not a good pitch, and why is that person maybe not expert enough for a show?
Matty: Well, first of all, they’re clearly not conveying any value that you or your audience are going to get. I suppose there could be podcasts out there that focus on early creators and what their experiences are.
I can imagine a podcast where the host is more like offering advice to somebody early in their career, and they’re looking for guests who are willing to have that kind of conversation with them, but obviously, that’s not The Creative Penn Podcast.
A lot of times, podcasters, just as with agents in the traditional publishing world, will post what they accept. The advice is, if they say they’re looking for thrillers and you’ve written a cozy, then don’t pitch them because you’re wasting your time and theirs.
The same thing with podcasts. If the host has posted what they’re looking for, then don’t pitch them if you don’t meet that requirement.
Even people who are representing well-known organizations that are clearly coming on a podcast to encourage people to use their products need to be able to focus on providing that value. I’m going to use Damon Courtney of BookFunnel as an example. I’ve interviewed Damon for The Indy Author Podcast.
Obviously, Damon has an understandable interest in educating people about BookFunnel, but we had a great conversation that never really mentioned BookFunnel until the very end, when I gave him the opportunity to let people know about it, because he had great information to share about cross-promotion and how to get the word out about your book.
I think everybody should follow Damon’s example. If you’re providing that value, then people are going to come to the product or book you’re hoping they will get to.
Jo: Damon is a great example of a very entertaining and engaging speaker. He’s got an interesting voice, he’s very animated, so he brings a lot of personality as well. I think that is important.
Let’s just give people some other tips.
You do have to know what you are doing, and you are only a good interview for the host if you’ve done this before.
Someone once sent a wonderful pitch, and I was like, “This is a great pitch. Come on the show.” Then when we turned on the recording, it was very clear this person had never done an interview before.
It was so bad I had to stop the interview and say, “Look, I just think you need some more practice at this. This is a really good topic, and I’m really interested. How about you come back in six months? In the meantime, go practice and do some other interviews.”
You and I have been doing this for a long time. There is a hierarchy of podcasts. There are brand new podcasts that maybe only have a couple of episodes and are new, and then there are long-running podcasts that have a bigger audience.
How can people work their way up to bigger podcasts and also get experience so they feel more confident giving interviews on shows, radio, and TV?
Matty: One tip I would share is that if you’re starting to pitch podcasts and you don’t have other interviews to point them to, which should be part of a pitch letter, you can create a demo reel.
I got one pitch years ago from J.W. Judge, and he sent me a video where it was his pitch, personalized to me, in video format. He said, “Hi, Matty. I write as J.W. Judge, and I would love to join you on The Indy Author Podcast to talk about these things.”
It was great because at that point, he didn’t have any other interviews to point me to, but he was very clearly comfortable on camera, had everything set up, and was engaging. I appreciated the time he had spent making this specific pitch for me.
If you are really uncomfortable with the concept, I think there are a couple of things you can do. One is to be an enthusiastic podcast listener. As with any kind of content, you are most successful doing it well if you enjoy consuming the content before you start trying to create it.
That can provide comfort, especially if you’re becoming familiar with a specific podcast that you want to pitch yourself to, because you’ll understand the rhythm of it, the tone, and the gestalt of the podcast. I think there are certain expectations that podcast listeners develop about how a podcast interview works.
Also, practice with people you know. Find someone you can sit down with over coffee and say, “Hey, here are some questions that I would love to be able to answer as a podcast guest. Let’s chat through them.” Do that a couple of times with a couple of different friends and refine your answers each time.
The great thing about that is you’re sitting right across the table from them and you can kind of see when their eyes start to glaze over and when they’re sitting forward and more engaged. You do less of the first thing and more of the second.
Once you have done those preparatory steps, podcasts can be really nice because you’re not in front of an audience.
Obviously, you hope that there will be an audience, but unlike speaking in front of a group at your local library, it can feel like you’re just chatting with the host, especially if you have a proficient host who’s good at making guests feel comfortable. It can be a good entrée to other speaking engagements.
Jo: I just want to comment on that video thing. Do not send me videos, anybody, because I literally never watch videos and will not watch them!
When people send me a link to a video, I think it’s a scam. What I would say is have an author website.
One of the first things I will do if someone pitches me is go and look at their author website.
It is amazing how many times something’s broken or it’s just not professional. You can have a landing page, like your author website name, forward slash media, and you could put a video there. Then I can choose to watch that video on a website as opposed to through my email.
The other thing is, I always have notes. I always send questions before every interview. I think that’s part of being an introvert and needing a lot of preparation.
ChatGPT is very good for this. If you say to ChatGPT, “I’m going on Matty Dalrymple’s The Indy Author Podcast. Tell me about Matty and some of her catchphrases and some of the things she likes. How does my book overlap with Matty’s interests? What are some of the things that her audience would like?” That’s a really good prompt.
Then, just on the notes, I have notes as a host and as a guest, but a big tip: do not read the notes!
Matty: Over time, I’ve evolved to an approach where I communicate with the guest and we land on an overall topic. When I ask them to schedule, I use Calendly, and one of the questions in there is to provide five subtopics related to the general topic that we’ve discussed.
They provide those, so they can prepare for those subtopics, and it just gives us some sort of points in the conversation. Generally, I find that sufficient because as a host, I’m standing in for the listener.
So if Damon’s coming on the podcast to talk about cross-promotion, by having five guiding points for our conversation that I can ask him questions about, I feel like that’s sufficient for my needs.
But it’s a great point that the more you can get insight into the preparation process of your host, the more you can be serving them by making that process as easy for them as possible.
Mark and I talk about the three P’s: politeness, professionalism, and preparedness, and the importance of these in your interactions.
If they ask you to provide a list of URLs for your social media sites, then don’t just provide them with your handle; actually provide them with a link. If they want a bio that’s 100 words, don’t send them 500.
Every way that you don’t comply with what they ask for, you’re just making their lives a little harder. For many podcast hosts, this is a labor of love. You can’t interact with them as if they were a service provider to you.
If you think about hiring an editor, you and the editor have come to an agreement, you’re paying them money, and for that, you expect certain deliverables. You can’t go into an interaction with a podcast host with that mindset because you really have to recognize they are doing you a favor, even if they’re getting benefits for themselves.
My guess is that very few podcast hosts are making money from this. They’re doing this as a service to the community.
Jo: And even more than that, I do make money from this podcast, so it is part of my business, but I’ve been doing this for 16 years. At least seven of those years, it was not monetized.
We put our time into connecting with an audience, and listeners come back to a show for the host.
They might listen to a guest, but they come back for the host. The trust of our audience is what I value so highly, which is why I cannot bring somebody who doesn’t bring value to the show.
I’m not going to interview someone unless I’m like, “That is going to help the audience.” We’ve spent years building up trust with our audiences so they know what they’re going to get when they listen to our show.
Now, you mentioned Damon Courtney from BookFunnel, who we’ve both met at events. You and I met at ThrillerFest, about a decade or so ago. This is another tip. We mentioned friends before; both of us have co-written with Mark, who is a long-term friend. We met on Twitter originally, and then we met in person.
How can people develop authentic relationships that can possibly develop into things like this?
It is much easier for you to say, “I’ve got this book coming out, can I come on your show?” than it is for a blind pitch. How can people do that authentically? The book does talk about connections as well.
Matty: I’m realizing that there’s a connections aspect to every nonfiction book that I’ve written for authors.
This is so interesting to me that I think my next book is going to be specifically on the connections that authors and other creatives can develop with the audience they want to reach, but also the real value of making those among your creative colleagues.
I think there are just general tips that can lead to podcast appearances and lots of other benefits, and I’m going to go back again to value. If you meet somebody at a conference and they’re a short fiction writer, and you’ve been thinking about putting together an anthology of short fiction, that is something you can offer them.
Even things like interactions on social media. When I got that video from J.W. Judge, I had already met him. I had had interactions with him, so I could feel comfortable that it wasn’t spam.
If I see people who I recognize as being Patreon patrons or somebody who follows me on social media and comments in a productive way on my posts, that just paves the way to good feelings.
If I have a whole list of potential podcast guests I’m looking at and there’s a name I recognize and I’ve already had a good experience with them, then that obviously paves the way to me wanting to say yes more than no to that pitch.
So fully understanding where your audience and interests and the audience and interests of your creative colleagues overlap can open up fantastic opportunities for podcast appearances and a whole lot of other things, whether that’s co-authored books or just a collaborative friend that you may be able to provide mutual benefit to.
Jo: Just to come back on the authentic connection, as we said, you and I met a decade ago at ThrillerFest as thriller writers. There was no transactional thing going on. We met as peers at a writer’s conference. That’s what I would say to people—
Go to conferences, meet people, and make genuine relationships. You never know what they’re going to turn into years later.
It’s not a case of, “Oh, nice to meet you. Can I come on your podcast?”
Matty: Right, and that idea of not treating it as transactional is so important. This is where I think that even if you’ve gone through all the earlier processes of doing your research, finding the right podcasts, making your pitch, preparing for the interview, and conducting it with all the best practices.
What a lot of podcast guests do is they sit back afterwards and say, “Phew, glad that went well. Now I’m onto the next thing.” I think that’s a very transactional attitude.
If that’s where you feel like the transaction has ended, you are really under-representing the benefit you can gain from it and the benefit you can provide.
Do those things to keep that relationship alive. If you are speaking on evergreen content, then every six months, maybe re-post on social media, “Oh, you might want to go back and look at this conversation I had with Jo.”
Make sure that you, as the podcast host, know that I’m doing that, that I’m continuing to point people to your work. Nurturing that relationship with a host can pay you back way more than just that one transactional interview appearance.
Jo: Last question, as we’re almost out of time. You have your long-running podcast, The Indy Author, your co-author Mark LeFebvre has his long-running Stark Reflections, and I have this long-running show. Now some people will say, “Oh, well, it’s all right for you lot, but now it’s too late to start a show.”
Why do you keep podcasting, and any tips for those who want to start their own show?
Matty: Well, I would first point people to my book, The Indy Author’s Guide to Podcasting for Authors. In that, I walk through what is really driving you to think about hosting a podcast. You want to make sure you think through your goals and if they’re realistic before you venture into that.
The primary reason that I keep doing The Indy Author Podcast is because those relationships I build up are so worthwhile for me. I first met Mark because I was a listener to the Stark ReflectionsPodcast.
An interaction I had with him related to a topic he talked about on that podcast is what led to our first co-authored book. It later led to me inviting Mark to be an advisor for ALLi. I feel like that connection we built long ago through Mark’s podcast has paid off.
Michael La Ronn and I have now co-authored two books together, and that has been based on many appearances that Michael has made on my podcast. It’s that idea that if I’m really interested in whatever the topic is, I’m developing a network of people that I can reach out to.
So I continue doing it because of the learning opportunities it offers me, the community-building opportunities it offers me, and because I just feel good about paying it back to the community. I feel as if, if I’m gaining these benefits from my guests, then I want to share those benefits with my listeners as well.
Jo: Yes, I totally agree. From my Books and Travel show, what I realized as I rebooted it is that it enabled me to write my memoir, Pilgrimage.
A lot of the episodes had helped me shape what that book became, and even though I didn’t necessarily realize it at the time, it made a huge difference to me.
One of my reasons for rebooting it again is because I have a book that’s gestating on English gothic cathedrals, and I’ve got another one on the idea of home. I am interviewing people whose books I’m reading as book research on that show, and I’m so sure that it’s going to help me to bring those books into the world.
That show is not about the writing process or publishing or book marketing. I want to make sure people know that those podcasts are also wonderful.
I would recommend people start shows on what they are really passionate about, where other people are also passionate. Yes, you are a writer, but there are lots of things that intersect with that.
Where can people find you and your podcast and your books online?
Matty: If they would like to listen to The Indy Author Podcast, that is “Indy” with a Y. If they’d like to find out more about all my nonfiction work, they can go to TheIndyAuthor.com. If they would like to find out about my fiction work, they can go to MattyDalrymple.com, and that’s “Matty” with a Y.
Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks for your time, Matty. That was great.
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Over the years, I’ve developed a set of terms that have become foundational to how I teach storytelling. A few I’ve coined myself, others I’ve adapted, and some I’ve simply emphasized so frequently they’ve become closely associated with my approach to character arcs, story structure, and theme. Whether you’ve followed my work through this blog or my books and courses, chances are you’ve come across many of these ideas and maybe even adopted them into your own writing process.
These days, it’s easier than ever to write stories that look like stories. I’m talking about stories follow beat sheets, mimic bestselling formulas, and say all the “right” things. But more and more, I see authors tempted to make creative choices based on convenience rather than imagination or integrity. When that happens, we have to ask: are we saying anything real?
There’s nothing like a sharp-tongued, quick-witted character to light up a scene—especially when the stakes are high or the tone is dark. From sarcastic sidekicks to roguish heroes, witty characters often steal the show. But when the humor feels forced or out of character, it can suck the life right out of a story. So why does some wit dazzle while other attempts fall painfully flat?
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