Our world is fast becoming audio-first. With experience in radio, Jules Horne is perfectly positioned to share suggestions for focusing on how your book will sound once it’s narrated.

Are you interested in publishing your books in audio form?

With audiobooks now one of the fastest-growing markets, many writers are looking at publishing their books on audio platforms such as Audible.

But some writers are going a step further, and writing with audio performance first in mind. In other words, writing first of all to engage the ear, rather than the eye.

In many ways, this makes perfect sense. Spoken storytelling is far older than the world of reading books. And if you can write a novel that engages readers when read aloud, chances are it’s a great read, too!

So if you want to go this route, what’s different about writing for performance? Do you need to change your writing style at all?

I write fiction, but I also write audio-first, thanks to a background in broadcasting and radio drama. I’ve also written stage plays and performance poetry where spoken word techniques come first – and writers in these other worlds do think a bit differently!

So I’ve compiled some tips from audio-first writing, so you can tweak your script and get the best results for your audiobook.

1. Audio writing needs to be super-clear

Audiobook ‘readers’ are often doing something else at the same time as listening to your book, such as driving, walking, or doing the dishes. They may have a split focus.

And even if listening with full concentration, they usually just get one chance to understand your words as they fly past.

This is very different from reading a book, where people can reread, scan, jump about and even flick to the end. So you really can’t be clear enough!

I’ve seen broadcast studio managers use tiny, cheap speakers to test their recording. If it’s good enough to come through lo-fi speakers with clarity, it’s ready to face the different scenarios it’ll encounter with listeners out in the field.

What to do:
If you’re writing non-fiction, include plenty of signpost words (“connectives”) to highlight change of flow.

Words and phrases such as finally, therefore, and on the other hand help to pull the reader through more easily, by drawing attention to contrast, emphasis, escalation and other changes in the underlying shape.

If you’re writing fiction, informal signal words such as then, while, so, but, and although are all the more important.

Repetition of key orientation words such as the character name are helpful, too.

2. Listeners need attunement time

It takes a few seconds for listeners to tune into new voices and changes of scene or emphasis. This might be because there’s suddenly an unfamiliar voice, or because they’ve drifted and a fresh topic has perked up their attention.

That’s why you hear radio presenters using a lot of phrases like ‘in other news’, ‘meanwhile in Scotland’, and ‘staying with domestic news…’

Opening phrases and words are important, but those very first words of fresh attack sometimes get lost, because the listener is still getting attuned.

What to do:
Try beginning new sections with the main orientation words a few words in. This is particularly helpful in fiction, where you can’t rely on section headers.

For example, ‘It was a dark and stormy night as Mike arrived at the mansion.’ Mike (protagonist) and the mansion (setting) are more important than the weather, in terms of orienting the reader securely with your story. The detail can come later.

Or, for example, if we need to know that Mike has a knife, put it near the top for orientation, but not in the first few seconds, to allow for attunement.

Don’t use this rhythm too often! You need to ring the changes or it’ll sound repetitive. Just be extra careful to plant clear opening signposts in audio.

3. Performing nouns and landing

Audio-first writing has a lot in common with oral storytelling and other spoken forms such as performance poetry. Performance writing has its own structures and tropes, including the use of repetition and rhythm.

All writers use these to a degree, of course – the effects are just far more pronounced with the spoken word. However, not all words are equal.

An experienced stage director I’ve worked with says the secret of performing text for clarity is to “land the nouns”. As long as the nouns are clear, the audience will get the general gist, even if they don’t get the detail.

What do to:
Take a paragraph or two of your writing and highlight the nouns. Now read aloud, speaking the nouns with crisp emphasis.

Does this tell the story clearly? Is anything muddy?

Note that ends of sentences and paragraphs are powerful positions to “land” on. Do your paragraphs have a clear, resonant ending for the narrator to land on, or do they run out of steam?

Sometimes, clipping off a clause at the end to expose a more important word can make all the difference – like pruning a plant! Again, ring the changes so that your rhythms don’t get repetitive.

4. Breathing and ‘which’ clauses

Writing for audio typically has shorter sentences than writing for the eye. That’s not surprising, as it’s led by our limited lung capacities and the natural rhythm of breathing.

If you have an expansive and wordy writing voice, it can come as a surprise when narrators struggle to read your writing.

When I first started writing stage plays, I realised how breathless my writing was when actors with well-trained lungs ran out of steam at the ends of lines. My writing soon sharpened up.

What to do:
Read your writing aloud. I do this at every stage of writing – while drafting and editing, as well as when preparing a script for a narrator.

This soon reveals sentences that are too long and meandering to read aloud well. Look out in particular for “which” clauses that qualify nouns. “Which” clauses can get very unwieldy, and sentences with long qualifiers like this often read better when they’re cut in two.

5. Audiobooks are performance scripts

You may not have conceived your book as a script for performance, but once it’s in the hands of a narrator, that’s what it essentially becomes.

For some writers, this is a mindset shift, but it can be very helpful. It tightens your writing, makes editing decisions easier, and puts audience connection right at the top of your considerations.

What’s more, it gives you license to go to town on character voices, rhythm, pace, dialect, and other sound delights – elements you probably use anyway, but which truly come into their own with the spoken word.

What to do:
Conceive your next audiobook for performance from the start. Read it aloud while writing, to feel the rhythm and pace, and how the sentences rise and fall.

Think about the innate music of the language and whether it’s “actable”, giving good opportunities to the narrator. Check that it has plenty of variety in pace, mood, and voice for fiction.

With non-fiction, focus on great clarity and economy, and check that the viewpoint creates the right kind of audience connection for your genre and topic – authoritative, business-like, friendly? Spoken word makes more use of second person “you”, which may be relevant for your book.

BONUS TIP: What about Whispersync compatibility?

Whispersync is an Audible feature that synchronizes audiobooks with the Kindle ebook version. So when your audience switch platforms, it’s seamless and they don’t lose their place in the book.

For this to work, the audio book and Kindle versions need to be pretty well identical. Not all audiobooks are compatible with Whispersync, but with increasing convergence between book reading and listening, it’s likely publishers heavily into Amazon will want to make their new books Whispersync compatible, to help with cross-promotion.

What to do:
If you want your next book to be Whispersync-compatible, consider writing it with audio-first in mind, and ensure it works well for performance. The print and ebook can more easily be created from the audio script than the other way around.

With fiction, this should be relatively straightforward.

With non-fiction, it’ll depend on your genre and content. Images, graphs and tables are tricky, and lots of sub-headings and layout hierarchies don’t work well in audio format. Audio recordings are more time-consuming and costly to update, too.

If your book is image, table or link-heavy, you may decide not to bother with Whispersync, or you could provide a reader download for visuals, or information with a short shelf-life – a great way to connect to readers, too!

When you’re writing, do you consider how your books will sound when narrated? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Jules Horne is an award-winning fiction writer and playwright. She teaches for the Open University and lives in the Borderlands – the part of Britain that inspired Game of Thrones.

For a manual of performance-ready tricks and techniques needed for audio-first writing, see Writing for Audiobook: Audio-first for Flow and Impact by Jules Horne, Book 3 in the Method Writing series.

Our lives are becoming increasingly impacted by voice and audio technology, something I discuss frequently on The Creative Penn Podcast. Today, author and podcaster, Paul Sating shares why it’s a good idea for authors to podcast, and how it can help with book sales.

It’s difficult to get published but finding a reader base for your books can be even more challenging.

Maybe you’ve leveraged every tactic known to ‘writerhood’; newsletters, blogs, paid ads, and various writer-centric websites aimed at readership.

Even writing nonfiction books isn’t a guaranteed path to market awareness of your brand. The challenge of finding readers, standing out from the crowd, becomes more difficult as the crowd swells.

But what can a writer do? After all, there are only so many avenues available to us. The good news is, publishing is a long road, but it is a road with numerous branches that can help us reach our goal of finding new readers.

One way to create a unique presence is by sharing your voice with the world by starting your own podcast. Now, before you say you couldn’t possibly podcast, allow me to tell you how it’s not as difficult as it may first appear and why you might want to consider getting into this medium.

Reasons to Podcast

1. Anyone can do it (yes, even you).
2. It can expand your author/book brand exponentially.
3. It’s relatively cheap (especially compared to book covers and editors).

Joanna Penn with her podcasting microphone

It requires determination to publish and now I’m asking you to be as determined in believing you can podcast. Many people think it’s too technical, but if you have a computer, Internet connection, and a recording device, you can podcast.

Lack of experience can easily be overcome and don’t worry about the sound of your voice (no one enjoys hearing their own).

The podcast space is an open and friendly space. Plenty of experienced podcasters are more than willing to provide advice and audiences know most of us are hobbyists. They are patient and supportive.

You don’t need the sheen of a highly-produced Hollywood product for thousands of people to enjoy listening to your show. With drive and dedication, your sound and production will consistently improve, a feature of this medium that is uniquely positive.

Fans actually celebrate the improvement over time of the shows they love. It’s a truly empowering experience.

No one expects you to sound like a professional studio and the podcast market is looking for genuine personalities to connect with. Make that be you.

Still not convinced?

Consider the flooded book market, with millions of titles and thousands added every month.

Standing out from the crowd is becoming increasingly difficult. Starting your own podcast creates exposure for your books like no other writer activity.

[Note from Joanna: I talk about this kind of voice branding in my podcast episode about narrating your own audiobooks.]

How Podcasting Can Increase Your Brand Exposure

Leading to a larger fan base, many of whom will read your books.

1. Intimacy

Podcasts are a dynamic medium that allows you to connect with fans (as a creator and as a person) on a deep level. When you podcast, you know you’re speaking to hundreds or even thousands of people, but they know you’re speaking directly to them.

That connection can be incredibly strong. Many fans identify as “friends” of their favorite podcasters, even if they’ve never met them.

2. Accessibility

We’re busy people with busy lives. A considerable strength of audiobooks is that they’re mobile – friendly. People can listen wherever they are and whatever they’re doing.

Podcasts share that strength. People cannot stop to read your blog or your interview when they’re at the job or working out at the gym. But they can listen to your podcast while doing those things. You become ever-present in their daily lives and, over time, part of their routine—you can’t put a price on that.

Lastly, the explosion of reliable podcatchers (apps users listen to podcasts) allows for a permanent on-demand existence for your content.

3. Flexibility

A podcast platform gives you the ability to be responsive to fans by quickly publishing content that is relevant to them or the latest trends.

The very fluid nature of podcasting allows you to release episodes when they are timely and topical, dropping them into millions of devices around the world.

And you’re not ‘stuck’ in what you first create. The medium is structured for easy transitions between podcast categories (fiction, nonfiction, business, self-help, etc.).

What is your niche?

Even with an estimated 500,000 podcasts in the space, there is still room for you. Though those numbers sound intimidating, it pales in comparison to the number of book titles. The key is to identify a niche that works for you (your book publishing strategy/goals).

By identifying a niche market, you can carve out a following by leveraging social media and “Also Listens” (podcast equivalent to Amazon “Also Boughts”). The best part? You can do this organically (for free) over time.

How To Begin

And that brings me to my last point. Starting your own podcast can be done cheaply — you only need an Internet connection, computer, a DAW (digital audio workstation — more about this in a moment) and a mic (and you can always add equipment if you choose to take this more seriously in the future).

Mics aren’t scary and you don’t need to be a sound pro to find one that will suit your needs. In fact, great starter USB microphones (plugged directly into your computer’s USB drive) can be found for less than $100. A decent mic can last well over a decade (can you say the same for your book covers?).

[Note from Joanna: for more information on audio set-up for an author, check out this post from Dan Van Werkhoven, the ‘sound guy’ for The Creative Penn Podcast.]

Great starter DAW software (like Audacity) is available for free. Though I upgraded to an Adobe product years ago, I know many successful podcasters who still use Audacity (or Garageband, the Apple equivalent).

The only other cost associated with podcasting (besides time) will be your hosting fees (which can range from free for to roughly $25/month, depending on your needs).

These costs are greatly outweighed by the exposure you’ll earn.

Don’t let fear of the unknown discourage you

There are plenty of resources available to help you get started. Many are free. YouTube is a wonderful place to find free educational resources for all skill levels. Just about any social media platform has a wealth of podcast communities with experienced podcasters were willing to help. You won’t be alone.

Audio is a growing marketplace. With our mobile lifestyle and content saturation, it’s important to not get left behind. For writers who want to obtain/maintain front-of-mind-awareness for readers, podcasting is the next natural step in this evolving marketplace.

If you’re looking to stand out, to grow and strengthen your relationship with your readers, build a unique brand presence, and have a consistent platform to cross-medium promote your books (for free), look no further.

You work hard on your books and they deserve to be in the hands of as many people as possible. Hosting your own podcast can not only be the most effective and cost-efficient way of marketing you and your books; it’s actually incredibly fun.

For many authors who podcast, it doesn’t even feel like marketing. Raising awareness, carving out a niche, building bridges to new readers, all while having fun?

What’s stopping you?

Have you thought about starting your own podcast? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Paul Sating has been podcasting for 9 years with over a million downloads and published his first 3 books in 2018. He writes horror, thrillers, and is currently working on an epic fantasy series.

Find his podcasts and books at paulsating.com. Connect on Twitter and Instagram at @paulsating.

Artificial Intelligence will usher in a new era of what it means to work and create over the next generation, but does this mean that writers and creatives will be made obsolete? In this episode, Professor Marcus du Sautoy discusses the developments in AI creativity and why our stories could be the very thing that helps train AIs to be more human.

In the introduction, I talk about Chirp, the new audiobook promotion tool from BookBub; plus, my writing update and my latest self-narrated audiobook, The Dark Queen.

Today’s show is sponsored by IngramSpark, who I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 39,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries and more. It’s your content – do more with it through IngramSpark.com.

Marcus du Sautoy is the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He’s a prize-winning Professor of Mathematics, a fellow of New College, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He’s also the author of several prize-winning books and his latest is, The Creativity Code: How AI is Learning to Write, Paint, and Think.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• Why creativity is at the heart of a mathematician’s work

• How AI is moving from learning about games to creating art and music

• Development of AI: Alpha Go beat Go champion Lee Sedol [BBC], Alpha Zero [Smithsonian]

• How humans and AI switch back and forth from being creative to being critical or making corrections

• On the AI version of NaNoWriMo, NaNoGenMo. Also, check out BotPoet, and read about OpenAI’s text generator [Wired and The Guardian]

• What happens when AI becomes conscious?

• Copyright implications when AI gets involved in creating art

• On AI translations between languages

You can find Marcus du Sautoy at simonyi.ox.ac.uk and on Twitter @MarcusduSautoy. The Creativity Code is available now.

Transcript of Interview with Marcus du Sautoy

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from TheCreativePenn.com, and today I’m here with Marcus du Sautoy. Hi, Marcus.

Marcus: Hello.

Joanna: Thanks for coming on the show. Just a little introduction.

Marcus is the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, quite a mouthful. And he’s also a prize-winning Professor of Mathematics, a fellow of New College, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He’s the author of several prize-winning books and his latest is, ‘The Creativity Code: How AI is learning to write, paint, and think,’ which is a super exciting topic.

Marcus, why is a maths professor writing a book about creativity? I know some people might find that difficult.

Marcus: I think usually the words maths and creativity don’t go together if you’re not a mathematician. But if you’re a mathematician, actually, it’s a very important part of our work.

I think it goes to the heart of the fact that we’re making a lot of choices, actually, when we’re creating our mathematics. We don’t want to just create mathematics that’s true because quite often that’s boring. We’re trying to choose mathematics which takes the people who attend our seminars, the people who read our papers, and our journals, on a kind of emotional journey.

We want to transform them, to change them, to make them go, ‘Oh. I didn’t realize those two things were connected.’ And so in charting out that kind of journey, it requires a lot of choice, aesthetics, and creativity because you’re having to go to places which are new.

So, what is creativity?

I defined it in this new book as something which is new, but that’s not just good enough because that could be very boring. So it’s got to be surprising and it’s got to have some sort of value. It’s got to kind of be worthwhile in some way.

And I think that’s what a mathematician is trying to do, create new kind of truths about numbers, geometries. But it’s got to be surprising, it’s got to kind of move you in some way. And if it’s got value as well, then that really wins the biscuits.

Creativity is something which is very important to me as a mathematician, perhaps more than a scientist. Scientists have to be quite creative, but they’re bound very often by the physical universe that we live in.

As a mathematician, I’ve got much more freedom to be imaginative in my world, create new worlds that perhaps aren’t physical, and I think that’s much closer to being an artist than a scientist.

Joanna: I love this emotional journey of mathematics. And your book does that really well. I’m not someone who reads mathematics books much, but this crosses the boundaries, which is fantastic.

So let’s come to AI, because I really discovered AI in a big way when AlphaGo beat the Go world champion. And I read in your book that that moment was pivotal for you as well. So let’s just revisit that.

Why was that such a big deal in 2016?

Marcus: It was a big deal, especially for me as a mathematician, because I’ve always used the game of Go as a good analogy for doing mathematics. I think a lot of people thought chess was quite a good analogy and a computer beats the world champion at chess in the mid-’90s.

But I think why Go is more closer to being a mathematician is that you’re not quite sure why you make certain moves. It requires a little bit of intuition, pattern recognition, a bit of creativity.

And so for me, I’d always use that game as a kind of protective shield against the idea that AI could do mathematics. So I watched this game with a lot of angst and existential angst. But for me, the most significant thing was not just that this computer managed to beat a world champion at this very complex game.

There was a moment in game two where the computer made a move, it’s move 37. And I talk about it in the book because I think this is a kind of a pivotal moment, when all the commentators went, “Whoa, it’s made a mistake,” because it was doing something that you’re taught as a Go player never to do, which is to play on a kind of particular line on this 19 by 19 grid.

But as the game evolved, we realized that it wasn’t a mistake.

It was a deeply insightful move. It was incredibly creative because it was new, surprised us, and it had value because it, ultimately, won game two for the AI.

So I think for me, that was one of the most exciting things. It enabled us to see how to play the game in a completely new way. So it was being creative, but not only that, the way this thing had been programmed was significantly different. And I think this is why there’s a real kind of phase change in AI.

It’s like water going to steam boiling. Because the program hadn’t been written by a human and the human knew what it was doing. The human had written the program so the program could learn, adapt, and change.

And so, ultimately, by the end of all the training it did, we actually didn’t know how it was making its decisions, why it was making its decisions. And this new AI, which we call machine learning because it learns how to program itself. It’s a bit like a child who’s born and in the past, the child had nowhere to kind of learn on, but suddenly, we’ve got this new AI, a child, which can learn by interacting with its environment, change and become something more than its parents as it were.

Joanna: And then what happened after that AlphaGo beat the human with the next iteration, Alpha Zero?

Marcus: In some ways, AlphaGo had been given the rules of the game, and had been given human games to play on. So it learned from what we’d done as humans. And so you feel, “Okay, well, it’s extending our intelligence and creativity.”

But then, DeepMind, who developed AlphaGo, developed something called AlphaZero, where they just gave the computer the 19 by 19 grid, the pixels, and a score, and it had to learn how to play the game, the rules of the game. And so this was a kind of tabula rasa learning.

It didn’t know anything. By the end of its evolution, it was actually better than the AlphaGo that had beat Lee Sedol. So this is genuinely exciting because it didn’t have to learn from things we’d already learned. It started from zero.

That’s almost true creativity; something from nothing.

It’s very interesting it was able to do that. I’m quite surprised that without any sort of guidance that it reached such a phenomenal level.

And actually, it even learned to play chess in an afternoon and beat all the computers that are programmed to chess, and also kind of a Chinese version of chess. So this is exciting and, perhaps, a little bit scary for some people.

Joanna: Some people will now be listening going, “Oh, yeah, but it’s still like a game, it’s still Go, it’s still chess.”

Give us some examples of how AI is also creating in music and writing.

Marcus: Yes, I agree with you. It looks a nice closed environment, the game of Go, and it is. And I think that’s why it was a good place to start.

But now, this AI, if it can learn, well, why not expose it to other things, not just games of Go, but the art that we love, the novels we like to write, the poetry, the music?

Music is an interesting one because it’s also quite a self-contained environment. If you think about it, it’s got notes on page, certain frequencies, that’s why there’s a lot of connection between maths and music. So AI learning on what we’ve composed in the past and extending it has been very successful.

Somehow, AI always starts with Bach as the composer. They try and make more Bach, and partly because Bach is very algorithmic in the way that he writes his music. And I think that’s one thing I wanted to illustrate in the book, that artistic creativity isn’t as mysterious as we think it is. That actually there’s a lot of kind of structure, pattern, almost algorithm in the way that we do our creation or pieces of art.

The book is partly showing why, actually, we’re responding to things in the artistic realm because they’ve got that hidden structure that we’re trying to unpick. So if we can understand that, then maybe the AI can go and extend that into other realms.

We’ve now got examples, for example, a jazz improviser, trained on another jazz musician’s riffs, the AI learned those riffs but then extended the sound world of this jazz musician. And what’s interesting there is the jazz musician said, ‘Look, I recognize what this AI is producing. It’s my world, but it’s doing things I never thought were possible.’

I think this is an example of the exciting role that AI can play in a creative’s life because it’s as if that jazz musician was stuck in a corner of the room with just a small light on, didn’t realize that they were sitting in a huge great big hall, and the AI has turned the lights on and showed, well, look at all these other places that you can go to with your sound world.

Music has been an exciting progress. The art world, where there are some curious things like a new Rembrandt was painted because the AI learned what Rembrandt had done in the past, his use of light, the sort of faces that he likes to paint, and by it taking that information was able to produce something which I think is pretty convincing as a Rembrandt-esque painting.

Joanna: It was sold at Sotheby’s, right, as well?

Marcus: Yes. At Sotheby’s…or think it was Christie’s actually, it was the first AI piece of art. And I think this is, again, interesting because Rembrandt, we’ve already got fantastic Rembrandts, we don’t need anything new there. So I think, what we want is AI to take us somewhere new and exciting, not to reproduce the old.

This piece of AI that was sold at Christie’s I think it was, it was created, actually, by making art into a bit of a game because it was using something called a Generative Adversarial Network or a GAN, and this is taking two algorithms which kind of compete against each other.

One algorithm is creating art which it tries to make new and not derivative, but not too new that you just don’t recognize it as a chaotic mess. The other algorithm then says, ‘No, I spot that, that’s very Picasso-esque,’ or, ‘No, you’ve now gone into a realm that’s not art.’ And the two competed against each other and created something which was kind of a new sort of art, and that’s what went on sale at Christie’s.

Joanna: And that’s the bit I think, is just like writers. I don’t know about maths, but I think there’s this generative, as you say, which is the creative mind, which is, ‘I’m back in first draft, that’s a first draft thing.’

And then the adversarial, which we would call critical voice or the editor is the bit that goes through and kind of says, ‘Oh, no, that’s not so great or that needs fixing,’ or whatever. So that, to me, almost sounds human-like.

Marcus: I agree with you. I have quite a few quotes from people in the book, the painters especially, and a poet, Paul Valery, who talks about the fact that you need two people in your mind, one being super creative and throwing out ideas, and the other one being critical and making choices about, ‘No, that’s not good. That is good.’

And certainly I do that in mathematics, and very often I will do that in partnership with somebody else. So we have a lot of collaborations and I have partners across the world that I create my mathematics with.

Sometimes I’ll be the good guy, suggesting loads of mad ideas and then my colleague in Germany, he’s the one who shoots it down, or I have a colleague in Israel, he’s the generative one and I’m the adversarial one in that context.

So I think that we do use this paradigm quite a lot. I think it’s interesting that AI has latched onto it as a powerful way to make new things.

Joanna: What about writing then? Because I hear my audience saying, ‘Yes, but an AI hasn’t written anything.’

Tell us about the poetry, automated insights, and what’s going on with writing.

Marcus: Your writers will be encouraged to learn that I think of all the arts that I looked at in this book, that I think writing is still the furthest away from AI being able to achieve anything like humans can.

But there have been some examples. People might remember a story about a new ‘Harry Potter.’ So again, this is machine learning because what the AI took was the seven volumes that J.K. Rowling has written, saw the sort of sentences she writes, the sort of connections she likes making, and then produced kind of the beginning of an eighth volume.

But actually, here’s a warning about AI because I looked under the bonnet of this piece of AI, and actually ran it on some of my own books to see whether maybe I could put myself out of a job or get the AI to write my book for me. And what I understood was, there’s still a lot of human creativity going on in an exercise like that.

So the algorithm offered me, at each point, 18 different choices of words which could follow the word you’ve just had. And I had to choose which of those that I would write.

And this is a warning because I think a lot of the news stories love to say, ‘AI has painted a new picture. AI has written a Harry Potter.’ And it doesn’t make a good news story if you say, ‘Human writes with the aid of a computer,’ and so the human gets kind of put to the side and it’s sort of celebrated as a piece of AI.

Actually, I heard Demis Hassabis, he said a nice thing, he was the creator of DeepMind and AlphaGo. He said it’s like in the turn of the century when everybody was just putting .com at the end of their companies to hype their value.

At the moment we’ve just got everyone putting ‘Made with AI machine learning.’ So be warned that not everything is always AI.

But that’s not to say that there are roles that AI can play in creative writing. Poetry has been a very interesting place because it’s quite a constrained environment. Sometimes you’re almost putting rules on yourself to push you into new ways of thinking.

I think that’s often why I quite enjoy writing poetry because I have to think of something that matches what I’ve just done if I’m trying to keep a particular rhythm going. So, there have been some interesting examples.

And I suppose they’re more successful because poetry has always had a gnomic quality. You’re never quite sure what on earth this means. And so I think AI can get away with a lot in this environment because it can write something which you can think, ‘Well, that sounds kind of weird,’ and it could easily be sort of human going off on some weird kind of path.

So I referenced a little exercise that you can do, which is trying to spot whether something’s written by a bot or not, and it’s somebody who puts forward some different poems composed by humans which actually sound quite machine-like, and vice versa.
Some of your writers might have been involved in the November Writing Month.

Joanna: Yes, NaNoWriMo.

Marcus: NaNoWriMo, exactly. My mum has done a couple of NaNoWriMos. But somebody came up with a cunning idea. So this is to write a novel in a month, really disciplined, pump out the words, but this was a kind of variant on that idea, which is, ‘No, just write a piece of AI, write a bit of code that will make the novel for you.’

So you spend the month not writing but coming up with code that will do the writing for you. So there’ve been some very interesting examples of that. And most of them, again, are quite derivative. They’re taking things like ‘Moby Dick’ and running it through a Twitter filter.

But I thought one of the most interesting was won by somebody called thricedotted, that’s her pseudonym. And she wrote something called, ‘The Seeker.’ The AI takes wikiHow, which if anyone’s gone on wikiHow, it’s how to ask a girlfriend out on a date or how to bake bread.

The code has thought, ‘Well, I want to learn what it’s like to be human. So I’m going to go through these pages of how to on wikiHow and learn what it is to be human.’ And the algorithm generates responses to the wikiHow pages.

Now, for me, this is most interesting because I think this is where creativity and AI is going to be richest, which is when an AI becomes an entity in its own right, and it wants to try and communicate with us, and we want to try and understand its world.

Why do we write novels? We write novels because we want to get inside the mind of the other or to share our minds with others. I think it’s trying to solve the whole problem of consciousness, that we can’t know what it feels like to be you or what it feels like to be me.

Our novels are almost like an fMRI scanner, reading into the brain of the other. So I think this will become most interesting when AI becomes conscious. And then we will need to hear their stories in order to understand what it’s like to be that machine.

Joanna: People are going, ‘When AI becomes conscious,’ which you know, I wasn’t going to get here so fast. But there are lots of people who worry about AI becoming conscious, obviously, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, famous names, dystopian sci-fi writers.

You mentioned that story might be the answer to the evil AI. So maybe just talk about that a minute.

Marcus: Yes, because I think it has been a little bit too dystopian, and I’m hoping this book is actually a more positive take on AI and how AI can be a useful tool but perhaps go further.

If it does become conscious, then we’re going to need it on our side. We’re going to work together. And there was an exercise which…it took the idea of how to tell a story.

And actually, many of your writers might have watched ‘Bandersnatch’ just recently, the ‘Black Mirror’ on Netflix, where you get to make choices along the way about what the characters do. Of course, this is a very old idea, books I used to love as a kid, where, you know, ‘Turn to page 37 if you go through the left door or…’

What this research team did was to train AI on the way that humans tell stories. We tell stories which aren’t too dystopian most of the time, or at least we tell stories about what it means to be human.

And then the AI, having trained on this, was let loose on a tree of possibilities of a story to tell. And what was encouraging was because it had learnt how humans tell stories, it chose a pathway that was more human-like, wasn’t horrific choices which weren’t emotionally involved. It took a pathway that humans responded to.

I think that if we can train the AI that’s emerging, in a sense, to be empathetic by reading our stories, by understanding our art, and therefore, being sympathetic to producing something similar, then we might have an empathetic AI will not be one that will, hopefully, wipe us out.

I actually put the quote by Ian McEwan, whose response to 9/11 was, if those hijackers had been able to put themselves in the minds of the passengers on those planes, would they have been able to carry out the act that they did? And I think this is partly why we have art is to be able to share our different ways of looking at the world, and to try and to mix minds, and not separate minds.

Joanna: I love that. I love that story might be the answer to the whole AI thing. I just love it.

I want to ask you some technical questions that I think authors are really concerned with. So the first one is the copyright question. We have a new quote, ‘The macaque selfie, the monkey selfie,’ which I’m sure everyone can remember. It was an item created by a nonhuman cannot be copyrighted.

What does that mean if we’re using AI as a tool? If I feed the AI my 17 novels and it spits out something I can use, what happens with copyright?

Marcus: Yes, I think this is still a very gray area, and it’s partly why I spent a couple of years on a committee at the Royal Society in London, looking at the impact that machine learning is going to have on AI on the future.

I think these legal issues are ones we just are not quite sure about yet. I think fundamental things like driverless cars, if it causes an accident, who is to blame? Is it the person who programmed the car? Is it the driver who owns the car? So I think similar issues come up with copyright.

If somebody writes a piece of code, but they take a material that the code is learning on which belongs to somebody else, and so the result is then a product of, say, your novels, but a bit of code written by somebody else, and so who owns the copyright there?

I think this is really interesting because I actually start the book with something called the Ada Lovelace Challenge. Ada Lovelace was one of the first programmers that was interested in the idea that this analytical machine that Babbage had made might be able to do more than just mathematical calculations, and she suggested music could be one of the things. But she cautioned and said, ‘Look, this will never be able to do more than the programmer who wrote it.’

And so that’s the challenge of the book. Is that really true anymore? Because these things seem to be really creative. So if it’s going beyond the person who’s coded the thing, it seems to be creating things which are not what the coder expected. Is that still the coder’s property?

Or should it start to be something else? If you think about the way movies are made, just generally the ownership of a movie, because there are so many people involved in that, it generally has to be owned by a company. So it’s not actually a person, it belongs to a legal identity, which deals with the fact that there are many creative processes going in, and you just couldn’t pull this thing apart, if everyone said, ‘But that line was my line’.

I wonder whether we’re going to get to a similar sort of situation where we will have to recognize maybe some legal status for AI which will incorporate the creativity of the coder, the creativity of the things that are being learnt on. But I think we’re going into unexplored territory here.

Joanna: I also wanted to ask about translation because this is something I’m really super excited about. Because just last year, a translation AI translated a nonfiction, and that’s important, a nonfiction book, 100,000 words in 30 seconds into Mandarin, from English to Mandarin, and then an editor took a week to clean that up.

It would have taken six months, apparently, to have translated with a human. So I wonder about that because in that case, surely the AI did the first draft, which is normally what an author does, and therefore, that just really confused me.

I’m very interested in what’s going to happen with translation with AIs. What are your thoughts on that?

Marcus: Language translation has been very successful, and it is a great thing for machine learning to work on because, in the past I suppose a translation would be top-down coding where you would say, ‘Okay, well, you’ve got a dictionary, you translate things’.

But very often subtlety of sentences means that just a simple translation of each word using a dictionary doesn’t capture it. And the language tools now are being very effective at really capturing the meaning of a sentence because they learn on the way that we use language, but they still aren’t perfect.

That’s where you said a human had to come in and tidy it up. And I think one of the things I kept on hearing when I did my research for this book was the words, ‘Good enough,’ that the AI can produce music which is good enough for, say, a game or a corporate video, but isn’t going to be performed in a concert hall.

Again, when it came to translation, the translations were good enough to communicate the message that somebody was trying to write in one language, but if you really wanted the full subtleties then you needed a human to come in.

There’s an interesting guy that I’ve always been very interested in called Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote the book, ‘Godel, Escher, Bach.’ He’s actually been looking at AI for 50 years or so, but he’s very down on AI as far as translation goes.

He produced some very interesting examples which just throw a computer because they just don’t understand context. Things between languages, for example, you know in English, we don’t have…words don’t have a masculine or feminine form, but in French they do.

That can cause real problems when you start translating because if you say something like, ‘His car and her car, his house and her house, his book and her book,’ that translates very difficultly into French.

And you’ve picked up on one thing which I think is quite exciting that, although computers are very good, humans are also very good. And actually, it’s going to be the combination of the two which is best.

If you go back to the game of Go, which we already talked about, if you combine a human with the AI, then together they can beat, certainly a human, but they can also beat the AI on its own.

We’ve seen this also in medical research as well. AI, one of the big things it’s being used for is in health care. It’s able to scan pictures and pick up tumors, for example, which are being missed by human radiographers.

But again, the combination of a human and the AI seems to be better than both of them. So I’m hoping that’s the future, that we’re going to use this as a very powerful tool to speed up translation, but it won’t ever be as good as a human in picking up the subtleties of use of language that the AI is just missing.

Joanna: Fantastic. A bit earlier you said it’s a bit like when everyone stuck .com on the end of everything and of course, then you’re probably talking 1998, ’97, ’98 to 2000, you know, that kind of .com boom. But of course, we are now, gosh, nearly 20 years later, and you and I are talking over the internet, I run a business on the internet, you’re collaborating over the internet, and we all are in a .com world.

Marcus: Yes, yes.

Joanna: Are we talking really fast change? Are we talking 20 years? What did you conclude? Are you out of a job? Am I out of a job and how fast?

Marcus: I think speed is very important here because people are comparing this revolution to something like the Industrial Revolution, which had a massive impact on work and people’s lives and caused a lot of poverty.

But the Industrial Revolution happened over a generation. It was your son or daughter that didn’t get the job that you had. I think the speed of this revolution is way faster. And I think that what we’re doing now, 10 years time, we will have to be doing something completely different.

We have to be ready for change. We have to know how to learn new things, which I think is exciting. I enjoy the challenge of not getting stuck in my ways and having to do something new. But I think that’s where AI is gonna help us. I think that too often we get stuck in our ways.

And actually, we end up behaving more like machines than the machines because we just keep on churning out the same sort of things. We get stuck in certain formulas for the way we write or the way we think. And AI is being able to analyze what we’re doing and suggest to us new pathways. Oh, maybe you could try this, maybe you could try that.

We might not like all the suggestions but some of them may resonate and take us off into a new direction. So I think that’s the really exciting, positive side of this AI, that it’s going to open up huge possibilities in our creative process that are kind of sitting there ready to be ignited, but we didn’t know were there.

Joanna: I’m excited too and that’s why I wanted to talk to you, I was like, ‘Yay, someone else who’s excited about our future.’ So thank you so much for your time.

Where can people find you and your book and everything you do online?

Marcus: Well, all my books in the UK are published by 4th Estates, who are a wonderful publisher. I’ve loved them and stuck with them all the way. And I have a website… So I’m the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, as you said, quite a mouthful. So I have a website where I put a lot of the activities that I do, radio work that I archive, television work, and also my books. So that’s www.simonyi, which is spelled, S-I-M-O-N-Y-I, .ox.ac.uk. I’m also on to Twitter, where I kind of use as a microblog, so that’s @marcusdusautoy.

Joanna: Thanks so much for your time, Marcus. That was great.

Marcus: Yeah, real pleasure.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Finding the time and discipline to write is a challenge for many authors. Nathan Wade shares three easy ways to make the most of your writing time each day.

Does creativity strike when you’re messing around and having fun?

Does being laid-back and disorganized spark the most creative masterpieces?

Many people believe that creativity is a product of the scattered brain. Some experts even argue that there’s research to support this theory.

While the archetype of the mad genius is a common one, the truth is that the most successful creatives are actually extremely disciplined when it comes to their work.

Unlocking creativity isn’t about sitting back, goofing off, and waiting for inspiration to strike. It’s about meticulously curating the right conditions to foster creativity.

[Note from Joanna: For more about how to make the most of your creative time, check out Productivity for Authors.]

The Myth of the Sloppy Creative Genius

Even if you aren’t familiar with his theory of relativity, you’ve probably heard of Einstein. Albert Einstein was one of the most innovative thinkers in history. The disheveled scientist is the poster boy of the messy genius archetype.

Einstein’s desk was famously photographed on the day he died. The picture reveals a chaotic landscape of papers and books.

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign of?”

But behind Einstein’s messy desk was a regimented mind. In Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, author Mason Currey records the daily schedules of the world’s most creative people. In his book, Currey refutes the belief that Einstein had a hectic or disorganized life.

Einstein’s schedule was actually regimented around his work. As a rule, Einstein worked at home after dinner to finish up anything he didn’t complete at his office.

And his shaggy bed head served a practical purpose: he kept his hair long to avoid barber visits.

Einstein was disciplined, and he’s not the only one. People like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos didn’t succeed by fooling around until they struck gold; they each worked within the confines of a routine that helped them to be creative.

The Need for Order

Creatives, freelancers, and entrepreneurs all share a unique problem: lack of order.

Most creatives don’t have a traditional job with scheduled work hours. They don’t have bosses or coworkers to hold them accountable. They don’t need to be anywhere at any specific time. Some don’t even have concrete deadlines for their work.

The consequence is that creatives need to foster self-discipline. This is much easier said than done, especially for absent-minded types.

Without discipline, creatives may find themselves doing nothing all day.

The hardest part of any task is getting started. Steven Pressfield writes in his acclaimed book The War of Art, “It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.”

Here’s how you can find inspiration, be more innovative, and unleash the power of your creativity.

1. Make a schedule and stick to it.
If you’re a struggling creative, chances are you don’t have a schedule. Or maybe you do have one, but you don’t follow it. In order to maximize your creativity, you need to have a schedule. More importantly, you need to stick to it.

Many creatives make the mistake of over-correcting here. They create a minute-to-minute blueprint for their day. This can result in fatigue and emotional exhaustion. Instead of taking this unrealistic approach, simply map out the flow you’d like your day to have.

Maybe you want to exercise, work, eat lunch, do some more work, and call it a day. Once you understand what your ideal day looks like, nail down your schedule by attaching times to each activity and follow that plan the best you can. And absolutely do not forget to sleep.

Planning is easy, but executing a plan (especially a daily plan) requires a good bit of willpower. If you want to work from 9AM to 1PM, you need to work for those four hours. Plan in some breaks if you feel that you need them, but remember to work consistently.

2. Separate your workspace from your living space.
Another problem that gets in the way of creatives is their environment.

Where do you work right now?

Many creatives lack designated workspaces and that’s a big reason why so many of them struggle. It’s hard to shift gears between work and play when you work from home.

If you work from home, you need to create a separate work area. This way you can shift into work mode more easily. Ideally, you should use a separate room as an office—but even setting up a work area in the corner of a room can do the trick. Do not place your office in the middle of your living room.

It’s critical that you don’t use this space for anything else. That means no browsing social sites at your desk. By creating a space that you deem solely a workspace, you’ll be able to get into the zone faster and get your creative juices flowing.

3. Set a dress code for yourself.
It’s not only where you work, but what you work in.

It’s a cliché that freelancers work in their pajamas. If you want to be creative and productive, you might want to toss that advice in the trash. What you wear has a direct effect on how you perform.

Donning a hoodie and sweats every day encourages you to be a little lazier.

Create a dress code for yourself during your work hours. You don’t need to wear a penguin suit or ball gown, but you should choose clothes that encourage professionalism. That may mean a crisp button-up shirt and slacks or a pencil skirt and blouse.

Find what works for you. Just don’t get too comfortable. Remember: you’re at work.

Cultivate A Habit of Discipline Today

For most creatives, developing discipline is the largest obstacle in their way. Using a work checklist can also help to stay on the right track.

Sure, you can search high and low for a new source of inspiration—but why not tap into the potential that’s already inside you?

If you’ve exhausted yourself sitting in front of a blank screen or canvas, give these techniques a try. You might be surprised at what you can achieve with a little order.

How disciplined are you about getting your writing done? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Nathan Wade is the Managing Editor at WealthFit. He’s previously worked as an attorney in entrepreneurial law and venture capital.

[Messy desk image courtesy Ferenc Horvath and Unsplash.]

Your book cover design is an essential part of your book marketing strategy. Today author and graphic designer AD Starrling discusses how to make the most of the cover design you’ve worked so hard to get right.

Cover attracts, copy sells.

I can’t recall where exactly I first read this eye-opening line but I now live by this motto as both a writer and a designer.

When it comes to selling books, there is no doubt that an eye-catching cover that fits your main genre and targets your ideal reader is an important element to get right.

There are dozens of articles out there by some very big names in our industry about how changing covers changed their sales figures and in some cases, their entire careers.

Our very own Joanna Penn has written a couple of features here and here, and there is this sobering example by H.M. Ward which I always quote as an example of very effective redesign and rebranding.

I also strongly recommend checking out this podcast interview with Stuart Bache on book covers.

So, now that you’ve got a great book cover, what can you do with it besides putting it out there in the world when you launch your book? It turns out you can do a lot, especially to market it. So let’s break this down into three phases:

1. Prelaunch
2. Launch
3. Branding

1. Prelaunch

Buzz building is a crucial element of most bestselling authors’ marketing strategy when it comes to their new releases. Getting your existing readers excited about your upcoming book and attracting new readers to your writing world is a great way to ensure you get good sale figures when you launch, especially if you’re doing preorders.

I would particularly emphasize targeting your existing readers. Remember the Rule of 7 in Marketing 101. Even your fans may have to “see” your book several times before they click the preorder or buy button.

Here are several ways you can use your book cover to build buzz about your upcoming release before your book goes live. You should start thinking about this 1 to 3 months before your book launch.

A. Cover reveal

A cover reveal is an easy, simple, and effective way to build buzz about your upcoming release. From exclusive cover reveals with preorder links to your mailing list and fan groups, to posts on your social media platforms which you can boost, to paid cover reveal book tours. All of these are easy ways to get your book out there to existing fans and potential new readers.

Many authors do giveaways with their cover reveals to engage their existing readers and attract new ones.

There are two ways you can use your book cover for cover reveals. Just use the cover itself or create attractive graphics that include your cover. In terms of cover reveal book tours, romance and YA fantasy are the two genres that can do well with that particular form of buzz building.

This is the cover reveal graphic I’m using for my upcoming release. Here, I used elements of the book cover for the background, a 3D render of the book, and a tagline with a clear call-to-action.

And here’s an amazing cover reveal post where the author uses their actual book cover to full effect (note this is not my design).

B. Profile picture

Another simple way to make your upcoming release highly visible is to change your author profile image on your various social media platforms, your Amazon author page, and even your Bookbub page.

Here are a couple of recent guides which will help you get the dimensions right: Sprout Social Social Media Image Size Guide and Hubspot Ultimate Guide Social Media Image Dimensions.

Social media platforms often change their image dimension requirements so make sure to revisit them at least once or twice a year to ensure you’re using up to date sizing guides.

C. Website

Always try and keep your website up to date by displaying your upcoming release prominently on your Home page. Your cover or an attractive graphic with a tagline and preorder links is an easy way to make sure your readers know what’s coming next, especially if you’re driving traffic to your website with advertising.

Consider adding your book cover with its preorder links to your mailing list sign-up page.

Here’s a website Home page graphic I made for Melissa J. Crispin when we redesigned the cover of her fantasy novella The Crimson Curse.

D. Banners

Adding your book cover to your social media and newsletter banners is another easy way to boost visibility. Many authors regularly change their banners to not only showcase their upcoming releases but also when they’re doing sales on one of their titles.

Here’s the Twitter banner I made for Melissa J. Crispin.

E. Ads and teasers

Using your book cover in ads is a brilliant way to boost preorders and increase visibility.

You can either use the book cover itself, elements of it, or images that are evocative of the story in your ad graphics.

Here are two Facebook ads I designed for S.E. Wright when we did her boxset cover.

Here’s a teaser template I created for Melissa J. Crispin, which she then used to add content to use in her social media posts.

2. Launch

Launching your book is a crazy whirlwind of newsletters, social media posts, advertising, and watching sales and reviews come in for your new baby. If you’ve put in the hard work for your prelaunch, it helps make the launch period that much easier.

Your existing and potential new readers have already seen your upcoming book cover several times in the form of the above buzz-building tactics. Now’s the time to dial things up and get them to click buy if they haven’t already pre-ordered your book.

A. Website and social media banners

Once your book is live, updating your website Home page and your social media banners with new launch graphics is a must. Nothing says “There’s naff all to see here folks” than going to an author’s website or social media page on launch day and seeing the proverbial tumbleweed roll across the screen.

You have a web presence. Use it to the max when it comes to your book launch. Remember the Rule of 7.

B. Boosted posts

Boosted posts targeted at your existing readers is a clever way to get sales on launch day. Sure, you would have sent a newsletter out too, but not everyone will open it on launch day and a boosted post doesn’t hurt visibility.

The book cover itself or a pretty graphic featuring the book and your buy links works well for this.

C. Ads

This is where most bestselling authors concentrate their marketing money. Most authors with a backlist that generates good read through and ROI have ads running in the background for their first in series, a boxset, or their reader magnet for mailing list sign-up anyway, but launch day is when the big guns come out.

Since you have no control over your Amazon ads graphics, ensuring the book cover itself is eye-catching from the get-go with a title or author name readable at thumbnail level is the best chance you can give your book in terms of those few precious seconds you have to catch a reader’s eye on a busy Amazon page.

For Facebook, Bookbub, or Twitter ads, the world is your oyster. Here, you can experiment with all sorts of graphics, images, and elements of your book cover.

The advice for Facebook ads is usually that simple images work better than graphics featuring book covers. But I have seen lots of great Facebook ads featuring book covers that work really well when you consider their social proof.

At right is a Bookbub ad I did for S.E. Wright for her boxset.

Here are some fantastic examples (note these are not my designs) of how you can use a book cover and its elements to create brilliant ads.

3. Branding

The other function your book cover has is to convey your author brand or series brand to readers. It’s advisable to revisit your author branding regularly (I would recommend at least once a year) to make sure you keep things fresh and on target for your genre and the kind of readers you are trying to attract.

A. Website and social media

Here are some great examples of authors who are constantly updating their websites and social media banners to reflect their latest release and branding (again, not my own designs).

When I designed the covers for my upcoming urban fantasy series Legion, I decided to give my website and my newsletter a makeover to reflect my new series branding.

B. Swag

Another brilliant and fun way to use your book cover for branding and marketing is by incorporating them in your business card, author event banners, and all your fan swag. So bookmarks, postcards, posters, mugs, T-shirts, tote bags, fridge magnets, popsockets, etc.

The sky is truly the limit when it comes to swag. And you can even monetize these designs by having your own author store on Zazzle or Society 6, or your own website.

[Note from Joanna: for more information and ideas about merchandising that ties into your books and author brand, listen to this episode of The Creative Penn podcast.]

Here are some great examples: Elise Kova, JA Huss, and Marie Force.

One thing to ensure before you sell physical products though is that you have the correct licenses with regards to the images used.

So now that we’ve talked about the various ways you can use your book cover or elements of it for marketing, what about the tools at your disposal to create these eye-catching graphics?

Here are the three I would recommend right now:

1. Photoshop
2. Canva
3. Book Brush

When it comes to design, every designer swears by Photoshop. It can look like the tool of the devil at first but I would recommend starting with Adobe’s own tutorials if you’re new to the software.

If you don’t fancy paying for Photoshop, then I recommend Canva as a great platform for creating stunning graphics.

The other platform to consider is Book Brush. The new kid on the block, Book Brush promises to help you “create professional ads and social media images for your books”.

Before I started my design business, Canva was my go-to tool for all my graphic needs. Photoshop is now my personal tool of choice because it’s so versatile. If you’re not a designer, then I would recommend trying both Canva and Book Brush’s free plans before committing to a paid plan with either of them.

One advantage Canva still retains over Book Brush is that you can do more than just ads and social media images on there. Canva offers a plethora of design features including business cards, book covers, flyers, and posters among many others.

The good thing about both Canva and Book Brush is that they are constantly innovating and adding to their platforms so you will be sure to get a solid product that will only gain in value over time whichever one you choose to go with.

Your last option when it comes to ads and social images is to outsource this completely. There are a few book cover designers who also offer social media kits and ads packages, including my previous book cover designers, the amazing Deranged Doctor Design. And of course, my own design business 17 Studio Book Design.

[Note from Joanna: You can also find more book cover designers here.]

I hope you’ve found this article helpful and will go forth with a better idea of how you can effectively use your book cover in all your marketing endeavors.

Have you used your book covers in your marketing and advertising graphics? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

17 Studio Book Design is the brainchild of bestselling fantasy and thriller author AD Starrling. Having done all her marketing designs since 2016, AD launched 17 Studio Book Design in October 2018, after obtaining her Adobe Associate Certification.

What can you expect from her? Stunning, professional covers that fit your genre. A reader for over 30 years and an author-publisher-marketer for over 6 years, she knows how this business works. Do check out the 17 Studio Book Design portfolio to see what kind of covers and marketing packages she can create for you.

Symbolism can add depth to our writing, turning characters into real people, and developing nuance in scenes. In today’s podcast interview, Caroline Donahue explains how to use Tarot cards to delve into symbolism and give your unconscious mind some fuel for creativity.

In the introduction, I talk about the ghostwriting + plagiarism scandal sweeping the romance community #copypastecris, referring to Courtney Milan’s original article and what to do about it, plus Kris Rusch’s in-depth analysis. I explain the difference between ghostwriting and co-writing, as well as why ghostwriting is a normal practice in publishing [Reedsy examples], but plagiarism is most definitely not acceptable.

Today’s show is sponsored by my Productivity for Authors mini-course with lessons on saying no and setting boundaries, finding time to write, making the most of your writing time, co-writing, working with author assistants, dictation, tools I use personally, and thoughts on health and mindset. Find all my courses at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/learn

Caroline Donahue is an American author and writing coach living in Berlin, Germany. She’s also the host of The Secret Library podcast. Her new book is Story Arcana: Tarot for Writers.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• Common misconceptions about tarot

• Ways of using the tarot to think about character motivation and inner landscape

• Crossover between Jungian psychology and the tarot

• The three types of archetypal journeys a book, its author and its characters go through

• Doing tarot readings with authors to discover what may not be working in a book

• Why you don’t need to know what the cards mean before working with them

• Why your subconscious matters when working with tarot

• On interviewing authors and noticing what they have in common

• On the changes a new city and continent have had on Caroline’s writing

You can find Caroline Donahue at CarolineDonahue.com and on Twitter @carodonahue

Transcript of Interview with Caroline Donahue

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com and today I’m here with Caroline Donahue. Hi, Caroline.

Caroline: Hi. It’s so nice to be here.

Joanna: Oh, it’s great to have you on the show. Just a little introduction.

Caroline is an American author and writing coach living in Berlin, Germany. She’s also the host of ‘The Secret Library’ podcast which is fantastic and I’ve been on it, so go listen to that.

Caroline: You’ve been on it twice.

Joanna: It’s amazing. Today we are talking about her latest book ‘Story Arcana: Using Tarot for Writing’ which is super cool and something I have definitely done over my creative lifetime.

Caroline, start by telling us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.

Caroline: I think it’s one of those things where it’s difficult to say when it started because it was kind of always there. I have these memories of being a little kid and taking stacks of paper and folding them in half and stapling them and making books, like, at a compulsive pitch.

Then the problem was is that I may have been an early compulsive bookbinder as much as anything else, at which what my mother pointed out, ‘You might actually want to write in them before you make another one.’

But I was the kid who was hiding under the piano in the corner of the classroom and reading and I pulled my first all-nighter I think when I was in third grade, third or fourth grade, reading ‘Bridge to Terabithia.’

It started very early the obsession with books and my mother used to say that I ate books, which I think is fairly accurate. I’d rather give up food than books probably.

And so with this intensity about books, there was always an interest in writing. And I was fortunate in that my family was not the kind of family that said, ‘Oh, that’s a terrible idea. You’ll starve to death and die,’ or the things that people say, and I got to go to some creative writing camps. There were some writing classes early on in school and I was really supported in that enjoyment.

Now, the funny thing is, I didn’t end up getting a degree in creative writing at school. I studied art history and then I ended up studying psychology which has actually been a better degree for writing in some ways because just getting into the way people work and the way that they think has continued to engage me.

I find that actually being into books is the best possible way to handle this because every book can be different. You can write fiction and nonfiction. Writing has been a way for me to stay engaged with many different interests, and yet appear to have a cohesive career.

Joanna: I love that.

Caroline: That’s why it’s really worked in the long term.

Joanna: I totally get that and I think that works really well. I feel the same way. We can do our research however we like. I have a second degree in psychology and also art history come into a lot of my books as well so obviously you and I have a lot in common. We always talk about this.

Caroline: Totally.

Joanna: Let’s get into the tarot. I blame Hollywood, I blame the media for making it sort of only gypsy fortunetellers or satanic rituals use tarot cards.

Tell us a bit more about what tarot is and some of the misconceptions that might be out there.

Caroline: One of my favorite sort of debunking statements about the whole kind of, ‘Is it a satanic tool?’ is a friend of mine, Susannah Conway always says, ‘Well, they’re just bits of cardboard with pictures on them.’ That’s what they are.

There are a lot of tools out there that are used for communication and exploration and I think people thought the telephone was kind of a satanic tool early on because it allowed people to communicate over long distances in ways they wouldn’t normally be able to do.

So I think the tool itself is actually quite neutral and I think that it depends on how you use it. Some people use it and claim to use it to be able to predict the future and that’s not how I’m working with it and I don’t think I’ve actually ever studied with anyone who claims to be able to predict the future.

It’s more that, from my background where I studied, expressive arts therapy and psychology is the relationship that the unconscious mind has to imagery, and the mind abhors a vacuum. So if you present a brain with a picture that looks like there’s something going on in the picture and then you try to say to yourself, ‘Okay, well what’s going on here?’

Your mind will start to fill in the gaps. It just happens naturally. We are storytelling, meaning-making beings. It’s how we’ve made sense out of our lives as long as people have existed.

The tarot is a system that’s been around for hundreds of years. It was originally started as…there are mixed kind of thoughts on it, but the greater consensus is that it was started as a card game and that some fortunetellers kind of co-opted the card game and then started to use it for fortunetelling.

It wasn’t even intended as a fortunetelling tool from the beginning but because it’s had this long association, a lot of people get nervous and freaked out about that, and there are some relatively scary pictures on it.

People get scared of the devil card or they get scared of the tower, they get scared of death. They’re not light topics but life isn’t light either if we look at it below the surface. It’s not like life is puppies and kittens and flowers everywhere and we never have to deal with anything dark.

In many ways I feel like the tarot is a more honest representation of our experience as people because it does include dark imagery, and good books include dark stuff. They’re not just sort of, ‘La, la, la, everything is beautiful. The end.’ We might want to write one of those sometimes because it’d be kind of a relief but I don’t.

Joanna: Neither do I.

Caroline: No, you definitely do not. And most of the people that I know who read books don’t want to read those either.

Joanna: I agree with you. I think there’s something on that deeper level. You just reminded me there of ‘James Bond: Live and Let Die’ I think ‘The Hangman’ and the voodoo stuff coming out from the grave and it’s been associated with stuff like that, but actually, as you say, I love that, just pictures on pieces of cardboard. That’s fantastic. I love it.

Caroline: Bless you Susannah for that one, but it’s true. They’re neutral. They’re an inanimate object. There’s no power inside of them that’s going to change or control your life. It’s a way for you to trick your unconscious to giving you information that’s not readily available.

Joanna: No, it’s almost like a writing prompt when we’re talking about writers.

Caroline: Exactly.

Joanna: So the symbolism of tarots.

Pick a card, any card, and talk about how the symbolism of a card might help us access that unconscious mind.

Caroline: The one that I’ve focused on, because there are 72 cards in the deck and I have only focused on the first 22 in this book because I feel like they’re a set.

The major arcana is traditionally looked at as a set, and for those who don’t know much about the tarot there’s the major arcana and there’s the minor arcana, and the majors in all decks they have big pictures on them and they have big names and they are big types like ‘The Hermit’ or ‘The Fool’ or ‘The Magician.’

Anyone who’s Googled tarot sees that yellow picture from the Rider-Waite with the guy with his arms outstretched and the symbols around him. That’s sort of a standard image. So that’s the major arcana and they represent major turns in the road, big changes, and the minors are more everyday incidents.

And then within that, there are the court cards, which are people. And so I’m planning to write about those later in terms of plot and the court cards I think are more about character development so I’m going to play with those later.

I don’t know if anyone has this issue. I have this issue sometimes when I’m writing a character, it feels a bit forced or it feels like I’m kind of the characters mouthing what I want them to say or they feel a bit like a puppet and there has to be some kind of unconscious motivation going on.

Maybe that the character isn’t even aware of because we do things all the time not realizing why we’re really doing them and you want your characters to feel more like real people.

So sometimes asking a question like, ‘Well, what are they hiding here? What are they maybe hiding from themselves?’ And then pulling a card and seeing what comes out, then you can start to turn it into a puzzle.

Say you have a character who’s a really, really friendly, helpful, kindhearted character and then you pull a card and the card underneath it’s hiding from them it’s something like ‘The Hierophant’ hiding underneath, and ‘The Hierophant’ is about institutions of thought. It’s also about the sort of institutionalized religion, organized thinking society and that sort of thing.

You might have a character who appears to be extremely helpful but if you look at their underneath agenda, they’re really trying to push a system. They might be trying to convert somebody. They might be trying to put them in a box or have them make sense.

It’s a way to make the dynamic just a little more sophisticated, and often it doesn’t take that much to make a scene just a little bit more interesting or dialogue just a little bit more realistic.

Because if you have a scene that’s like, ‘Hi, John, I’ve just been to the store. They were out of milk.’ And he says, ‘Well damn, I’m really sad that they were out of milk.’ That’s not going to be that interesting, but if what’s really happening is it’s a man and woman and he thinks she hasn’t really been to the store. He thinks she’s been sneaking out to see her lover.

If you find that underneath. If you pull ‘The Lovers’ and see maybe somebody thinks there’s something else going on then the thing about the milk can be pretty dynamic.

Joanna: I love that and it’s really interesting. I told you this earlier, but at several points in my life’s journey, I’ve pulled ‘The Moon’ and ‘The Hermit’ and amazingly ‘The Moon’ especially has come up for me again and again.

I haven’t done my own spread that often in my life but at major points where I just don’t know what I’m doing with my life, I pulled ‘The Moon’.

In case anyone is interested, what do you think that says about me?

Caroline: I think ‘The Moon’ is about intuition.

The moon comes out at night and it’s illumination that happens at night and it’s also on many decks. I think you said you had a Rider-Waite, but if you look at a Rider-Waite moon, you’ll see this crazy lobster crawling out of the water. There’s a lot of weird stuff going on in ‘The Moon.’

There’s a wolf howling and there’s usually this lobster coming out. I think that ‘The Moon’ to me represents looking at the unconscious and seeing what comes up from the depths if you really pay attention to that. So if you’re working with ‘The Moon’ it’s not all going to be out in the open.

It’s not like ‘The Sun,’ another card, where everything will be really obvious, upfront, everything’s good. It’s easy. But ‘The Moon’ is you have to wait until it gets dark out, you have to wait until some light comes out and then the stuff is going to start coming out of the depths and then you’ll be able to see what’s really going on.

To me it’s about patience, it’s not being afraid to find inspiration in the darker portion of your exploration and it’s also about trusting your intuition and trusting yourself and not expecting it to be all out in the front with a blaring sign like, ‘Here it is.’ It takes a bit more patience to work with ‘The Moon.’

Joanna: I love that and I think it’s been quite comforting for me to have ‘The Moon’ and also ‘The Hermit’ which just represents the writer’s life.

Caroline: Totally. It’s like, ‘Don’t hang out with people. Just go write. Go write. Just go do it, basically.’

Joanna: Exactly.

Let’s talk about archetypes because again, we both studied psychology. I’ve written about Carl Jung. I know you’re also really interested in Jungian psychology.

How are the archetypes represented between Jungian psychology and the tarot?

Caroline: I think that there are several layers going on. It’s easy to talk about with the major arcane, which again is the focus of the book for this stage, because it not only talks about types that you see like ‘The Empress’ is a mother figure, a very maternal figure. You see that in every society.

‘The Emperor’ is a paternal figure that’s a male energy that’s really in charge and can handle everything, and then those are the sorts of archetypal images that you see in every society one way or another.

But the other layer of it is that from the beginning of the major arcana with ‘The Fool’ all the way to ‘The World’ at the end there is a journey that is happening, and the archetype of a journey is something that’s present in most societies.

You see it in ‘The Odyssey’. You see it in cave paintings, you see people going out to hunt trying to solve something and then coming back, and all of these stages of what can happen in the journey are present in the major arcana.

You have the little guy at the beginning of ‘The Fool’ who’s got a backpack on, he sets out. You get to ‘The Magician’ he’s got a sense of, okay, I’m feeling a sense of mastery and he goes through all of these stages leading to the cards that scare people and that everybody wants to throw back in the deck whenever they pull them like ‘The Tower’ which is everything falls apart, and ‘The Devil’ which everybody thinks just means the worst possible thing happening. I don’t, but we can talk about that if you want.

And then also, ‘Death’ which is sort of an ending things that have to be. And that can be a literal death or it can be a metaphorical death where a relationship dies, something in a storyline dies, something happens.

‘Death’ is pretty much primal an archetype as you can get. And then it comes out the other side with things like ‘The Sun’ and ‘The Moon’ and ‘The Star’ which is a bit of hope and moving forward into a sort of reckoning with ‘Judgement’ and then you get to ‘The World’ which is sort of like, ‘Okay, now we’ve come full circle, literally like a globe. We’ve come full circle.’ And then you start over.

One thing that I focus on in the book that I think is important is that there are three levels that go through this major arcana journey which is an archetypal journey.

You have your characters in the book will go through their own journey, figure things out, learn things, maybe not learn some other things and they will reach a point at the end.

The book itself will go through its own evolution. Points where the book is working, when the book is not working, when you want to throw the book in the garbage, feeling like this was a stupid idea, ‘I shouldn’t have written this book,’ and then, ‘Oh, wait, I’ve figured it out.’

You get through the ‘The Tower’ part where the book is terrible and then you have some hope and then you get to the end and you get to ‘The World’ and there’s your book.

But it’s also for the writer because anybody who writes knows that part of the reason that what you want to write is that we want to be transformed by the process as well.

If it was we were exactly the same as we were at the beginning every time we write a book I mean that would get pretty boring for me. So those three layers are happening and you can follow those archetypes through the journey of the major arcana in the tarot.

Joanna: Wow. It’s so interesting, and this is the truth about writing, isn’t it? You can go all these different layers and levels and like you say, it can be our journey as writers, it can be the journey of the characters. It’s just fascinating.

There’s so much in your book. It really is jam-packed amazing stuff, but I’m interested because of course you also do readings for other people. You do readings for other writers.

Caroline: I do.

Joanna: If people want to do their own reading with your book, how would they do that or how do you do it for other people?

Caroline: The way I started was basically that, like you, I was getting the same cards all the time for myself.

I would go through phases, and it does change, I would use a different deck. I would change. Nope, you’re still getting whatever it was. You’re still getting ‘The Hangman’ right now. You’re in limbo, too bad for you.

And so I said, ‘Well, there’s cards I’m just never drawing so I want to learn.’ So I decided I was going to do a 100 readings one summer and I just told anybody I’m doing it by donation. I really just want to build more of a relationship with these other cards that I never pull.

And then I ended up doing one of those readings for someone who was working on a book and they said, ‘I don’t really need a reading for me. I feel okay about me.’ But I’m really stuck on this book.

So we looked at what was not working with the book, where was the stuck point with the book and then you start to ask questions and pull a card and then look at the card and like we discussed earlier your subconscious will start to fill in answers.

You can ask questions and it’s best if they are who, what, when, where, why kind of questions. ‘Why’ is really good. ‘How’ is pretty good. ‘What’s missing’ is good. You don’t want to say, ‘Is this book good? Yes or no?’ That’s really not going to work very well with the tarot. They have to be a little bit more like prompts where you would want to do some journaling after you do it.

But I do put a couple of spreads that are examples of ones I’ve created especially for writers in the book. One is which is like working with dialogue. So if somebody is having a conversation you can pull a card for each character and then you can pull another card underneath each character to say what are you really trying to talk about here.

No one ever talks about what they actually talking about in a book or they shouldn’t because otherwise, you get things like, ‘Oh, George, we must run forth before the explosion happens because it will kill us all and this is not expository dialogue at all.’ You don’t want that.

There has to be something going on underneath. Picking something for your surface level and then picking for something underneath is really helpful.

Another thing that’s helpful is if you get into this situation. I don’t know if anyone else has this happened. It happens to me all the time where my character is in location A, I need to get them to location B and they don’t seem to want to go to location B. It just feels unnatural or it’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to get them there but it feels really far.’

I used to live in Maine for a while at one point and one thing that they like to say is like, ‘Oh, you can’t get there from here, because the roads are constructed in such a way that it’s very difficult to get to a place that looks very close by.’

So I had a spread in my head that I called the ‘You can’t get there from here.’ You pick a card for where the character is now, you pick a card for where they’re trying to go and then you pick another one for in between and then start saying, ‘Oh, the people in there are…’

You don’t have to know what the tarot means. I would hate people listening to feel like they have to go buy a bunch of tarot books and study it and learn it. It’s not like learning a foreign language where you can’t interact with it if you don’t know what the words actually mean.

Because they’re pictures, you can look at the picture and it’s more important that you decide what that picture looks like to you. So if you see something like the five of ones and there’s a bunch of people trying to poke each other with long sticks and you say, ‘Oh look it’s like they’re in a fight it’s not going well.’

Maybe if she got in a fight with somebody then she’d want to leave and then she could go to this other location.

It’s more important that your unconscious kicks in when you’re looking at the cards so that your associations and your understanding of your story is what allows it to mean more and to give you some aha moments.

Joanna: I love that. I love the idea of the two levels of the dialogue and then what’s actually going on underneath. That’s a really good tip. I love that. I’m going to try that. It’s fantastic.

Caroline: Yes, it’s fun.

Joanna: Let’s talk about the decks because you’re in art history and I love visual images. I’ve looked at a lot of this stuff and the interesting thing is there’s not one tarot deck that everybody uses. So there might be one card called ‘The Moon’ and such but if you buy a Native American deck versus the Rider-Waite as we’ve mentioned is the kind of maybe the best known.

We’ve also got the Thoth deck in our house which my husband likes and I know you’ve got other ones.

Tell us about the deck or decks you prefer and also does it matter? And why the image is so different?

Caroline: First of all, I will say it does not matter what deck you get as long as you like it. If you respond to the imagery and the imagery feels really exciting or rewarding or it connects to the kind of thing you’re trying to work on then I think it’s completely fine.

There’s no one deck to rule them all. I don’t think that exists, especially now when there are new decks coming out all the time.

The Rider-Waite-Smith is sort of become one syntax. So there are a lot of decks that will take the illustration that Pamela Smith originally did and I think that was the first deck to have illustrations not just for the major arcana but for the minor arcana.

In many decks, before that, it used to just look like playing cards where you’d have symbols that were the number of symbols for that. There would be five ones in a picture and that was it. There would be no scene. So she’s the one who came up with all of the scenes and the scenes have fairly consistent things that happen.

You’ll see a lot of decks that have different styles of art and it’s fun if you’re a big nerd like me where you’re like, ‘Oh, oh that’s so clever how they placed that a little differently than this.’

But there’s always going to be a lobster with ‘The Moon’ in the Rider-Waite-Smith convention. The Toth is a completely different sort of syntax. It’s like that one is a different language. So if you’re really into that, that is its own kind of system if that makes sense to you.

So for somebody who’s looking to build a relationship with the tarot, it’s kind of interesting to pay attention to which one that is. You don’t have to get an actual Rider-Waite-Smith deck if you don’t respond to the imagery. Some people love it. Some people are just like, ‘Well, I’m not into it.’

But there are so many out there that there’s a deck for you somewhere. There are so many. And a really good place to start is there is a site called, I never know how to pronounce it, aeclectic.net and you can look up tarot decks and name for most decks that have been published with the exception of some independents that are on Kickstarter and so on and not yet indexed, but they will have pictures of most of the deck.

I think that one thing to guard against when you’re buying a deck is that sometimes you’ll see a picture of a deck and there’s a picture on the cover of the box and then you may see one or two others and think you’re really into it and those three are the ones that you love and then the rest of the deck leaves you flat.

It’s like when the single on the album is amazing and then the rest of the album you’re not into it. That can happen with tarot.

So the more you can see as many cards in the deck as possible before purchasing or even better if you can go to a shop and see them then that will help. Often if you buy things off Etsy or an independent site or Little Red Tarot in Europe is a great source.

Those places will have pictures of lots of the cards so you can make sure that this is really something you’re responding to.

I had a giant card catalog file filled with decks before we left the U.S. in the fall. I had to cut it down. Hilariously, it was culling to down to, like, 50 decks. It was not culling down to two. So there was somewhere I was like, ‘This is cool.’ I gave them to friends who are interested, but I still have probably 40 or 50 decks.

Joanna: What did you write the book on for example or did you just kind of use them all?

Caroline: I tended to use groups because I didn’t want to be writing from just one deck because I felt like I would be really leaning on that card’s imagery and I wanted someone reading the book to be able to use the deck that they loved and not be kind of wedded to it.

I played with using imagery from cards in the book but then I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to have a particular deck that people feel they have to respond to.’ And I have different decks.

If you go on Pinterest, it is a great place to find tarot spreads. If you search for a question that you have and say tarot spread then they will appear. There’s one that’s called a deck interview which is kind of fun.

So when you get a deck you can interview your deck which is really fun, because if you go down the rabbit hole like I did if you’re into you will end up just get a cabinet. Just get a cabinet and you’re going to have all your decks in there and it’s going to be fine.

But there are different decks that have very different imagery. I have one that’s called the Bohemian Gothic that’s hilarious and it’s like old-fashioned, crazy, Dracula kind of stuff. I’m not going to use that to write a romance scene necessarily.

Or if you’re writing a romance novel you may not want that deck. But if you’re writing an adventure suspense plot you’re not going to use the cat tarot of which there are many.

I think that you can have different decks that work for different situations and one of the things in this deck interview spread is you can say what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses…you pull cards for this and then it says what should we work on together.

You could look at maybe this deck is really into dialogue or maybe this deck is really into character development or it’s really into crime novels and maybe you have another deck that’s really, really into romance novels. And maybe you have another one that’s really into literary fiction.

It’s tough to say. But I like the idea that they all have their own personalities and they’re really into different kinds of subjects just like we are. And that the art will activate different parts of your brain that will work well for that. That’s all that really matters is that you like it.

Joanna: When I was reading your stuff I was like, ‘Oh, you know, I should look at some other decks.’ and I fell, like, into the rabbit hole as you said.

Caroline: Oh, boy.

Joanna: Oh yeah, and I was like, ‘Okay, I’m backing away now because it’s…’

Caroline: Yeah, you gotta back away.

Joanna: It’s so cool but it’s also very intimidating. So I’m back to my Rider-Waite, but it is definitely beautiful as well.

I think this is really important like to stress that this writing prompts can so often be written. Writing prompts are written, whereas this is almost a writing prompt from something visual and I’m a visual writer.

I’m often looking at visual stuff to prompt my writing. So if people listening are in that phase then that really works.

Caroline: Definitely. I think it’s helpful to have different kinds of prompts. You can even just say I feel like writing something, pull a card and see…like, okay well, look at this picture and say, ‘Okay, what would a circumstance be surrounding this scene?’ And just start writing that and see what happens.

Joanna: I want to ask about your podcast, ‘The Secret Library’ podcast, which is amazing and you interview some seriously famous writers, a lot of literary fiction, a lot of kind of prize winners and really interesting guests.

I definitely urge people to check out ‘The Secret Library’ podcast.

Because you have interviewed so many super successful authors, are there any commonalities that you see in those writers that you’ve kind of learned over the years.

Caroline: I think so. I’ve thought about this a lot but one of the things I’ve noticed is that just in speaking to them there isn’t this point where you’re a prize winner or you’ve won an award for your book or something and then writing suddenly becomes this really easy process where there are no doubts or fears or concerns or you never get stuck.

What I’ve learned from talking to them is that they’re not superhuman. It’s kind of like when you get to the age when your parents were when you were a certain age and frustrated with them and you thought you’re an adult, you’re supposed to understand everything and then you get to this age you’re like, ‘Oh, no, they had no idea what was going on.’

It feels a little bit like that, which is not to say these writers don’t know what’s going on, it’s just that I think that for many years I thought when I was trying to write books that when I got really stuck and didn’t know what to do that that was an indication of my lack of skill or that it was an indication that I didn’t know what I was doing.

In talking to so many authors who hit that point and yet worked through it and continue that that point of feeling like I don’t know what I’m doing right now is not an indication of failure, it’s just part of the process.

And I think author after author after author that I talk to has had that experience and even the ones who are really big and have hit it really big have often written like four or five books that they tried to sell and nothing was happening, there was nothing keeping them going.

I think of Donal Ryan who is a fiction writer and he just tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and he said, ‘The only reason I kept going was because my wife just said, ‘You know what? It’s good and you should keep going.”

And as soon as he published he was shortlisted for a prize but it took years and he could’ve given up at any moment if there hadn’t been somebody saying, ‘No, this is worth it, what you’re doing.’

I think that seems to be a consistent theme is that there was some force that convinced them that how terrible it can feel at certain points was not an indication that they shouldn’t be writing or that writing wasn’t for them.

Joanna: That’s interesting you picked that one because you’re also writing a novel right now, aren’t you?

Caroline: I am.

Joanna: Do you think that’s the thing that you personally are taking in or what else are you taking in into your writing process from what you’ve learned?

Caroline: It’s probably the one that’s with me today because today I have a library that I go to. I’m a member of a library here in Berlin which I love and it is like my zone and I was running a little bit late this morning.

It’s a very popular library. You have to be a member but I got there and there were no desks and it completely threw me off my game and I wrote nothing this morning. So I think having heard this from all these writers I’m like, ‘Oh, good. This is not an indicator that the book is not going to get finished. It’s just a hiccup in the routine and I have to just go back tomorrow and it will be fine.’

But the one that is the most consistent and not even today and not even when I was really hardcore working on the book. I was always present with that and always with clients, but I think the other thing too is that there are points when you have to let go of control of the book in ways that are sometimes uncomfortable.

I can think of several people, one in particular, the most dramatic by far, was Patricia Park who was working on a book called, ‘Re Jane’ and it was a Korean retelling of ‘Jane Eyre’. She was working in her uncle’s shop in New York in one of the boroughs and she hit this point where it’s like, ‘Oh, this book is not working. I can’t believe it.’

She got a Fullbright to go to South America and kind of spend a lot of time researching the Korean community in South America which is quite large in Argentina. And she got into there and she was really in it and she was starting to develop something and then she realized that the character she was developing was actually a B character in her original book that she had decided was not working.

Not everybody is probably going to get a Fullbright and go to South America and research and realize it’s still the same book, but she thought she had a whole new book and it was still the same book.

I think the other one that really stands out is that I have had every single person who has mentioned the length of time it has taken them to write a book has been irritated at how long it took and none of them have said, ‘God, I really wish it had taken a little bit longer. If this book could’ve taken me another six months, that would’ve been great, but no it just happened so fast.’

Nobody ever says that. It’s always like there’s something about it that was inefficient or difficult but also that they gained insight that they needed to have through the process of it being inefficient and difficult and that they were grateful for the insight but they just wish it hadn’t taken quite so long.

Joanna: That is super interesting. So I also want to ask you about Berlin because you mentioned the library there and you’ve been there a few months now, I guess. Six months?

Caroline: We’ve been here for four.

Joanna: What has Berlin done for you in terms of your life? And what has it changed up about your life? And how does changing place help you change your state as well?

Caroline: Oh, definitely. We had been thinking about this for a few years. We lived in Los Angeles for many years. I was there for 12. My husband was there for 20, and we were at a point where it was time to break up with Los Angeles.

And part of that is how expensive that city has gotten. I want to be writing, I don’t want to be sitting in the car which is what you have to do a lot there. There were just a lot of things that we just felt like it wasn’t suiting what we wanted.

So we got rid of 80% of our stuff. We moved here. We went from an 1800 square foot, 3-bedroom place with 2 bathrooms to a 440 square foot apartment with one bathroom in which we have three cats and a dog. It’s a very, very interesting dynamic.

This is a temporary flat. We will be in something larger before long, but I think we just wanted to cut away all of the distractions and all of the things that were keeping us from doing creative work.

My husband is an artist. He is an illustrator, animator, designer and then I’m writing and I just felt it just takes forever to get anywhere in LA. There was just a lot and it with just all of those things were taking away from the writing.

And also a majority of the book I’m writing right now is set in Berlin. So it turns out it’s quite difficult to write a book that’s set in Berlin when you’re in Los Angeles because they’re not very similar.

I think some of it is being in the location of the place that I’m writing about is a huge support and I think that just the European sensibility was one that we have always been interested in and supported.

We just couldn’t do the 10 days off a year anymore in America. You have to make a $150,000 to $200,000 to even consider having significant savings that like just to pay for your life and all of those things were like that’s just not sustainable, and it’s not sustainable doing creative work unless you want to work 80 hours a week when you put your creative work and your day job together.

We just wanted to pull the plug on all of that, which has been wonderful, and to be somewhere where the prevailing value system is not that people should be ground into dust by their work lives.

I’m feeling extremely liberated by that. I’m feeling very grateful to be here. I’m very grateful not to have to have a car anymore.

Joanna: It’s a big thing, isn’t it?

Caroline: Oh, it’s amazing.

Joanna: You can just walk places.

Caroline: We have bikes, you know. We bike or take the…

Joanna: The tube?

Caroline: The public transit which is here and functional.

But the other thing about that that’s really good for a writer is I sit on the train on the way to the library, every day that I go to the library and I see a new character. I see someone, I get to watch them and see what they’re doing, what are they’re wearing, how are they fidgeting. That can go straight in the book.

If I’m sitting in a car on a freeway in LA, I don’t get that interaction. I don’t get to hear their voice if they’re talking to their kid or if they’re talking to their friend. All of those details go right in a city like Berlin or London is the same.

There are many cities that have good public transit and everybody is out on it. New York is the same. We were not built for New York. You really have to want that one.

Being here and being able to be a part of that. And the other thing too is as an American things are different here. They look different. The sidewalks look different, and I love that. So I enjoy gobbling all of that detail up.

Joanna: I lived New Zealand and Australia. I was away 11 years and I’m a European. I feel like that and I missed so many things about Europe. So I’m really excited about your book when it eventually makes it out there, your Berlin book.

And also you’ve got another podcast coming, haven’t you? If people are interested.

Caroline: I do. I have a really good friend who is also an American and she took the leap from Boulder, Colorado. She and her family felt like they need a change, she and her husband and her son, and there’s been a tech boom in Dublin and she’s worked in that field for ages.

So they went to Dublin and they’ve been there for two years now. we decided based on so many conversations that we would have with people that are like, ‘Oh, that’s amazing that you’ve moved. I couldn’t ever do that. That’s really amazing what you’ve done.’

We’ve both been project managers so we’re like, ‘Well, it’s just a series of practical steps that you can follow. If you know what they are, it’s really not that bad. So we wanted to do a series of episodes of just short kind of actionable, this is how we’ve done these things. And that the ‘GTFO’ podcast that will be coming…

Joanna: What does that stand for?

Caroline: It stands for ‘Get the feck out.’ We’re going with the Irish ‘feck’ rather than the other.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Caroline: So that we don’t get kicked off of iTunes.

Joanna: That is a good idea and this is a clean show and that word is clean.

Caroline: Yes, I know.

Joanna: That’s fantastic. Where can people find you and everything you do online?

Caroline: They can find me at carolinedonahue.com and then they can find the show at secretlibrarypodcast.com and there are links to everything. I’m on Instagram and Twitter and everything but all of those are on both of those sites.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Caroline. That was great.

Caroline: Thank you so much. It was such a treat talking to you, as always.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Writing to meet readers’ genre expectations is part of marketing your book. In this article, Edwin McRae breaks down the steps he uses to find a genre and sub-genre that will suit each writer perfectly.

Fiction sub-genres are legion. Under science fiction alone you’re looking at well over thirty different sub-genres, from post-apocalyptic through to robots.

And then you have your sub-sub-genres like robot apocalypse! So here’s the challenge.

My chosen sub-genre is LitRPG. How do you pick the right sub-genre for you?

Actually, this challenge can be broken down into two sub-challenges.

A. How to pick a sub-genre you’re going to enjoy writing.
B. How to pick a sub-genre that will financially sustain your writing.

Let’s get this out of the way from the outset.

TIP: Spreading yourself across genres isn’t a great idea, especially when you’re starting out.

I can speak from experience on this one. I’ve hopped from cyberpunk to weird west to comic fantasy. Those three books have all sunk without a trace.

Why? Because I didn’t understand each book’s sub-genre before writing it and I didn’t stick around long enough to make a name for myself in that sub-genre.

Okay, so let’s hone in on Sub-challenge A, how to pick a sub-genre you’re going to enjoy writing.

Step One – Make Lists

TIP: Make a list of your fiction interests and your current knowledge base.

This is a vital first step in finding the right niche for you. Here are my lists:

Interests

• Dark, gritty fantasy
• RPG video games
• Cybernetics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Virtual Reality
• Lovecraftian monsters
• Fighter-mages

Knowledge Base

• Lifelong reader of dark fantasy
• Professional narrative designer for video games
• Extensive reading in the cyberpunk genre
• Bachelor of Psychology (knowledge of neuroscience and brain anatomy)

Actually, my full lists are much longer and include things like pick-a-path books and life as a high school drama teacher, but for this article, I’ve just picked out the elements that are pertinent to LitRPG.

Your Interests list is there to show you which sub-genres you’re going to enjoy writing in. Your Knowledge Base list is there to show you which sub-genres you can start writing in straight away, without the need for a ton of research and upskilling beforehand. Yes, we’re talking about the old “write what you know” adage here.

TIP: Take the keywords from your Interests list, put them into the Amazon Kindle search, and see what pops up.

Also, once you have you an Interests list, you’ll be better prepared to spot sub-genres that simply pop up on your radar. My own ears pricked up regarding LitRPG when Chris Fox mentioned it on Joanna’s podcast.

Chris Fox is the author of Write to Market. It was Chris’ book that gave me the tools to research the financial viability of LitRPG as a sub-genre. I can’t honestly recommend Chris’ book more if you’re determined (like me) to make your living as a sub-genre writer.

“A great example is LitRPG, which features characters trapped within MMOs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games). A lot of indie science fiction and fantasy authors, who are also gamers, got into this niche quickly, writing books to this market and some of them did incredibly well.” – Chris Fox

Step Two – Read Lots

TIP: Read a popular example of the sub-genre.

I know, pretty obvious recommendation, but I’m offering it because I’ve made this mistake myself. I co-wrote a weird west book without ever reading a novel in the weird west sub-genre. Not surprising then that I missed so many of the marks that weird west readers are looking for.

To find a popular LitRPG, I went to the Amazon Kindle store, put LitRPG in the search box and from the results picked the book with the most ratings. If you don’t know the specific name of your possible sub-genres yet, just put in keywords from your Interests list.

At the time of my LitRPG search (over a year ago), the most highly-rated book happened to be Aleron Kong’s The Land: Founding: A LitRPG Saga (Chaos Seeds Book 1). And yes, lengthy titles are a bit of a LitRPG trope.

I read it, and while I wasn’t all that rapt with the story or the writing style, I totally fell in love with the form. Now begins the journey of self-understanding.

TIP: If you find a sub-genre that you ‘zing’ with, check back with your Interests and Knowledge Base list to see if it’s a niche you’ll enjoy writing for and can start writing for in straight away.

For me, LitRPG ticked several boxes in Interests…

• RPG video games
• Cybernetics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Virtual Reality

…and a couple more in Knowledge Base.

• Professional narrative designer for video games
• Extensive reading in the cyberpunk genre

Great. Looked like I’d found a genre I could write in but also enjoy writing in the process.

But now for the most important step if you want to make a living out of writing sub-genres.

Okay, so let’s hone in on Sub-challenge B, how to work out if your chosen sub-genre is potentially profitable.

Step One – Money Talks

TIP: Find out if authors are making money in your chosen sub-genre.

Here’s where I followed Chris Fox’s advice. I looked at the Kindle Rankings on Amazon to see how well LitRPG books were doing in the sales charts.

Kindle Rankings are easy enough to find. Make sure you’re in the Kindle Store, search up the book you want to check out, simply scroll down from the Book Description, go past “Sponsored products”, and you’ll hit “Product details”. Then have a look at the “Amazon Bestsellers Rank”.

Here’s a LitRPG example I found recently, on the 7th of October, 2018.

Advent (Red Mage Book 1) by Xander Boyce
#301 Paid in Kindle Store

Okay, clearly this book is doing really well but I want to know exactly how well in terms of dollars and cents. So I take that 301 and plug it into Dave Chesson’s Kindle Bestseller Calculator. And this is what I get.

331 book sales per day! At a per book price of $5.69, Xander is earning $1883.39 per day from Kindle sales. Once we take away the 30% commission from Amazon of $565.01, Xander is left with a take-home gross income of $1318.37 per day.

Yes, Xander Boyce is doing very well indeed!

And these figures also show that LitRPG is a popular genre with plenty of people willing to pay money to read it. However, you can’t base your decision on just one book.

What if it’s a rogue, one-hit wonder?

TIP: It’s best to repeat the above sequence with a dozen or more books in the sub-genre to get a feel for how the broader field is doing.

I took Chris Fox’s advice again and tracked the rankings for a selection of LitRPG books over the course of a few months to see how they continued to perform well over time. The result was that I saw a number of authors doing financially well over an extended period of time.

Yes, LitRPG looked to be a financially viable sub-genre for me.

Step Two – Audience Expectations

Sub-genres are so tightly defined by conventions and tropes because that’s what the readers want. Yes, readers are also open to having those conventions and tropes challenged and subverted. They’re open to seeing their sub-genre progress, become more sophisticated. But innovations still need to be within the firm confines of the sub-genre.

TIP: Immerse yourself in the sub-genre.

I embarked on a campaign of reading, absorbing LitRPGs from the center of the genre (Fantasy Sagas inspired by Skyrim and World of Warcraft) to LitRPGs on the edge of the genre (Zombie Apocalypse and Real-Life RPG).

TIP: Listen to sub-genre fans on social media.

I also took note of the following LitRPG communities on:

• Facebook
• Discord
• Goodreads
• Reddit
• LitRPG Forum

I got a feel for LitRPG fan preferences:

• What they were enjoying and not enjoying.
• What they hoped for and what they were bored with.
• What they were impressed by and what was frustrating them.

TIP: Write your own definition of the sub-genre.

Then I wrote my own definition of LitRPG based on what I’d read and absorbed from the communities. This is it.

LitRPG aka “Literary Role-Playing Games” is a subgenre of fiction where the protagonist spends the bulk of the story playing some form of roleplaying game. For instance, the main character might be a wizard in a High Fantasy session of Dungeons and Dragons, a space pirate in a science-fiction MMORPG or even a zombie in a survival horror RPG.

The most common setting is a full-immersion virtual reality RPG where smell, touch, and taste are as much a feature as sight and sound.

During their in-game story, the protagonist will interact with other players and/or NPCs (non-player characters), will complete quests, gain experience points, build up a repertoire of skills and spells in their chosen character class, and generally do all of the stuff you’d expect to see in an RPG video game or tabletop roleplaying game.

I fully expect to rewrite this definition many times as the sub-genre develops, but for now, it’s my touchstone.

Step Three – Writing to Market

I totally understand that not everyone can do this. The “write for yourself” strategy is totally valid. But here’s where the final and biggest box needs to be ticked before you spend however many months writing your chosen sub-genre novel.

TIP: If you find you simply clam up when you think about all those readers and what they’re expecting from your book, then that’s a sure sign that you’ve chosen the wrong sub-genre.

Personally, I’m happy to meet most LitRPG reader expectations because it’s the sort of stuff I love writing anyway.

That said, I have spotted a few expectations that I won’t be pandering to. Harem is one. The mass slaughter of wildlife for resources and XP is another. Thankfully, these don’t seem to be deal breakers for the majority of LitRPG readers, so I don’t have to write anything I don’t feel comfortable with just to keep my audience happy.

And honestly, that was my biggest reservation about ‘writing to market’. In my previous life as a soap opera storyliner, I had to roll with plenty of stories I felt morally opposed to. It got too much for me in the end. Hence I don’t do that anymore.

I only write what I feel happy about writing, and I’ve found a sub-genre in LitRPG that allows me to do that.

Still, whenever I need to make narrative decisions about the LitRPG novel I’m writing, I do check in with my most up-to-date LitRPG definition to make sure that what I’m planning to write fits with the audience’s expectations.

If it doesn’t then I either ditch that idea or come up with a really good reason why this innovation is progressing the sub-genre and will be welcomed by the audience.

Conclusion

And that’s how I’ve ended up writing Warlock: Reign of Blood, a dark fantasy LitRPG which I published in October 2018. Regardless of how well Warlock does, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing Warlock and actually found the confines of the genre to be more inspiring than limiting.

There’s something wonderful about having clear boundaries within which to create your narrative magic. Nothing terrifies me more than ‘infinite possibility’. That sort of thinking just makes me want to go play video games.

I hope you’ve found this useful and that you too find a fun and prosperous niche to write for.

My parting thought would have to be this.

Finding your sub-genre is a match made in heaven. Writing tastes meet reading tastes. I sincerely hope you find yours.

Have you considered writing to market? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Edwin McRae is a science-fiction writer and senior narrative designer for the video games industry. He has fallen in love with LitRPG, a sub-genre that combine his twin passions of cyberpunk and video games.

Audiobooks are the fastest growing segment in publishing, and in a world where voice-first technologies are continuing to grow, it’s a great time to take more control over your audiobook rights as discussed in today’s interview with Will Dages from Findaway Voices.

In the intro, I mention Amazon buying adaption rights to its own books, a first step to keeping all intellectual property in-house [The Verge]; plus, the OpenAI text generator that is so good, it can’t be released for fear of it being used for malicious purposes [Open AI blog; Wired], and why you need time for cashflow and asset creation activities if you want a long-term sustainable author business.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn

Will Dages is Head of Product for Findaway Voices and an avid audiobook listener. He’s been immersed in the audiobook industry for seven years and working on everything from technology to marketing, to product development.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• A big picture overview of the players in the audiobook market in the US and the world

• New developments in the library market for audiobooks

• On the ways voice technology can increase the ease of audiobook purchase for readers

• Pricing and promotion control for your audiobooks with Findaway Voices

• Selling audiobooks directly. Click here for my AuthorsDirect audiobook store.

• What it costs for an author to produce an audiobook

• On the new Voices Share program which supports authors to get into the audiobook market

• Tips for marketing and selling audiobooks

You can find Will Dages at FindawayVoices.com and on Twitter @willdages

Transcript of Interview with Will Dages

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I’m here with Will Dages. Hi, Will.

Will: Hello.

Joanna: It’s good to have you on the show. Just a little introduction.

Will is Head of Product for Findaway Voices and an avid audiobook listener. He’s been immersed in the audiobook industry for seven years and working on everything from technology to marketing, to product development.

Will, tell us a bit more about you and how you got into audiobooks stuff and why you love audio so much?

Will: Great question. When I a kid in middle school I loved reading, and I was reading 20 novels a year. Just couldn’t get enough. And then at some point in school, I had to start reading books that I didn’t want to read, and that just killed the love of reading for me.

So I became a non-reader for many years until, I still remember this, the day I graduated from college. I was, like, ‘Ah, I finally have the time to read what I want to read.’ And I picked it back up, and it was like the floodgates opened, and years of pent up reading energy flowed out.

Audiobooks are the way that today I can still read as many books as I want. I read 50, 60 audiobooks a year now… listen to them. And so audiobooks are the way that I can fill up my commute with that and get as much as I wanna listen to.

Joanna: Why did you go into it as a career?

Will: Well, actually I found my way to Findaway through means of development. So I went to school for video production, actually, and I did some voiceover work back then. And I kinda got bored with it at the end of college, and instead of switching majors, I said, ‘Okay, I’m just going to finish the degree, and I’m going to teach myself what I really want to do, which was programming.’

I built a couple iOS apps and played around there. And then I started building websites. I love that. And then I ended up getting into Findaway as a UX developer and helping them build websites, basically.

I did that for a couple of years, and then I moved into some more experimental roles. And I helped launch a product called Dualbook, which is one app that lets you read and listen at the same time, and syncs the audiobook and the ebook together. And then if you want to switch formats, it’s always in the right spot.

From there, I had so much fun with that launching the new products, getting customer’s feedback, and iterating on it. That when FindawayVoices came around, as the newest product from Findaway, I raised my hand. I said me, ‘Oh, oh me. I wanna be a part of this. This sounds like fun.’ And here I am.

Joanna: I love your enthusiasm. I do want us to tackle the read / listen word. To me, it’s a brain, and how information gets into the brain doesn’t really matter. But how do you address this: I’m reading a book through audio, or I’m listening to a book?

Some people say, ‘Oh, well it’s not really reading.’

Will: Personally, I think that’s ridiculous. And it’s up to personal preference. No one should tell you how you want to read or listen. If you get the most out of the audiobooks, or even not maybe the full potential, right, some science comes out and they say, ‘Oh, you only absorb 90% of the information that you would have if you read.’ Who cares, you still got the 90%.

So to me, I could never read 60 books a year if audiobooks weren’t part of my life. And so that whole debate of, ‘Is listening really reading,’ it’s a nothing question for me because it’s all about personal preference. I get enough out of it that I don’t really care what the general consensus is, to be quite honest.

Joanna: I think it’s a misinformation campaign by people who are invested in print publishing. That’s what I think it is.

Will: That could be.

Joanna: It’s a bit like how romance reading has been treated by some people in the past, like, ‘Oh, you know, you have to hide it,’ or whatever. But no, I think in this community, we say ‘Read however you like. We love you. We love you reading.’ But you and I met at NINC and we geeked out on audio stuff, which is why I’m talking to you now.

Although I talk about it a lot on this show, I think it’s worth talking about: the current state of the market. Because, again, I talk to many Americans, and they might only know Audible, for example.

Can you give us a state of play in the audiobook market right now, and the big players in America, but also in the rest of the world?

Will: It’s good. For a lot of people, Audible is synonymous with audiobook. You’ll even hear some people say, ‘Oh, I got an Audible’ like, oh, actually, that’s not called an audiobook.

Audible is a huge player in the industry, and they’ve paved the way for making audiobooks as popular as they are. So everybody owes a ton of credit to Audible for making the audiobook industry what it is, especially in the U.S.

In Audible, the way you buy an audiobook is generally you pay 15 bucks a month, and you get a token, and you get to exchange that token for any book that you want in the catalog. Or you can just buy it out right.

But the vast majority of purchases are happening based on this credit subscription model. Where you get a credit, you’re subscribing you get one every month, and then you choose whatever audiobooks you want.

There’s actually a lot of other ways to buy audiobooks, so Google, Apple, Kobo, NOOK, they all do the a la carte. This is where I pay a bit of money, and I have a license to that audiobook. I’ve just paid outright for it, and now it’s in my library forever.

There’s also unlimited subscription partners. Think of this is like a Netflix model where maybe you’re paying 10, 15 bucks a month, and you get access to listening to as much as you want or listening and reading.

This is Scribd, Playster, hibooks services like that where you get access to the entire catalog, and it might be a more limited catalog. You might not get the top tier audiobooks, and you might not find every single audiobook you want there. But it’s unlimited listening, for lack of a better term.

And then there’s also libraries. Libraries are big in the audiobook space. We have 12 library partners that we distribute to right now. And libraries buy books in two ways.

One, the librarian curates the catalog, they buy it once, and then just like a physical item that sits on the shelf, one person is allowed to check it out at a time, and they’re allowed to go patron to patron to patron and basically circulate it forever.

The other way is actually a more innovative way, we’ll talk about this more, I bet, which is kind of the Netflix model in a library. We call this cost per checkout model. Where the library patrons have access to every book in the catalog, it’s not curated by the librarian, instead, it’s merchandised by the librarian.

So the patron can find any book they want. And every time they download it or check it out, then the author gets paid a small fee, not super small, a buck or two as opposed to maybe your library list prices, $15, $30, something like that.

That’s really opening up the library market to some really fun things for authors to do direct patron marketing and saying, ‘Hey, go check out my audiobook at the library.’ It’s free to the customer, which is a really easy thing to market to them, and you get paid every time they listen.

So there’s a lot of different ways to buy audiobooks right now. And there’s even more experimentation happening with some other, I don’t wanna say smaller models, but some other models that have yet to be proven.

Joanna: Also we were talking about Storytel, and probably even Google Play would be the bigger players outside of the dominant Audible space.

Could you just maybe comment on those companies as well?

Will: If you’re in the US, you know Audible, but it’s actually surprising how few countries Audible operates in.

Storytel, who you mentioned, has done some really smart things. They are finding that the countries that Audible is not in, and they’re going after those countries really aggressively, and they’re starting new markets for books that have never really existed before.

If you think of a country that has primarily consumed books with paperbacks and hardcovers, and now they’re moving to digital for the first time, it’s much easier to say, ‘Use the phone you already have, than go buy this e-reader tablet.’

When people are consuming a book on their phone, are they going to want to listen, are they going to want to read an ebook on their phone. And that’s why obviously, the answer is audiobooks if you ask me. It’s a much better experience to listen than to read on a phone.

And so they’re really establishing these audio first digital book markets, and they’re doing it really aggressively and having really strong performance.

Storytel is really the big one internationally, and we just launched with them. We’re really excited to get authors audiobooks on Storytel and see how that goes. Because they’re just expanding into tons of countries, and they’re doing some really cool stuff.

Joanna: That’s the primary reason I was, like, ‘I’m coming with you guys because you’re doing this partnership.’

But also there’s been a lot coming out of CES, in the last few weeks, about Google Assistant being in so many things. And, of course, they’ve said it’s on something like nine… I wanna say billion devices because of the phones. You distribute to Google Play as well. It’s, like, ‘Hey, Google, play me an audiobook, and it will default to a Google Play.

Do you think Google Play audiobooks will become a bigger force internationally because of the assistant model?

Will: I think there’s a ton of potential there because of that. It’s amazing that you can buy an audiobook through Google. You say, ‘Hey, Google, buy my book.’ ‘Hey, Google, buy How to Write Non-fiction by Joanna Penn.’

Every time you walk into someone’s house, you should just say that outloud and wonder if they have a Google device. Because boom, there’s a sale, right? So the ease of that transaction is gonna be really, really powerful.

Even the way Audible works is you get your credit, you have to go to the website, you have to redeem it on the website, then you go back to the app.

There’s a lot of friction there as opposed to just on Apple and Google. You just click a button, you pay, it’s done. It’s in your library.

Using your voice is even easier and more impulsive. And I think that that’s going to lead to a lot of potential for lowering the friction on sales, and then as a result, increasing sales dramatically.

Joanna: So exciting. We’re gonna circle back to kind of feature stuff.

I wanted to talk about Findaway Voices, again, because you get me at your tagline, which is, ‘Take back your freedom.’ And, I mean, freedom is my number one value.

Freedom is why I’m an author-entrepreneur. It’s why I do what I do. I love your tagline.

Tell us why use that tagline, and how can people think about freedom in terms of audiobooks? And how is it different to using a service like ACX?

Will: I’m glad you love the tagline. We love it, too. It’s all about giving control to the author.

The most obvious one that everybody thinks of first is this price control thing. When you submit an audiobook to ACX, you don’t get to set what your list price is. They determine what the price should be. They determine what they’re gonna sell it for.

If Audible wants to discount the book to whatever they do it, they don’t ask anybody. And that’s different in Findaway Voices.

We’re the wide distribution option. We’re the place you go if you want your audiobook in every audiobook retailer in the world, including Audible, right? I don’t want to discount that. We do send to Audible.

Now, when you distribute through us, you get to set two prices, two list prices. You get to set your retail list price and your library list price. And with every retailer that we send to, except for Audible, those list prices are how your royalties are paid.

So if we say you’re getting a 45% royalty, it’s off the list price that you set. Doesn’t matter what the retailer wants to sell it for, they could sell it higher, or lower. If you set it as $15, you’re making 45% of that $15.

Beyond pricing, there’s also promotion control. We’re offering the ability to have the little slash due to price and say, ‘You know, it was $15, now it’s 12, or now it’s 10.’

That kind of pricing control has not really existed in audiobooks before. The audiobook market is very young when it comes to promotion pricing, and it’s not as easy to get the promotion. So we’re exposing that to authors.

We’re also doing things like letting you really have fine control over your metadata, your release schedule. If you want a future date, a release date, and say, ‘Well, this is going to go live in six weeks.’

You can submit it now with a future date, a release date, and it won’t be live on most retailers. Some retailers ignore it. But most retailers do respect that release date, and they’ll hold it, embargo it until that date.

We’re pushing on vendors for more pre-order support, more price control, more fine-grained price control. A lot of the promotion windows are 30 days at a time.

So you set your promotion price for the entirety of June, and not June 1st, to June 3rd, or something like that. So we’re pushing for more control and giving these levers to authors.

We don’t have the perfect formula for how to maximize the sales yet. But we’re giving everybody the control and the freedom to experiment. And we know that people will figure it out, and figure out how to maximize that. And once there is a standard formula, we’ll pass it on to everybody.

That first round of authors will be on to the next year. There’s a lot of money to be had for whoever figures out how to pull these levers in the right way first.

Joanna: I’m going to come back to discoverability.

Some people might think, ‘Oh, do I have to be all in with you, and I can’t do anything else, or how can you combine both of these? Or what are the options there?’

If an author is already on ACX, and they want to use Findaway, how can they do that?

Will: Great question. And another reason to plug freedom, because there’s another place where we get more control, which is awesome.

There are two scenarios that you can be in if you’re with Audible right now. One, you can be on Audible exclusively. When you go to Audible, you have two choices, you can go exclusive with Audible, and make a 40% royalty, or you can go non-exclusive with Audible, and you can make a 25% royalty. So that 15% split for such a huge player in the market is a big deal to a lot of people.

And so a lot of people have chosen exclusivity probably before we existed and they didn’t know about us. I totally understand.

If you are exclusive with Audible, it’s a seven-year contract, and that means you cannot use us. So if your book is exclusive with Audible, you cannot use Findaway Voices for that title. It’s title by title.

Joanna: I would say, if you have been in that exclusivity for one year, you can request to move to a non-exclusive. So I’ve now requested three of my books will come out this year, and I’ll be able to take them wide. So if you’ve done one year of your seven years, you can get out.

Will: That’s right. There is a loophole, but that only works if you didn’t do the royalty share, right?

Joanna: Yes, exactly.

Will: So now we’re getting really deep in here. But there’s another option where you can pay nothing up front for your audiobook production and split the royalties with your narrator for seven years. In that case, the narrator took no payment up front, and they’re relying on those seven years of royalties to make up that difference.

And so it’s not fair to get out of exclusivity, lower the rate on the narrator, so you do have to fill out the full seven years in the royalty share instance.

But yes, if you did not do royalty share, if you paid for the production after one year, you can request to go non-exclusive, and then you can bring the audiobook to us.

So once you are non-exclusive, you can go to Findaway Voices, upload your audiobooks, and you’ll see a page with a huge amount of logos. And this is all the places that we’re going to send your audiobook. And if you drill it down, you can see a checkbox list. And you can check or uncheck any partner in that list.

So if you want to continue going direct to ACX, you can just uncheck that one. Maybe you don’t like our business model, right? Maybe you are philosophically opposed to libraries. I think you’re missing out on a lot of money there, but there’s some people who really don’t want their book in libraries.

It’s totally fine to uncheck all the library partners, and just keep the retail ones. And just we will only send your book to the options that you check.

Findaway Voices is not an all or nothing option; we give you fine-grained control as far as where your audiobook is sold as well.

Joanna: I really like that. The last couple of years I’ve just paid narrators outright. So I own all the rights and I’ve gone non-exclusive, so I’ve put those books on as you know. I’m waiting for some of them to hit the one year mark, for the ones I’d already paid, but are in exclusive.

And then I’ve got a lot that are royalty splits, so those ones I’ll just have to wait. But we’re in this for the long gain, so as far as I’m concerned, I’m waiting. And I’ve got all the dates, and I would just sort it out once we get there.

I also wanted to ask you about selling direct. I’ve sold direct audio for nearly 10 years. I’ve just done downloadable mp3s that people can buy and listen to. But, I don’t even think people know half the time how to download an mp3 and get it on their phone. They might not use Dropbox or another app to sync. So you have to help them and it’s all technical, and it’s a right pain in the neck.

How do we sell direct audio with Findaway?

Will: We’re trying to tackle this problem as well. We launched a platform last year that’s still in beta right now, as of the recording, and it’s called Authors Direct. This is a way for authors to sell their audiobooks directly to consumers. And we help with a couple things.

One, we help with the listening experience making sure that the listener’s experience is up to par with what they’re expecting from a world-class audiobook player.

So it’s not just open the mp3 on your phone, and you get the play bar that’s great for music controls, or short audiobooks. But as soon as you’re getting into the two, three-hour range, and maybe it’s split into four or five commutes.

And you have to use the scrubber bar to find out where you were, and remember the time code, and, ‘Oh I want to go back 15 seconds to hear that again.’ There are no controls for that or the sleep timer has no speed control. All these things that people expect from a good audiobook player are just not there.

So we’ve built a fantastic listening app, this is what I use quite a bit, is Authors Direct, and we have an internal one for testing that we use. It’s a great playback experience. So when you sell the audiobook, you know your listener will have a good experience.

The other thing that we help out with from the author’s perspective is taxes. Selling audiobooks is not easy to do from a tax perspective. We are the merchant of record for all the transactions, not the author, and so we will take care of all the tax reporting and the payment fee transactions.

Because processing a credit card is not free to the retailer. So we take care of that, and we also take care of customer service. So like you said, it can be a pain in the neck.

When you’re sending an mp3 to somebody, you probably send them a PDF or some instructions, and they may or may not read it. And they’re gonna reach out to you and say, ‘Hey, I paid 10 bucks for this audiobook. I can’t play it. You gotta help me.’ Findaway takes care of all of that as well through the Authors Direct platform.

Now, when your book is for sale in Authors Direct, we’re like a retailer in that we’re taking care of these things. But we’re not like a retailer at all, in that we’re not promoting the audiobook. We’re not driving traffic.

There’s no discoverability on Authors Direct, that’s the author’s job. So the author is responsible for driving all of their traffic to the website to purchase. And then they get the great listening experience. They get customer support. They get everything.

In exchange for that, the author makes 85% royalties. So that is a massive increase over the next highest retailer in the market, which is 50%.

Now Findaway Voices takes 20% of the 85%. So it ends up being about 70% royalties take home for the author. So when you’re buying ad dollars, you’re pushing people to this site, you know you’re making 70 cents on the dollar when it’s all said and done. And that’s a much better ROI than on any other retailer.

We’re hoping to help make the direct sales experience a lot better for authors, and try to get a lot of the experimentation that we want from vendors, this fine-grained, I want three days of price promotion here. All of that stuff.

We’re using Authors Direct as our testbed for that, and to show other retailers and vendors what can be done when authors have that much control. So it’s a limited beta. We’re testing it with 15, 20, we might be up to 30 people now, and we’re going to keep opening up that wider and wider. And we plan on opening it up for every Findaway Voices customer at some point.

Joanna: When you say, ‘At some point,’ are we talking 2019 or 2020?

Will: I think it’s going to happen in 2019. We’re still working out some bugs. We’re still figuring out how to most efficiently manage the customer service. We’ve seen the transaction scale like crazy, and we want to make sure that we don’t overload our team so that we can continue to give the best listener experience to the customers.

Because if it fails, we don’t want to be the reason. We don’t want the listening experience, that thing that we’re taking our cut to be the reason it fails. So we want to make sure that we do it right, and we’re working out all the bugs still.

Joanna: Having worked in software as well, I know bugs happen. But as you said, this is a younger industry, and so this is what BookFunnel has enabled people to do with eBooks, and providing this separate. So that’s fantastic.

Let’s just talk about cost to produce. You’ve talked a bit about pricing. One of the big barriers to entry for authors is the price of creating an audiobook. And I found myself, I have an audio platform for nonfiction with this podcast, so I sell a lot of nonfiction, and I make good money on my nonfiction.

With my fiction, takes longer to pay back the investment. Which is why I’m starting another podcast, so I can maybe try and speed up that process from audio to audiobook.

If you’re on your phone and you like someone on a podcast, you might be more likely to click a button to check out their audiobook. So that’s my kind of sneaky marketing for fiction audio.

Tell us a bit about cost to produce versus profits and timelines that it might take.

Will: Sure. So the cost to produce an audiobook is generally based on the per finished hour rate. So the longer the audiobook and the better the narrator, the more expensive it’s going to be.

We see most audiobooks in the $1,500 range, so this is for like a six to eight-hour audiobook, at maybe 150, 200 bucks per finished hour. So you’re laying out that 1,500 bucks, call it, or 2000 for a round number. 2000 bucks at the start of it, and you want to make back, and we want you to make that back.

I’m going to take a quick tangent here.

The way Findaway Voices makes money is that 20% fee on the distribution. So when you make money, we make money. You keep 80%, we keep 20%. So our incentives are aligned.

We want you to sell books as much as everybody else. We want you to recoup so that you make more books and have more and more to sell. As far as, like, how soon you make it back, that is varied wildly based on a lot of factors, like the quality of the audiobook, the amount of effort you’re willing to put into marketing it.

I don’t know what episode this is of ‘The Creative Penn,’ but you have put a massive amount of time and effort into building this platform. And all of that investment pays off when you release another nonfiction audiobook. And you’re going to make those back a lot faster than somebody else who hasn’t put in that amount of time, right?

The caveat being if you get an Audible feature, or if you get on the AppleCare sale that can all change overnight. All your dreams are coming true then. But you can’t rely on that. Good business people don’t rely on that luck to happen, they work for it. And going wide requires a lot of work in marketing.

So to address the point that you said about cost being the biggest barrier of entry for somebody trying to make an audiobook, or wanting to make an audiobook, totally agree. We’ve heard that feedback a lot.

We’re launching a new program this year called Voices Share. And you can think of this as a kind of hybrid royalty share program. Think of it as a half price audiobook. You’re going to pay half the price up front. That means the narrator gets some bulk payment up front, probably half their rate, and then they’re going to take a smaller than 50% cut of your royalties ongoing.

So they have ongoing upside for many years afterwards. They’re still able to pay the bills. They don’t have to just take a complete risk on something.

We’re launching that this year to help lower the cost of audiobooks and help get more and more authors able to produce.

Joanna: I really like that, because I think that’s always much fairer because I feel like some of the lovely narrators who’ve done royalty splits at the beginning there was a rush into that with ACX. And then a lot of them I don’t think made enough money.

So a lot of Indies are finding it harder to work with narrators for royalty share deals because you kind of have to already prove sales. So this would be kind of halfway there. That’s really interesting.

And, of course, Findaway Voices helps authors find a narrator doesn’t it, as well? Just like ACX, you can find narrators with you guys.

Will: I’d like to think it’s far easier than ACX, so the fundamental difference on the production side between us and ACX.

ACX is an open marketplace. This is like you’re searching for a hotel on Airbnb, and you’re going through all the filters and you’re looking through the maps and trying to find the perfect one.

Where Findaway Voices is like Stitch Fix.

Joanna: I don’t know what Stitch Fix is.

Will: Stitch Fix is a company that learns all about you and they assign you a personal stylist, and then it’s one of those monthly boxes, right? So the box shows up, and here’s the perfect set of clothes for you, or the perfect outfit tailored to you from a stylist.

They do all the curation work for you. And that’s what we do. So we curate these selections.

When an audiobook project comes in, we ask a whole bunch of questions like a big dating profile. We’ll try to learn as much as we can about the type of the audiobook, what you’re imagining the field being, is there a sound-alike with a celebrity. We ask 20 questions about the audiobook. And then it goes to a human casting team.

We have a fantastic casting team that onboards all of our narrators. So they’re really intimately familiar with what all of our narrators can do. We’re up to 1,500 or so now that are fully on-boarded.

And then we present you with 5 to 10 top choices. So we zoom you right to the semifinal round. And now instead of listening to 80,000 samples, and dealing with sliders for many hours, you’re just listening to samples from five, 10 narrators.

That narrows the field quite a bit. It uses our expertise in what we think would be a great narrator for your project to help leverage that expertise for first-timers who have no idea what to listen to sometimes.

We have a lot of people come to Findaway Voices and say, ‘I’ve never heard an audiobook. How can I be expected to produce a good one?’ We say, ‘Oh, that’s what we’re here for. We can help with that.’

We love audiobooks. So the casting process really zooms you to the semifinal round, and from there we do free auditions for any of the narrator’s in that list that you want. And you get to hear your words in their voice. And then you get to hear your top two, top three, or as many as you want, head to head before you make the decision who to us.

So we hope that you feel really comfortable and excited about the narrator by the time you’re ready to the lay down on that commitment for the $1,500, $2,000 because that is a lot of money. And we want to make sure everybody feels really excited about it.

Joanna: We do have to address the elephant in the room, which is yes, you can create a fantastic audiobook, but how do you actually make some money? How do you sell it?

One of the things that is basic around eBooks and print is the metadata, and I know you do give controller metadata. But for example, there’s still only one category. There are no keywords as such.

There’s no BookBub for audiobooks. Although getting a BookBub does actually drive audiobook sales, obviously.

Talk a bit about tips for marketing audiobooks, and what some of the bestselling audiobook authors are doing.

Will: Sure. The first tip is going to be the most basic obvious one ever, which is the cover art. The cover art matters so much for the marketability of the book.

And with audiobooks, covers are square. Covers are square because back in the day, audiobooks were sold on CDs, and CD cases were square and that has carried through.

And so if you bring your ebook cover, which is decidedly not square, it’s usually four by three. And you just slap it in the square container and have it letterboxed on the side, it doesn’t look good.

I can tell you all of our bestselling titles on Findaway Voices have great looking square formatted cover art. So it’s worth the investment to make sure that you have a high-quality cover art because it matters a lot.

The other thing I want to bring up, you did mention quickly BookBub, and how BookBub and Written Word Media, FreeBooksy, Bargain Booksy, those things all have dedicated audio offerings, but they do matter to audiobooks. Because anytime you get a BookBub for your ebook, that visibility is going to spike your audiobook sales as well.

Personally, I subscribed to BookBub and I get a deal every day, and if there’s something I want, I’ll see it on there, and I’ll go look for it on audio.

And that’s another reason it leads nicely to another tip, which is simultaneous release. I think one of the best things you can do for your audiobook marketing is try to hit a simultaneous release.

So the same day that your paperback or print on demand, your ebook is released that your audiobook is also available. Because that’s the one day, the launch day, you’ve been doing all these plans, you’ve got all this marketing ready to go.

Launch day is the day where you’re going to have the most attention, the most eyeballs, the most ads running, the most relevant conversation happening. And people will see your book, and they will go look for it on audio. And if it’s not there, they’re probably just going to forget about it.

There are some ways to do really effective staggered launches, where you have the ebook, today, the audiobook after a month, and then maybe book two of the series after that, and book two of the audiobook after that if you leverage a lot of touch points with your audience.

If you don’t have enough to say on Facebook, maybe having a separate launch to just announce some more good news is a good thing. But when audio is thought of as an afterthought, all the book launch marketing goes into this one moment. And then the audiobook comes out and your ad’s out there, but you don’t really do as much for it. That’s what really hurts your audiobook sales more than anything.

So we see the way around that is simultaneous release, is making sure it’s part of the release strategy, the bigger strategy when the most buzz is hitting. Simultaneous release is really the biggest thing you can do to boost your audiobook sales right at the beginning.

Joanna: Really good point. And I know I have not done this yet because most Indies will finish the ebook, get it edited, but then they’ll upload it. And we’re so used to things being available fast.

Whereas the process is very easy at Findaway and ACX is very easy. But then it takes couple of weeks, and you don’t really know exactly when it’s going to come out, like, it’s very odd. Plus if you hired a narrator, then you have to wait till the book is finished.

So I get what you’re saying, and the challenge I think, challenging everyone listening and myself, is to start thinking more like a traditional publisher. Well, I say that a lot of them are not simultaneous release.

Will: In this way, a lot are.

Joanna: Don’t rush things out, wait until all the formats are together. The other thing I see now a lot in the UK, I’m sure it’s in America, too, is the audio first or the Audible audio exclusive.

You’re actually saying, ‘Look, you can actually get it on audio before you get it on ebook and print.’ Is that something you’re seeing?

Will: I haven’t seen as much experimentation with that as I would like to, because I think it’s a really compelling offering. The downside of simultaneous release is my ebook is ready. It could be selling today, but I’m holding on to it, and that hurts and I get it. I totally get it.

But we’re seeing a couple authors experiment with shorter books or interludes. Maybe you have a five book series and they’re going to start releasing little stories that happen in between the books and the series. And maybe these are just 30 minutes or an hour, and they’ll do those audio only.

And they’ll see, ‘Okay, well, I have a really strong ebook readership, can I convert them to audio, when audio is the only way they can hear more about this character I know they love.’ And they’re using that to test conversion rates between formats.

But as far as a big release going audio first, I haven’t seen it as much of that as I want to. If you, dear listener, are interested in experimenting with it, reach out. We’d love to help you plan that and help you really get a success story there. Because I love to have more examples of where that’s working really well.

I just want to go back a little bit because you mentioned the timeline, and that is kind of important when you’re thinking about simultaneous release.

The average audiobook production from start to finish can be four to six weeks. That’s a lot of time. And then when you hit the distribute button, it can be another 10 to 14 days before it’s actually live on distributors. So keep that timeline in mind.

It isn’t like the ebook world where you hit submit, and then you refresh the page on the retailer, boom, it’s there. The audiobook market does move a lot slower.

Part of that is we have gigabytes and gigabytes of files to move across a whole bunch of different places. And the audiobook market and retailers just aren’t as fast, for lack of a better term, as the ebook market is.

Joanna: I get that. And then what about that metadata issue, because it frustrates me. And I also find the Audible store is terrible.

And in fact, I normally, if I buy an audiobook, I’ll go to say, amazon.co.uk, find the ebook or the print book, and then look for the audio version, rather than going on to Audible.

And the category thing annoys me because I write across genre, as do many people listening, and I don’t like just having one category.

I want more categories. I want keywords. I want more metadata. Do you think that’s a possibility in the future?

Will: I think it is. We’re pushing a lot of retailers to get better and better with that, as well as first in category. Let’s have some rankings here. Let’s have some things that you can show off when you hit a top 10 list.

I don’t know of any audiobook retailer today that has those kind of rankings and lists, or deep support for really customizable categories. A lot of it is just based on BISAC code. So we send off the BISAC codes. You can do I think three to five, I forget exactly how many. You can definitely do three maybe five BISAC codes that we send along to the retailers.

And then they use those to categorize as they will. We don’t have a lot of fine-grained control yet for category support. But I love the idea, we’re always pushing more ideas to retailers, and I would love to see better support with that in 2019.

Joanna: We’re getting into the kind of feature thing, but audio SEO is something I’m thinking a lot about. And there is, as far as I know, obviously, Google is doing a lot of it. The Voice Assistant stuff, they’re doing a lot of voice recognition.

Our audiobooks have text. They have text associated with them. They are a book. I always feel like we should be able to upload an ebook with the audiobook, and the metadata is the book. So that they actually can recognize a lot more with that. I want this for eBooks as well. There’s no reason why they can’t do this stuff.

But do you see what I mean? SEO around audiobooks.

If someone is talking to their Alexa or their Google Assistant, and they say, ‘Find me a werewolf romance set in London’, that would help find it, as opposed to just the very limited stuff we have now?

Will: That would be fantastic. Right now BISAC codes and description fields are probably the only thing that they’re indexing, if their doing both.

The description is, basically, if you’re going for SEO, make sure you’re writing a really good description. Look at what the big pubs are doing. They’re stuffing a lot of stuff in there. And look at some of the top sellers and see what they’re doing with their audiobook descriptions.

They’re limited to, I believe, 4,000 characters. I could be wrong on that specific metric. So you don’t have a ton of space to work with to do a lot of excerpts, or parts of the chapters, or something really relevant to pull out.

But definitely, if you get an award, or if there’s any news, like, the publishers are all putting that in there. Now, there’s a movie tie in, now there’s a new award, it’s up for an audio, it’s up for something.

You can update your description at any time with Findaway Voices and republish it. So that’s another piece of control that you can use to experiment and see if you want to try some SEO stuff in your description.

You can try something for a couple months, you can change it for a couple months, you can kind of do an A/B test over that period of time. Or you can make two versions of your audiobooks. And you could have one description in one version, and another description in version B. And you kind of send each version out to half the retailers.

I’m going to send this description to Apple, this description to Google, and see if there’s a noticeable difference in performance, and maybe swap it halfway through. All that control is available now. So the SEO stuff is great.

When somebody is searching for a book on your topic, the metadata is the product, right? They might listen to the sample or something, but it’s the metadata that’s going to draw them in from the search engine to the retailer. So it’s worth spending the time to make sure your description is really solid.

Joanna: Right. Oh, I could talk to you forever, you know that.

Let’s just come back on libraries, because I feel like libraries have been ignored a lot by Indies. You can get into libraries. You’ve been able to get into Free to Match Words into libraries for years. And, of course, OverDrive is owned by Rakuten, which also owns Kobo and Draft2Digital, obviously, do stuff into libraries. So there’s lots of ways into libraries, but what you talked about there with audio is really, really interesting.

But again, discoverability; I don’t have the bandwidth to try and hit up every library in America with a letter.

How do you market? Or do you just try and market to customers of libraries to go and request stuff?

Will: There’s two main ways that I will recommend doing it because there’s two ways that libraries buy audiobooks.

There’s the a la carte model where the librarian is curating a catalog, and they’re finding your book through some list or somewhere, or maybe you’ve done a letter to them. They’re choosing your book to have in their catalog. And generally speaking, they’ll pay two to three times what a customer would buy at retail to have that right to circulate it.

So you set your list price for retail at 10 bucks, you set it to 30 for libraries. Libraries are used to paying that for the right to circulate it. In that case, I like to recommend starting with local libraries, letting them know you’re a local author, and they will almost always buy local content.

Go to your branch library, go to your county library, go to your State Library. Think of what local means in your context.

A Seattle librarian may have a Pacific Northwest collection that includes somebody from Vancouver and includes somebody from Portland. No matter where you are in that range, Seattle might be local in the right context. So think broadly in terms of that, because librarians love featuring local content. So those are easy wins.

The more scalable broad approach of leveraging the cost per checkout model, where this is the Netflix model in libraries, where the whole catalog is open to patrons, and the librarians do more of a merchandising role than a curation role.

This opens up the possibility for direct patron marketing and starting to do ad campaigns, or outreaches to your mailing list that say, ‘My audiobook is available at your library.’ And when you use Findaway Voices, we’re distributing to 12, 13 libraries. You know it’s there. You don’t have to worry about which particular system their local library uses, you can say, ‘Just go check out my book at the library.’

And if they’re not on a cost per checkout model, they’ll request it from the librarian, which is a great call to action. Because the librarian, when they get a request, will probably buy it. Or they’ll start downloading it like crazy, it’s free to them, and you get a couple bucks every time they do it.

It doesn’t matter if they finished the book, in most cases, it just matters that they had the spark enough to download it or check it out. So that can be really powerful.

We’ve started to see some people really experiment with patron driven marketing campaigns, which, I mean, when you’re telling somebody, ‘Go listen to my book for free,’ it’s a really compelling offer. It’s about the most fun you can have with a marketing campaign is, ‘Go listen for free and I get paid.’

We’re seeing some authors with 20%, 30%, even 40% of their royalty checks come from library systems. So the ones that are working really hard at patron marketing are seeing it pay off in a big way.

Hoopla is another big one in the U.S. A lot of libraries use Hoopla. And we recently announced MNOL, which is a huge library system in Italy. They’re in, like, 70% of the libraries across both schools, universities, and public libraries in Italy. They’re desperate for more non-Italian content. So English language contents can work really well in those systems. And we’re just seeing this trend towards libraries being more and more impactful every day. And we’re really excited about it.

Joanna: Wow, well, in that case, call to action everyone, you can get Joanna Penn and JF Penn books in your library. So that’s awesome.

Will: If they’re not there, ask the librarian to buy them.

Joanna: There we go. Fantastic. I am excited about libraries. I think sometimes one of the issues of being an Indie, of course, is bandwidth with all the things that you want to do.

You and I met in September, and this is what? Four or five months later now when I’m, like, finally getting around, and I uploaded my books this week to Findaway.

I know everyone has their list. But libraries to me, like you say, can be win-win for the customer. Because audiobooks are more expensive than eBooks, even with a subscription they’re more expensive. So I think libraries are a really good idea.

We’re almost out of time, but I always have a future segment, and you and I were talking a bit about this. And I wanted to ask you about what you think is coming.

I want to say in the next two to five years, maybe longer horizon, what are you excited about? Like, I went on lyrebirds.ai the other day, and I built myself a voice synth which was just amazing. It wasn’t brilliant as in you could tell the difference. But it was still amazing that I could train an AI to speak like me already, and that they’ve done this for people.

I’m also thinking about the impact of 5G and what that means to that. And also Voice Search and Voice Assistant. So those are some of the things I’m interested in. Any comments on those or anything else that you’re excited about?

Will: I’m a huge geek, and I love this kind of stuff. So we have the next three, four hours to talk about?

Joanna: Yeah, totally.

Will: Voice synth is probably one of the most interesting things to me. The ability to have a computer replicate a human-sounding voice is going to have huge implications for a lot more than just audiobooks.

But certainly, audiobooks are gonna be a big benefactor of it as the market changes, though. I think in the meantime, that there is even some potential for a new market to expand or be created from a different tier of audiobooks, for lack of a better term. I don’t have the terminology right for this yet.

But the thought is that a human-narrated audiobook is an audiobook. And maybe there’s a computer narrated audiobook that’s marketed differently, it’s not pretending to be an audiobook, so maybe it’s half the price or quarter of the price.

And it’s setting the consumer expectations, right, that, ‘Okay, this isn’t a perfect performance, this is going to sound a little robotic in parts. But it’s good enough that for two bucks, I guess, I’ll pick it up.’ And those things are not locked in time like human narrated performance is.

A human-narrated performance, when you get it, if you find a typo, or want to change a bit of a story, it’s really expensive to go find that narrator again, sound out the words. You could make edits on the fly to your story, and have it automatically updated in the audio versions.

You could always have the most recent tech being delivering your audio versions. So as the computer voice gets better and better, your audiobook gets better and better as well. You can imagine a future like that it’s really compelling for the audiobook industry.

I don’t think human narrated performances will ever be completely extinct. Just like professional photographers are not completely extinct now, even though everybody has a great camera on their iPhone.

There’s a performance and an emotional connection with that, that I think will continue to persist for a very long time, if not forever.

Joanna: I guess my thought there is if I can synth my voice, and you have a connection with my voice brand, and I write the book, and I have my voice synth narrated, then where does that lie on that spectrum that you’re talking about?

And this is really interesting for intellectual property rights, for audit, because, at the moment, I think most people are signing away rights to audiobook rights. Maybe single voice or they might sign away performance or that type of thing.

Whereas what you’re saying is interesting because you need to further talk about your rights in terms of human narration versus AI narration, for example?

Will: What if it’s the listener’s choice who they want the narrator to be. The book is there and I say, ‘Well, this book over here, I love it. But I love Joanna Penn’s, voice. Oh, I can choose Joanna Penn’s voice. Her’s is up here. And I can listen to any book in the world narrated by Joanna Penn.’ And maybe you for offering your most vocal profile, you know, you get a little cut every time.

Joanna: I get a license, or I license my voice to a publisher. I love that. And also some people have a preference for male-female voices or an American voice, or British voice. So that could also be a parameter.

When is that coming 5 years, 10 years?

Will: Another one I wanted to point out was, I think just the traditional audiobook production process will be really improved by technology too. So right now, when a human… look at me, I’m so future I’m already talking about narrators as humans. When a narrator records an audiobook, a really good narrator, it can take three to four hours just to get one of those finished hours of audiobook produced, right?

So they’re reading, they make a mistake, they have to back up and re-record it. And then in the editing room, they have to take out the bad take and put in the good take and splice it all together so it’s seamless.

Imagine a teleprompter proffer machine all in one or an iPad, that as soon as you make a mistake, it’s transcribing you as you talk. It knows you made a mistake because it knows the ebook. And so it flashes red and says, ‘No, back up. Here’s where you need to start again.’

And then it does the splicing automatically for you. A narrator could cut that down to almost real-time or 1.5x recording time.

And that has a lot of implications. One, the narrator rates might go down, because now they can record 200 books a year instead of 50. And for the same amount of money, they get a lot more portfolio work in.

The production time is going to be reduced. So it’s much easier and cheaper for you to do simu releases, because now instead of six weeks, it takes two weeks, or one week or two days.

And all of a sudden, all those ebook sales that you’re losing by holding them while you’re waiting for your audio to be produced is not nearly as painful, because the production cycle is quicker.

I think tools like that are going to make the production process far more easy. And even if you think about the difference between 10 years ago making an audiobook and today, like, you’re not renting studio time.

You’re not going to a huge professional operation that charges 200 bucks an hour, which then your rate is on top to cover that overhead. The technology to record and have a home studio has gotten so much cheaper and so much better. And that’s not slowing down.

It’s going to be even easier and cheaper for more narrators to get started in this industry. So that’s in the two to five-year range.

Joanna: I was going to say because that’s a software as a service model. Someone’s going to make that software, license it, and people are going to use it. So that has a much more immediate return on investment for that type of software development.

I’ve been just been doing this. I just recorded three short stories and I went through that whole process, recorded them, made mistakes, and then I’ve been editing them, and then sending them for mastering. If that sounds great, I would pay for that, right now.

Will: Yeah, for sure. It’s just a matter of time before.

Joanna: It is totally.

Anything else you’re excited about?

Will: I’m interested in how self-driving cars affect the audiobook industry.

Joanna: I was going to say that next.

Will: And in that vein, maybe VR as well. So, these activities that you’re doing that require your eyes and your hands right now, but leave your ears free are great times for audiobooks.

What happens when you can take a nap or watch Netflix in the car? Does that commute time really change the audiobook industry in an interesting way?

Or what happens when VR is for more than gaming, and people are spending a lot more time in VR, where they’re using their eyes and their hands, but they have their ears free, is that maybe a new leisure time? Or, you know, the 2050 commute is going to be in VR, and maybe that’s a great time to get more listening in.

What is the audiobook experience there and is it supplemented with the environment, is it supplemented with the text in an interesting way? All of those things are things that I love thinking about, and thinking about what the industry is going to be like because of those innovations.

Joanna: Me too. But I think, again, a more possibly immediate thing is, like, by 2021, I think it is, or 2022 when most of the world will then be on 4G, and the leap-frog technologies in most of the rest of the world.

Take China, India, places where people have not gone desktop, laptop, they’ve gone straight to mobile.

And since I feel like the explosion in audiobook listening has been mobile first, basically. But if we’re looking at in a couple of year’s time people are going to be on the internet with a phone, then it feels like the expansion in places other than America will be exciting as well.

If we’re on these mobile devices, and in these places…and many, many people want to listen to English, learn in English, in that way, as well as speaking English. So I think that’s another thing I’m excited about is just the expansion of the internet and mobile speeds across the rest of the world.

Will: I love it. There’s going to be so much of more market for the audiobooks when that happens. It’s going to change the industry completely. And that’s why we have a really strong focus this year on international expansion.

We’re not sure exactly what the right bet is, so we’re making all the bets. Put your audiobook everywhere that we can find it, and one of those or more those are going to break out in a big way. And we want to make sure the audiobook is there when that happens.

Joanna: I guess the message for everyone is, even if you’re not creating your audiobooks now, if you’re not investing in audiobook, don’t sign away your rights to everything.

Because if some of this tech comes in, it will be cheaper to do audiobooks. We’ve seen with ebook formatting. Remember five years ago, ebook formatting was a nightmare, or you would pay loads for it.

And now you can pretty much do it for free, or use brilliant software like Vellum. So I think the message is, even if you can’t do it now, build up your backlist, and then be ready to do some of this stuff. But I think you and I will probably still be talking about this.

Will: I hope so. I love this,

Joanna: Tell everyone where can they find you, and Findaway Voices online.

Will: Our website is findawayvoices.com, and we have a blog that’s pretty active as well at blog.findawayvoices.com. And we’re also very active on Twitter and Facebook. You can find us at Findaway Voices.

Joanna: And then we should say the integration with Draft2Digital.

If people are already with Draft2Digital, what should they do then?

Will: If you’re already with Draft2Digital, you’ll see a little icon next to your books where you can just click one button, and then boom, all your metadata has been transferred over to us.

We create an account. We can get the process started really, really easy for you with just one click. They’ve made it really, really simple. And all of your metadata from your book is transferred to us.

So you don’t have to type it all in again, you don’t have to worry about all of that. We can get you started really fast in the process. So if you were with Draft2Digital or Smashwords, we have integrations with both of them. It’s really simple to get started with Findaway Voices from either of those platforms.

Joanna: And it’s pretty easy anyway. So either way, people can check you guys out. Well, thanks so much for your time, Will, that was great.

Will: Thank you. This was so much fun. Thanks for having me.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Every element of your web presence is part of marketing your books. When readers are becoming fans of your books, they’ll begin to want to know more about you.

One of the first places they’ll learn about you is on your Amazon author profile. Chris Fey offers several tips on how to make that page as inviting and informative as possible.

In June, The Creative Penn hosted me for a post: 5 Ways to Spice Up Your Amazon Book Pages, and now I have the opportunity, thanks to Joanna Penn, to offer another post inspired by that one and share 5 tips to spice up your Amazon author profile.

Every author gets a profile when they sign up for an account through Amazon’s Author Central to claim their book pages.

Author Central Information:

Currently, to update your author profile for select countries, you have to join that country’s Author Central, which is easy to do if you are already signed up with the US Author Central.

All it takes is logging in with your US account info (which they call “registering”), accepting their terms, and confirming your email. The only site this didn’t work for me was with the Japan site. In that case, you have to create a new account through them.

Countries with Author Central Sites:

United States: https://authorcentral.amazon.com/
United Kingdom: https://authorcentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/home
France: https://authorcentral.amazon.fr/
Germany: https://authorcentral.amazon.de/gp/home
Japan: https://authorcentral.amazon.co.jp/gp/home

TIP: To translate pages, right-click on the page and click “Translate to English.”

There are rumors that Amazon is beta testing a new Author Central experience called Amazon Author, which will let users easily update their author pages around the world, saving authors the time of having to visit each site.

You’ll be able to log in once and update your Amazon Author Page in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, India, and Japan.

At this time, however, there has been no further word on this. To read more, visit this page from The Digital Reader.

TIP: I suggest adding your biography to your author profile on each site and then sticking with at least one or two of the most important sites (to you) for any other updates I highlight below.

Surprisingly, there’s a lot more you can do on your profile than just feature your bio and author photo. Curious? Keep reading!

1. Update Your Bio

What’s so special about this tip, you ask? I did just say there’s more you can do on your profile, but do you have enough info there for curious readers?

Maybe not.

Let’s see:

• Before your bio, include a shortened link for your mailing list with a call to action like, Sign up for his/her newsletter…or simply: Newsletter Sign-Up.
• If you have an author tagline, start or follow your bio with it. A tagline is a single sentence that summarizes you as an author and what you write.

How to Come Up with an Author Tagline

Consider the common themes in your writing. Example: romance, mystery

Consider what tones and moods you use the most. Example: dark, funny, heart-warming

Do you frequently use the same settings? Example: small towns, Great Britain, the South

Do you tend to write about the same kinds of characters? Example: cowboys, tough heroines

After answering these questions, brainstorm several tagline ideas using a few of the answers. What vibe do you want to give potential readers?

For example, my author tagline is: Thrilling and Romantic with Heroines of Steel.

Why? Because suspense and romance are always present in my stories, and my heroines aren’t push-overs.

After your bio and author tagline, and I suggest a shorter version of your bio (about 100 words), list the books in your current or most-popular series. That way if someone reads the list in your bio, he or she can check out your books at the top of your profile for those very titles.

At the very end, add a thank you message of some sort for the readers who actually read all of the information there. Show your thanks for their visit, their reviews, and even encourage them to follow your profile.

Here is My Thank You Message: Thank you for visiting my page! Please Follow my profile for important updates. And thank you for your reviews!

2. Upload Other Photos

Joanna Penn cycling down the Western Ghats from Ooty into the tea plantations, India. On a digital fast

And not just your author photo. When you edit your profile, there is a section to upload up to 8 photos that readers may find interesting, such as photos of your desk. You can also share an illustration that demonstrates a scene in your picture book.

On my mom’s author profile, she uploaded a picture of a teddy bear that is the physical manifestation of one of her characters.

Post photos of things that inspired your story or images of you or your table at book events. Any photo related to your books or your life as an author would be good here.

These photos will be at the top of the page, mixed in with the stream for your videos and your blog posts (US-only), which brings me to…

3. Link to Your Blog

NOTE: Only the US site has this feature.

Especially if you blog about your books or topics related to what you write about. While editing your author profile, go to the “Blog” section and click “add blog.” It will ask to “specify an RSS feed for your blog.”

Old posts will not show up when you add the feed URL for the first time, but it will be updated with new posts.

To Find Your Blogger RSS Feed:

• Sign in to Blogger and view your blog.
• Find the “Subscribe to” widget and click “Atom.”
• The current feed for your blog will appear as a new page.
• The feed URL will be the URL for that page, copy and use it anywhere that asks for your blog’s feed URL.
• If you’ve burned your feed with Feedburner, which I suggest, you’ll feed URL will look like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/WritewithFey
• For additional blogging tips and tips on using Feedburner see: Blogging 101

4. Upload Videos

If you have a YouTube channel and create videos about your books, don’t pass up the chance to upload them to your author profile, too. You never know who will see them on your profile, enjoy them, and may want to check out one of your books.

Actually, you do know who will…current readers and/or potential readers.

For YouTube video ideas check out: 10 Things You Can Do on Your Author YouTube Channel

5. Add Events

Joanna Penn speaking in Ubud, Bali.

A small section at the bottom of many author profiles gets neglected because of its location, but the events section is a great spot to highlight any upcoming events you plan to attend for readers who may want to get a signed book from you. So, when you add upcoming events to your website, put it here, too.

TIP: If you only do events located in the US, just update the events section on your US author profile, but if you travel internationally for book events, update the other sites accordingly.

The great thing is, you don’t have to worry about taking down the info as you do with your site; the event will be automatically removed once it passes. One less thing to have to remember.

Finally, when you’re done editing your author profile, in the upper right-hand corner, you can find the link to your profile. Snag this URL and add it to your links on your website, blog, in your newsletter, everywhere.

Also, below your profile’s URL, you have the option to share the URL to Facebook or Twitter, do that and encourage your followers to check it out and follow you.

Now that your Amazon book pages and author profile are at their best, and you know how to update them when you need to, you’re all set to wow readers.

Good luck!

Have you optimized your Author profile on Amazon? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Chrys Fey is the author of Write with Fey: 10 Sparks to Guide You from Idea to Publication. Catch the sparks you need to write, edit, publish, and market your book! From writing your novel to prepping for publication and beyond, you’ll find sparks on every page, including 100 bonus marketing tips.

Fey is an editor for Dancing Lemur Press and runs the Insecure Writer’s Support Group’s Goodreads book club. She is also the author of the Disaster Crimes series. Visit her blog, Write with Fey, for more tips.

Writing deep in a genre you love is a great way to make a living with your writing. In today’s show, Iain Rob Wright shares his tips on writing horror and also becoming a successful full-time indie author.

In the intro, I mention the ‘future of digital journalism in question’ [The Guardian], even as Spotify buys Gimlet Media and Anchor. Is the future audio-first? [Recode] Google has also announced Live Transcribe, an app that takes real-world speech and turns it into real-time captions using just the phone’s microphone [Google Blog].

Vellum now has Large Print, mass market and international print sizing. Click here for my Vellum tutorial. Plus, my first fiction self-narrated audiobook is out now, A Thousand Fiendish Angels [Audible US | Audible UK | Google Play | Other stores]

Join me and ConvertKit for a free webinar: How to Sell More Books with Email. The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for Authors. Tues 19 Feb at 3pm US Eastern / 8pm UK. Click here to register for your free place.

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.

Iain Rob Wright is the bestselling British author of over 20 horror novels in a number of subgenres, including the apocalyptic novels The Final Winter and The Gates.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• Writing horror that’s based in hope

• On the intersections between thriller, horror, crime and paranormal

• Tropes in horror and cliches to avoid

• Success through subverting tropes and doing things first

• On the wide variety of opportunities available to authors with streaming services

• On choosing to go deep or wide with an author business

• Financial security when sticking with one genre

• Persistence with advertising and seeing returns on investment

You can find Iain Rob Wright at IainRobWright.com and on Twitter @iain_rob_wright

Transcript of Interview with Iain Rob Wright

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I’m here with Iain Rob Wright. Hi, Iain.

Iain: Hi, Joanna. Thanks for having me on the show.

Joanna: Oh, it’s great for you to be here. So just a little introduction.

Iain is the bestselling British author of over 20 horror novels in a number of subgenres, including the apocalyptic novels ‘The Final Winter’ and ‘The Gates.’ And we went full-time as Indies around the same time. Although we’ve never met, which is kind of crazy, in person.

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.

Iain: I’ve always sort of enjoyed writing. I think that’s true of most authors or hobbyists or whatever, we enjoy the act of writing. So, even as a child at school, I always enjoyed English and writing little stories or something.

I always had that desire in me. As far as how I got into being an actual author, I went almost completely the Indie route. And that was basically out of desperation to start earning money from my work, because I’d been doing sales for five or six years in the phone industry.

I was really unhappy and getting worse and worse, not enjoying the job. And eventually, one day, I’d just enough and I walked out on a job. I was working for the Three Network at the time.

So just completely walked out, but I had this book I’d been writing in my spare time just as a hobby. And, I had the same dream, you know, one day, I’m going to get an agent, and be published like everybody did back then.

But I also knew it’s a bit of a lottery win. It isn’t an easy thing. And, it was in a time when you’d say, ‘Oh, I want to be a writer one day,’ and people just go, ‘Yeah, okay. Good luck with that.’

But I was desperate. So, my partner at the time who now is my wife, she wasn’t very happy. I had just walked out on my job, but I promised her, ‘I’ve got this book, and I’m going to get an agent,’ and all this.

I started researching agents, and somehow, I must have stumbled across KDP, and this is in 2011. It was in May. So, I thought, oh, you know, I’m going to do this. I’m going to be a great success. Winter, fall, this is all I need. I’ll never have to go back to work in vain.

I completely deluded myself at the time. But I published it and it started to make a little bit of money. And, I was like, oh, that’s nice. So, my partner said, ‘Look, I’ll give you six months. If you can replace the income you were making in sales, then that’s great. Stay at home.’

And at the time, I was half paying my way by being an at-home guy doing all the washing and the cleaning to try and make myself useful, and just banking on this book. And in month six exactly, which was the deadline, it made the exact same amount I’d been making in sales in month six. So it did exactly what I’d hope it would do.

But it was like winning the lottery because I didn’t do anything proactive. I put it out there, went on Facebook. I didn’t even have a Facebook up until that point. Just shouted about it a bit, and it took off and I was earning thousands of pounds a month from this one book. That was in 2011.

I think in hindsight now, I was so lucky that it was that point in time that I needed that break because if I was in that situation now and had one book and just wanted to break into the industry and make a living, it’s just so difficult now, and there’s so many millions of ebooks that just weren’t there in 2011. So I’m so blessed for the timing.

It is really difficult now to have that same amount of success, but it is still possible, but it’s much more of a long-term sort of business now that you need to set up to make in self-publishing. Whereas there, to be honest, I was blessed and really lucky.

As I’m sure you found the earlier days were a little bit easier. You go in, and you didn’t have to swim quite so hard to stay afloat.

Joanna: Maybe that’s true in any industry. We don’t want to make anyone listening feel bad if they’re just starting. There’s opportunity at any point.

Whenever you’re starting something new, you’ve also got energy that you don’t necessarily have later.

Iain: There’s so many different things I have to do now. Whereas in 2011, it was just, ‘I’ve written a book and I want to sell it.’ Now, it’s so many other things.

There’s still guys that I see kind of getting success really fast, but there’s no easy wins now, I think. I like the fact that self-publishing has become a little bit more mature and serious and that the people that are going making it are the ones that deserve it and work hard and work smart.

Some of the ones that were kind of chancers or had some success and didn’t necessarily deserve it, they’ve kind of fallen by the wayside a bit now. So, I suppose it’s matured like any other business that the success is going to go to those who work hard and work smart.

Joanna: Which is good news from everyone, because those people are listening to this show.

We’re going to circle back to what you’re doing to be continually successful. But let’s just wind it back to horror. Because I also think that you perhaps were more visible in 2011 because the horror niche was not so busy as it is now.

Horror has really taken off. A lot of people put horror in the kind of slasher, gore category, and forget that it’s a very broad niche.

Give us an idea about what goes into horror at this point in time, and what type of subgenres do you personally write in?

Iain: I never really go into a horror novel with horrific thoughts. It’s more of hope.

It’s very much like, I’ve got these characters in a really desperate situation and I think about how they’re going to come out at the end of it stronger.

I think a lot of people kinda look down on horror as exploitive, and a little bit low brow. But I think horror is one of the most hopeful genres because it’s all about burying your characters in insurmountable odds and the human condition, the endeavor of your characters gets them through to the end and they come out of it stronger.

Whether it’s they defeat some natural crisis, mother nature turning on them and the world ending, or whether it’s a killer in the woods, it’s all about finding the inner strength of humanity. And I think that puts hope and strength onto the reader by showing them what people can achieve.

I think horror is one of the most ancient genres. And I think it should get more respect than it does. Because I think it’s very much the closest genre to what it is to be human. And, whenever I write a horror novel, it’s always the characters that are strongest in my mind rather than the villain or seeing the horror. It’s all about what I want to bring out of these characters and the adversity they face.

So I find it a really uplifting genre to write. I’m wearing black. But usually I’m the happy person. My favorite place in the world is Disney World. I love being around my kids. My office is covered in Disney. There’s no Freddy Kruger on the wall or anything like that.

I’m not a depressing person. It’s all because I find horror is a really nice place to kind of exist because it’s all about triumph and hope and strength. It’s not about any of the bad things in humanity.

Joanna: I’m definitely with you there. And it’s funny, I love reading horror. I read a lot of horror. And, I feel that it’s about, eventually, something good will triumph over evil, in most of the kind of genre. Not all of them, but generally.

Jonathan Maberry, a great horror writer who I love says, ‘It’s not about the monsters, it’s about the people who win over the monsters in the end.’

Iain: Definitely. And I think that’s what Stephen King is so successful because he’s very character driven.

My favorite horror novels are the ones where the characters stood out to me so much. Like, one of my favorite horror novels is ‘World War Z,’ and that’s almost because the zombies could be any sort of natural disaster, and it’s all about the survivors and their tales and humanity getting through just a disaster that happens to be zombies. But, the horror is at its strongest when it’s character driven.

Joanna: I love that book too, and I saw you said that in another interview, and I think that’s the book that got me into zombies. Because I was like, oh, I’m not going to read zombie stuff. And actually, that book, I would say is literature in that it’s actually the book is so not the film. Right?

The film is whatever, but the book, it’s basically alternate history, I would say. So the fact that it has zombies in it, but it’s more speculative fiction.

This is what I want to circle back to. Does horror always have to have something supernatural in it? And where does it move into crime? Where a serial killer book is often a crime book.

Where do the boundaries between horror and crime and thriller and paranormal go?

Iain: I think in the Venn diagram, the crossover for crime and horror is definitely the serial killer. You’ve got also end of the world, because of global warming and stuff, can sort of be horror as well, and then you’ve got the sci-fi spectrum.

So I think a lot of genres are interlinked. I think the only pure horror, probably, is supernatural, because that really only exists in horror or possibly fantasy, but all other types are horror.

They’re just drawn from the scariness of humanity or mother nature. And I think horror is a pretty wide net, to be honest, and I think that’s why there’s so many subgenres in horror.

I mean, if you take crime you’ve got cozy mysteries and things. I don’t think there’s as many subgenres as there with horror, because it goes into post-apocalypse and joins with sci-fi, and it goes into serial killers and joins with crime.

So I think it’s the center of the universe idea, horror, and I think all the other genres gravitate around horror because it links with all of them.

Joanna: I love that. That’s brilliant. I’m going to go with that, horror is the center of the universe.

I like also what you said about being a happy person, because I’m a happy person, and I read a lot of horror, I know a lot of horror writers. And I find horror writers some of the nicest people. I’ve said this before on this show.

Everyone has a dark side, dark things in their head, and horror writers can get it out on the page, and thus it’s not in their head anymore. Whereas, if you write rainbows and unicorns, all the dark stuff stays in your brain.

Iain: Exactly, yeah. No, yeah, definitely, I’ve met a lot of horror authors, and they’re all great people, they’re all lovely. They’ve all great sense of humors.

Joanna: Just staying with writing horror. If people are interested in writing horror, I imagine they’re reading a lot of horror, but there are some horror tropes that a reader would necessarily need to have, and also some that might have turned into clichés.

What are some of those necessary horror tropes and clichés?

Iain: I always try to think fear comes from our human needs being taken from us. So, we don’t like being trapped or confined, because we worry about suffocating. The end of the world situations with zombies and things, we fear about getting food, and shelter and water.

We don’t want to be attacked and things. So, you have to think about human needs you’re going to take away from your survivors because that’s where the fear comes from. So being stalked in the dark woods by a slasher, you’re losing your sight because you’re in the dark, and you’re out in the woods. So you’re taking the sight from the character.

I think a lot of the tropes that are fundamental tends to be things about putting people in a situation where they can’t fully focus on their comforts, the things that would usually keep them safe.

I suppose you revert their little patch of civilization back down in the caveman era, and you bring out the inner caveman fears and things. So, being chased, that brings out our caveman that we need to get away as quickly as possible. Being trapped is a primal fear.

The tropes that always tend to be necessary to bring out that fear in the reader, they need to be very primal deep fears that we have. Like spiders terrify people because we have a primal fear of being bitten and poisoned and things. So the tropes tend to be very much around primal fears, I feel.

Joanna: I read in one of your interviews you said, ‘One of the clichés to be avoided is the young, blond woman running and then tripping over a log,’ or something. I’d actually put, in general, the kind of young, beautiful person being murdered is a trope. It really is repeated.

I think gender tropes in horror are quite important to challenge.

So anything else people should be kind of avoiding and or being aware of?

Iain: Absolutely. With my own work, people quite often praise the fact that my characters are normal people. They don’t have any guns or training, they’re not soldiers or police officers usually.

I’ve got salesmen that get into horrible situations and things. And there’s a website called tropes.org, I think. I read that for every film or book I enjoy, and it’ll list out all the tropes and whether they’ve been subverted.

Whenever you can identify a trope, it’s really fun to try and do the opposite. I think ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ did it in the first scene of the series where they had a blonde girl running and being chased by a lad, and then she suddenly turns into a vampire and kills him, and that was subverting the trope that, at that point, had been pretty steadfast with the slasher movies of the ’80s and ’90s. Josh Whedon subverted that trope there.

I think you should look at whatever the trope is today, what’s happening today, and try and subvert that, and that can be really successful. I know for a long time, zombies kind of outstayed their welcome.

The more popular ones are the ones like Jonathan Maberry, he had ‘Patient Zero’ that did the zombies, but it was very scientific rather than the dead are rising and nobody knows why.

He went the opposite direction. The dead are rising and this is why, it’s scientific and someone’s doing it, a terrorist. And he subverted the tropes there. And I think at the moment we’ve got, ‘Bird Box’ and then one where they couldn’t make a noise.

Joanna: Oh, yeah,’The Quiet Place.’

Iain: Those are obviously the tropes at the moment. So, if you can think of some cool ways to subvert that, you’d kinda be tapping into what today’s audience is looking for and then surprising them. But, the tropes change all the time, of every generation I suppose.

Joanna: I was thinking about the zombies. Because, now, I read quite a lot of zombie fiction, but I didn’t used to. Again, Jonathan Maberry really got me into it. And he has the ‘Rot & Ruin’ series which is YA kind of crossover, which is in that.

‘Game of Thrones’ had zombies in; the Whites and the Army of the Dead, they are zombies. But because they don’t get called that, people almost forget that they’re watching a zombie horror.

Iain: And that’s what you’ve got to do because if you’re just following the same old path, then people just roll their eyes. Because, you’ll get the most success when you do something first.

And that’s true in any life, because you look at Mark Dawson, he got the most success from Facebook ads because he’s the guy that tripped on it first and it’s the same for writing within a genre. If you have the idea first, it’s completely fresh and original.

There’s a book called ‘Hex’ and I forget the guy’s name because it’s hard to pronounce, but he wrote a story about a witch that’s nothing like anything I’ve ever, ever read and it stuck in my mind so much. It can get lost within my head because it stands on its own. It’s this unique story that there’s nothing else like. So I can’t help but think about that.

Whereas with zombie films and books, they become quite interchangeable unless they have something really specific. So, any horror writer out there…well, I think we all have the same kind of desire that, ‘Oh, I want to write a zombie book, I want to write a haunted house book, I want to write a vampire book,’ because we’re fans of the genre we want to do these things that we’ve enjoyed so much ourselves.

I want to write a vampire novel at some point, and what’s putting me off is when I do, I want it to be completely different. And I love the ‘The Strain’ series of books because they’re so different.

Joanna: Me too, yeah.

Iain: So and I’ll top that, when I did tackle zombies, I made sure I did some things different and that’s why I’m not going to write a vampire book until I have that idea.

I think one of the worst things, especially a horror author can do, is just go, ‘I love zombies. I’m going to write a zombie book.’ Because there’s so many.

So you’ve got to think, ‘I’m going to write a zombie book, but this is how it’s completely different from every other zombie book.’ And there are so many books available, you need to have that unique selling point. If you’re looking at making money and a living, you need to have that.

Joanna: You mentioned ‘Bird Box’ which has been on Netflix, the adaptation, and many of us read the book by Josh Malerman a couple of years ago when it came out. Given ‘Stranger Things,’ again Netflix, a lot of Amazon stuff coming out in films, horror stuff just being more mainstream:

Do you think even writing screenplays or trying to do adaptations or looking at other forms of media is a good way forward for horror? What are your thoughts around this for yourself?

Iain: I think there’s going to be a bit of a Renaissance with these streaming platforms. Kindle gave us unprecedented ability to publish our books. You can contact Netflix and they’ll get back to you. You can’t contact MGM and hope to have someone get back to you.

I’ve got a friend, Matt Shore, who’s been dealing with Netflix about a small indie film he made. I know they’re receptive to it. And, with Amazon, because you’ve got Thomas & Mercer there’s a good route now where you can start out on publishing your own books on Kindle and try and kill it with sales, so much so that Amazon will take notice, and then get you onto one of their imprints, and if that does really well, they’re already set up to do an Amazon Prime show based on one of the books there.

So there’s a direct route now for Joe Blogs to write a book and someday get onto Amazon Prime or Netflix. Because it’s all being streamlined. It’s very much between the viewer and the creator with a lot less in the middle, which is great.

Booksellers would say the opposite that it’s not great, and agents and all that would say it’s not great. But for us, the creators, it is because there’s less resistance now to get to that endpoint.

I wrote a horror script for Audible to make a standalone horror play. And, I wrote that, they paid me for it and I haven’t heard anything since. But it happened. They got in touch with me. I’m not with an agent or a big publishing deal. But, Audible came to me and said, ‘Look, you know, I’d really like you to write some horror for our platform exclusively.’

If you concentrate now on just selling your book, everything else falls in around you, and that’s great because there’s less to worry about. And you can focus on what you can do.

You don’t have to worry about trying to get an agent, and trying to win the lottery of getting that. There’s a lot less just hoping on this happening, and hoping on that happening. You write your books, you try and sell them as good as you can, and that success will breed your success.

Look at Mark Dawson, I know he’s got all sorts of things in the pipeline, but it all began with him finding out how to sell his own books.

So, my advice for authors is always concentrate on that, and the rest will come. The best way to get a film deal or a book deal is to sell a million ebooks. You have control of that. You can change that.

But you can’t make a Hollywood executive take note of you. That’s not something that you can just go out and do.

Joanna: I’ve looked at the way you’re doing things, and I admire you very much. And actually, similar to Mark Dawson, you’re very focused which is fantastic.

I have a different brain, which is kind of, I’m interested in so many things and I do so many different things, and I don’t focus.

Now, some people would say that is just a fundamental difference in personality. And I like having a wide base because it feels more stable to me. But, how you’re doing things…obviously, you’re very successful.

You never went back to the day job, right?

Iain: No, seven years now, going on eight years, I haven’t worked for anyone else. It’s nice.

Joanna: Similar time to me. Tell us how are you running things right now?

How are you managing to make a good full-time living, supporting your family in the beginning of 2019 as we record this?

Iain: I’ll tell you one of the reasons I am so focused. I suppose when I think of things as a business, this is actually something that happens to a lot of businesses that start getting success, I suddenly branched out in a hundred directions thinking that was what I needed to do.

Diversified, didn’t get all my income from Amazon. So I set up an online course, I was going to try and sell projects and T-shirts. And I started to do all that, and they were all making little bits of income, but slowly, my sanity started slipping.

I was depressed and I had the online course, but I didn’t feel trying to get hundreds of pounds out of fellow authors because I kind have an overactive cringe gland, and what I really love about selling books is that it’s so passive. Suddenly, I was in this direct sales atmosphere, and that was making me feel really depressed.

And I felt guilty like I was charging people for something that wasn’t worth the money and all those things. And I’m a pretty anxious person and a deep thinker. And it wasn’t making me happy.

So I decided I’m going to draw it back down to books. I’m going to focus on the one thing that I am good at and I enjoy. And my wife just recently left her job. She was an MD of a company. But she was working every hour God sent, and missing out on our kids.

I was becoming a main breadwinner/at-home daddy as well. So I was getting stressed, in other words. So, my wife now has come home, and we’re going to try and build the business together now and do some of the things that I wanted to do, but I was a bit overwhelmed.

She’s very much a stronger person than me, emotionally, that you can put the weight of the world on her and she’ll come out smelling of roses. Whereas I will crumple. So it’s really good to now have her at home with me to deal with those things.

But, what I do personally to stay afloat and do well, the first thing is I haven’t panicked over the last seven years. And the first time Kindle Unlimited came along and used to pay you per download rather than lend and things like that, destroyed me. Wiped out half my sales almost overnight.

Suddenly, there’s was these guys with a hundred short stories were making more than me who’d written 15 full-length novels, that I try to take very seriously.

So that almost ruined me and made me panic a bit, ‘Oh my god. What am I going to do?’ So, I reacted to the environment. I wrote a lot of short stories, and put them together in a compendium, released them separately. Started to take advantage of the new model.

That got my earnings up a bit more. But I concentrated on doing the right thing. So I kept concentrating on keeping getting people onto my mailing list, and just steadying the ship a bit.

I didn’t think short term. I just kept going and doing the right things, and those people that suddenly had this boom with Kindle Unlimited taken advantage of it, they’re getting day jobs again now.

I feel really bad for them, but there are quite a few of my colleagues who started in 2011 or thereabouts, that did really well. They spent all their money, posted it all on Facebook, they’re doing all this, that and the other. They just kept writing books and not thinking about anything else, just thinking it’ll always be this way, and it won’t.

It’s going to get harder. It’s going to get easier. Wages go up, wages go down. And that’s business. I’m always reading things you’ve written, David Goghren’s written, Mark Dawson’s written, I take online courses.

I always make sure I know what’s declining and what’s on the rise. And I try to dabble in them all to see what’s helping. I never stay static and you can’t.

If I just sat and wrote books and kept releasing them like I did in 2011, I’d be back at a day job because it takes a lot more than that now. And I think to give a few tips people can take away, you’ve got to have that reader magnet on your website and people signing up to your mailing list. It’s just fundamental. And that’s what gives you the stability.

If Amazon stops selling books tomorrow, and now I’ve got 20,000 people I can try and migrate somewhere else, you’ve got to have that little bit of control.

Because that gives you the stability for when times are down so that you can make hay sometimes when things are good, but you need a cushion to keep a baseline. And that’s what a mailing list will do for you. It’ll keep you at that level of never being completely out of ideas and never having zero sales. So that’s fundamental.

As soon as you’ve got two books, start giving away book one for free and selling them book two. I give away five free books because I’m in a position I can do that. But it pays for itself, and it always will do.

Although I hate to say it, at the moment, advertising, it’s just the difference maker. I was doing pretty well. I was earning between three and five grand a month in pounds, which is a good living.

Once I started getting the ads working for me, I’m 20 grand in sales some months in things. It completely took me from plodding along to, wow, this has changed my life on a whole new level.

To get established and to stay afloat, the mailing lists will probably be enough if you’re doing everything right and you’re writing good books and you’re writing them quick enough and you’re releasing them to a mailing list, you can probably plod along like that.

But if you really want to make a name for yourself, even at a low level, you need to dabble with the ads things. Because it’s the way the industry’s going. And it’s because it’s becoming like any other business, you’ve got to fight for that visibility.

Joanna: Absolutely. I agree with all of that.

Have you focused down on specific subgenres and you’re kind of writing to an audience?

Iain: Again, financial security does come from sticking in the same genre. I wrote probably a dozen horror novels and then I released an action thriller and it just died a death, no one was interested and it was like starting again.

So it is easier if you stick to one genre because you can keep building within that genre. But then, as an author, we are, I suppose, artists and we do need to flex our muscles sometimes and write something different.

You can do that, just be prepared that it’s almost like starting again. Make sure you’re in a position where, okay, money’s quite good, sales are quite good, I can probably afford to take a hit for a few months by building up some new books.

My thrillers languished for a long time, doing absolutely nothing until I started advertising and now they make a lot of money. And that completely changed from no sales whatsoever to being really popular.

That was 100% advertising because it just wasn’t happening without the Facebook ads. But with my horror novels, I can sell them without ads because I’ve got 20,000 horror fans on my mailing list.

If I try to sell them a romance book, not a single one would buy it. So, if you are going to go multi-genre, you need to almost run separate businesses. You can’t have a mailing list that’s going to do every genre.

You’d have to set up, history, fiction, and romance, and horror, and for each one, run it as a separate business. Maybe have a different pen name. Because you can’t just flog everything to the same audience. You need to sell them what they want from you.

Joanna: That’s why I have two. Although, with J.F. Penn, I do write a number of subgenres. So it’s kind of difficult. I might end up having different lists with different subgenres.

You’ve mentioned Facebook ads and Amazon ads. Are you using both right now or either?

Iain: Facebook ads since 12 months ago. Last January, I started again. I tried originally, when Mark first released his course, I took it. And the sign ups to my mailing list worked straight away. And they always have done.

I can add subscribers, between 30 and 50 pence and with a catalogue of 20-odd books that is worth doing. It makes me money. So that worked from day one.

But I could not get any traction on paid sales. If I advertised a boxed set and tried to sell it then, then it was losing me money. So I gave that up for probably 18 months, I just did it touch it.

And then, for some reason, I can’t even remember what it was now, I think sales were a bit down. I knew my wife was unhappy in her job, so she didn’t want to be there anymore. And that was a big wage, she wanted to give up.

So maybe I got a bit desperate again. And I think a lot of my success comes when I’m really desperate and down. That’s when I come out of the gates fighting.

I spent a load of money on Facebook ads. But this time, I targeted people with a caveat around the Kindle. So, I targeted Stephen King fans, but now it’s only Kindle owners.

That went nowhere. And the previous month, I did about three and a half. It had been a pretty bad month, three and a half is a lot of money for most people that want to write. But for me, but that was kind of at the low end of what I was earning.

So that wasn’t great. And then suddenly, I did about 10 grand worth of sales. And most of that was profit. I had only spent about two grand to get that boost. I was like, ‘Whoa. What just happened there?’

Then, the next month, I ran even more ads, and I went over 20 grand in sales, and I kept doing that. I made stupid amounts. I made more in the last 12 months than I ever have in the last seven.

And that was because for me, the Facebook ads just suddenly clicked and I spent all the money I had on my business credit card and things. Just spent whatever capital I had. And that was what stopped me from spending more. I had no more money to spend. And I got all that back plus a return on investment. And then things started to die down a bit.

What I learned is you can’t get those gains forever. You can definitely do that for a bit, but I can’t keep doing 20 grand for months, unfortunately.

But, I’ve now got to a point where I am boosting my sales to a really good level and keeping them there. And I think that’s what advertising will do for you, you slip away in security. So, I’m spending probably 5 or 6 grand a month on Facebook at the moment, and making about 15 to 20 in sales. So it’s a really good living.

Amazon ads, I’m really struggling with. I’ve had a recommendation of an agency from a pretty big author who’s doing really well. And they’re going to start managing my AMS ads in April and doing it all for me for a fee.

I’m going to test that for a few months to see whether they manage to pay for themselves.

I don’t usually outsource things. I usually like to do them myself, but I just can’t seem to get anything to happen with AMS, so I’m going to outsource that.

But Facebook ads, the better you can get at that, the better. Because even if you’re only spending $5 a day, you can make a profit on that, and then just scale up. So there’s a pretty low entry point to get into it, and then if you do get better at it, because of the returns you’re making, you can scale it up.

It pays for itself to scale up, if you’re doing it right. But it’s just hard to get that initial success. It took me 18 months to finally get that working, so it’s a skill in itself.

Joanna: Just for everyone listening, just because Facebook ads work for you, doesn’t mean they’re gonna work for someone else and vice versa.

And also, Amazon ads work for some people, don’t work for other people. It’s so interesting.

And I think, again, you mentioned there, it’s almost like something changes in your life, like your sales drop or you have a family situation and then you really push. And you’re like pushing and then you’re like, ‘What’s the latest thing?’

And you’re getting into that and then you realize that that’s going to drop off. And this is so important and this is why you’re in it for the long term and you have a mature business like me. So, this works now. Let’s take advantage of it. Oh, it stopped working. Maybe do something else.

Nothing ever continues to work in the same way. Right?

Iain: Absolutely. There’s a few things that I suppose you’d call them evergreen, and that’s things like your mailing list, writing good books, having good covers, good blurbs. Those things don’t change.

So be good at those. Don’t skip on editing and artwork and things.

But yeah, there’s always fads that are working. And that’s where, if you were investing in stocks in London, you’d be reading the ‘Financial Times’ and the ‘Broadsheets’ and things, and you’d be constantly immersing yourself in that world.

That’s what you have to do to take it beyond a hobby. You can’t just write books and put them on KDP. You need to know what Mark Dawson’s doing, Hugh Howey, all the guys who are really good at learning this stuff. And you also need to try and find the things yourself as well by doing your own little testing.

But you can’t be static. You need to know where the market is, where it’s going and try new things. Because if you can tweak on something first, you’ll get the biggest gains, like Mark Dawson and some of the early self-publishers that found the success when ebooks when first a thing.

So always try new things yourself as well. But you want to look at that juggernauts and see what’s working for them because it will usually work for you if you get in there early enough.

Joanna: Tell people where they can find you and your books online. And also, you have a non-fiction too so mention that as well.

Iain: I’ve just written my first non-fiction book and it’s all about my experiences of having my first child, Jack. And it’s tongue-in-cheek comedy, it’s a bit sort of Dave Gorman-esque in its tone. So that was really fun.

It didn’t sell a lot of copies. I didn’t think it would. It was more for me. And that’s again, another great gift of what I do. Is that I’ve written so many, that when I’m dead and buried, my son will have this book that tells him all about how I felt about him, and there’s so many parts of this job that aren’t to do with money. And you couldn’t ask for a better family job.

I was the only bloke there today at Slimming World when I went with my wife, because we’re losing weight. And all the other blokes were at work, and I’m with my wife, and I’ve dropped my kids off this morning. And it’s wonderful.

If you do want to buy my books, I’d say probably start with ‘The Gates,’ which is my most popular series. There’s four books in that as the moment.

Search Iain Rob Wright on Amazon, and I’m generally exclusive to Amazon, unfortunately. But if you go on my website, iainrobwright.com, you can get five of my books for free and that’s on any device.

If you are on iTunes usually for your books and things, you can put them on there. Oh, and here’s my first non-fiction book. It’s a draft copy, so there’s a band across the top. Ignore that. That’s me and my son Jack. It’s a funny read, hopefully, anyway. And it’s probably the book I’ve had the most enjoyment writing. And again, what other job gives you the opportunity to just try something completely different for a bit of fun?

Joanna: Yeah, brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time here, and that was great.

Iain: Thanks, Joanna.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

If you’ve been running your author business for a while, you can start to feel like you’re in a rut, or that you’ve hit a plateau in terms of sales. So how do you move into a new phase? I discuss this and more with Tara McMullin today.

In the intro, I mention PublishDrive’s announcement of a new advertising dashboard for authors that includes Amazon Ads, the new Stephen King Alexa Skill, and the new Masterclass with Neil Gaiman.

Plus, Valley of Dry Bones, an ARKANE thriller, is out now in audiobook. [ Audible US | Audible UK | Google Play | More links]

Are you struggling to find the time to write? Do you want to make the most of your writing time so you can write more words, faster? Are you ready to reset your productivity? If yes, check out my new mini-course, Productivity for Authors, just US$149. You can find all my courses at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/learn

Tara McMullin is an author, professional speaker, and founder of the What Works Network, a social and support network for digital small businesses. She’s also the host of the What Works Podcast and her latest book is Subtle: The Small Shifts That Lead To Big Results.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• Tara’s motivation to write her latest book

• Viewing our non-fiction body of work as part of a journey rather than something set in stone as we all change over time

• How to move out of stagnancy without destroying the past

• What causes plateaus in business, and how to deal with them

• Why systems matter and how they are actually already in place

• Getting away from the launch cycle mentality

• The synergy between physical fitness and business

• Tips for rebranding

You can find Tara McMullin at www.ExploreWhatWorks.com

Transcript of Interview with Tara McMullin

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn, from thecreativepenn.com, and today, I’m here with Tara McMullin. Hi, Tara.

Tara: Hello, Joanna. I’m so glad to be here.

Joanna: It’s great to have you back on the show. Just a little introduction.

Tara is an author, professional speaker, and founder of the ‘What Works’ network, a social and support network for digital small businesses. She’s also the host of the fantastic ‘What Works Podcast,’ and her latest book is ‘Subtle: The Small Shifts That Lead To Big Results.’

It’s such a super book, Tara, but I wanted to know, why this book now? You’ve written books before.

What’s happened in your life and your community that you’re doing this book in particular?

Tara: ‘Subtle,’ is all about mindset and how our mindsets evolve or don’t evolve as our businesses mature and become more sophisticated, and as we try, try, try to grow them.

I think the real reason this book now is because not only has mindset been a huge part of my journey over the last few years and really figuring out why are certain things working and why aren’t certain things working.

But what I really started to notice is in interviewing successful, mature, sophisticated small business owners, mindset was incredibly important to the way they approach their business. And it was very clear that there are specific patterns in how their mindsets changed as their businesses grew and matured.

What I really wanted to do was call out those patterns, because in each individual episode of the podcast, there’d be a question or it might be part of the conversation, but we didn’t have any place where I could really highlight those patterns in the podcast itself, and it seemed like a book was the perfect place to do that.

Joanna: But why would you come back to writing a book? Because you blog, you write, you write amazing stuff on Medium, you have the podcast, you have a newsletter, you have a community. You have a lot of ways of putting out what you think.

I thought you were done with books. I thought you said you were.

So for those listeners who want to write non-fiction books, why a book at this point?

Tara: No, definitely not done. I mean, I did take a hiatus from writing longer form content. But this seemed like something that needed to be tackled not piece by piece, but really as a whole.

And I think that if we’re thinking about how you make an argument in that kind of more meta, more complete way, there is still nothing better than a book, right? For making that kind of argument. And that’s what I really wanted to do with this.

I would say that looking back over the things that I’ve published so far, I think this is the one that has the most complete argument to it. It has the best through line of the idea and the information that’s included in it. And I just couldn’t think of a better way to communicate what I was trying to communicate than through long-form written content.

So I think that’s why I really chose a book format for this work. It wasn’t going to be enough to do a podcast episode or a podcast series. It wasn’t going to be enough to mete it out blog post by blog post, it needed to be something that was able to be more complete. And I think that a book is still the best way we have to do that.

Joanna: And obviously, my audience agrees!

But I am also interested because I’ve known you ‘online’ for like 10 years, and then we met a couple of years ago when we spoke in Denver, and your early books obviously represent an earlier form of you.

I think this is a fear that many non-fiction authors, well, many authors in general have, which is, if I put out a book now, I’m going to change. My thoughts change.

Tara now is different to the Tara who wrote that first book.

What would you say to authors who are scared of putting out what they think now, in case it changes?

Tara: I would say I still wrestle with this question. If I look at my older work, there is some of it that I’m just like, ‘Oh, I can’t believe that that’s still out there and that people are still reading it.’

I’ll get tagged on an Instagram post, ‘Oh, go read Tara’s ‘Quiet Power Strategy.’ It’s really awesome.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay.’

Joanna: And it’s still helping people.

Tara: Absolutely. And so I think that that maybe is the key, is that what you have to say now can help people, and if it’s valuable now then it’s worth being said, it’s worth being written.

And then yes, you are going to grow, you are going to change, you’re going to learn new things, your opinions might change, your perspective might change, and actually documenting that growth is also useful for people.

I made a post on Instagram yesterday, just talking about the 10 years that I’ve been in business, and all of the changes that I’ve made. Because really, if there’s any theme that connects all of my work over the last 10 years, it’s change and evolution.

A bunch of people commented that they’ve learned so much by just my willingness to change and evolve. And so I think that that applies to our written work as well.

I think it can be tempting to think that when we write a book, it becomes this artifact that has to stand on its own for all time, or it needs to go out of print. I think that there is room for looking at writing books as a journey and as your whole catalog as a body of work that has its own value in how it’s evolved.

And that’s a really important part of showing the breadth of whatever it is that you’re talking about and your perspective as a writer and thinker.

Joanna: I agree with you. And of course, I’ve been sharing my journey for about 10 years of the podcast, and 10 years with a blog and everything, and it’s kind of crazy. And the stuff we talked about then we were learning then. And now, we’re learning new things.

Let’s get into the book. Because what I really like about ‘Subtle’ is it’s not for newbies, it is not actually for people starting out. It’s about what happens next, which is great.

So, many of my authors are new, but many of them might have a lot of books, they might have been doing this for years, they might feel stagnant or at a plateau in their business. And I’ve felt like that too.

How do we move out of that stagnant phase without blowing away everything we love?

Tara: It’s a great question. And I think that often, stagnation just comes from asking ourselves the same questions that we’ve always asked ourselves. And the best way to break out of that stagnation is to start asking new questions.

And yes, mindset has everything to do with that as well. I talk about this a little bit in the book. But mindset isn’t something that you change and then everything is hunky dory. You can’t just flip a switch on your mindset.

It is something that you need to integrate into your daily actions, integrate into the way you approach things, the way you plan for things, the goals that you set. And so one way we can actually do that, one way we can step into a new mindset and open ourselves for growth beyond that plateau is by asking different questions.

And so if you’re trying to figure out maybe a problem, or a challenge, or an obstacle that you’ve had in your business for a while, something that you feel like has you stuck in that plateau, try asking that question in a different way.

What would it look like if? What would it look like if I charged 10 times more for this? What would it look like if I took down my website? What would it look like if I put all my books out of print and reworked them and relaunched them all at the same time?

None of those things are advice, by the way, but it’s a question that you can ask yourself to see things in a different way. And in doing so you can actually activate that creative thinking side of things, so that you’re not trying to business your way through the next phase of your business, but instead, you’re actually using those creative problem-solving skills that are the reason you’re both a writer and a business owner.

And in asking those new questions, then find possibilities, find potential, find opportunities that you might not have had otherwise, or might not have seen otherwise. Because we really get in a rut, right?

Plateaus are caused by mindset, yes, they’re caused by broken business models, and just looking at challenges wrong. But they’re also caused by being in a rut, doing the same thing the same way, year after year after year, without questioning whether it’s the right thing or not.

I think the best thing that you can do to start breaking out of that plateau is questioning the way you do things, questioning what it could look like if you did things completely differently. Questioning whether the conventions or the assumptions that you’ve been operating under, whether they’re actually true or not.

It might feel like a lot of almost busy work at first, because you are going to ask yourself just ridiculous questions that are not necessarily productive.

But one question leads to another, leads to another, and now suddenly, you have a completely different way to see things, and that completely different way of seeing things allows you to create something that does help you finally pass that plateau.

Joanna: It’s interesting because I feel that so often, the business owner label is quite difficult for writers, because you feel like, well, I’m a writer, how can I write books differently? Or, how do I ask these questions?

If people want to go from, say, mid, you know, 250K, which is what you kind of talked about, up to a higher six-figure or seven-figure business, and then it’s like, well, it’s just me, but I don’t want to outsource the writing.

So, I guess so my challenge here is, how do we figure out what questions to ask? How do you step outside your head, as Tara? Do you have a coach? Do you take a weekend walking? Because I know that’s kind of what people will be thinking.

How do you actually figure out those questions?

Tara: First off, I love everything you just suggested. Yes, hire a coach or take yourself out for a weekend where you’re just out of your element, and you’re just seeing things differently because you’re in a different place.

Those things absolutely work. Pick one that feels right for you.

But something else that you can do, something that I love to do when I feel like I’m in a rut, when I feel like I’ve plateaued and like, I feel like there’s nowhere else for me to turn, is I start looking at other industries.

And Joanna, I think this is something that you do really well is that you haven’t gotten yourself stuck in, ‘this is what the writer’s business model looks like,’ right? You have looked at all sorts of different kinds of businesses, all sorts of different kinds of companies, and you’ve asked yourself, ‘What can I learn from this?’

And so one way to start asking different questions is by exposing yourself to different stories, different information. So that might mean listening to different podcasts or incorporating…don’t stop listening to Joanna’s podcast…but incorporate different podcasts from different industries into your listening time.

Read books from different industries. Talk to business owners who aren’t just other writers, but instead are building different kinds of companies, who are operating under different kind of models, who have different kinds of teams, different kinds of operations, different kinds of products, and find out what questions they’re asking themselves, and then start asking those questions of yourself.

Sometimes it’s almost like the idea of like, copy like an artist, right? Where you have to understand how other people are doing what they’re doing, so that then you can apply that to your own business.

And at first it’s going to feel like I’m just doing what they’ve done, or I’m just copying them. But eventually, you start to integrate that into the way you think, and you start to see your issues differently.

That is probably my favorite thing to do when I need to see things differently is instead of asking myself what would another business coach do? Or what would another community manager do? I ask myself what’s Mark Zuckerberg doing? Well, not right now. I’m not asking myself that right now at all.

But I would absolutely ask myself what’s Howard Schultz doing? He’s not the founder technically of Starbucks, but he’s sort of like the spiritual founder of Starbucks. And I ask myself, ‘What is Starbucks doing right now to innovate on their business, to grow their customer base, to respond to the market?’ Starbucks is actually making a ton of changes right now, because they’re paying attention to their market.

So what can I learn from that? What questions do I think they’re asking in their marketing meetings? And how can I apply that to my business?

The same thing, every time I go grocery shopping at our new Whole Foods here in Central Pennsylvania, which was just so exciting when that opened. Every time I’m in that building I’m asking myself, why is this thing here? Why is that sign there? Why are these employees so happy?

I’m thinking, all right, what was the strategy there? What were the questions that were asked, and how can I apply that to my business?

But the more you dig in and say, ‘Well, I’m a writer, and this is the way my business has to be,’ or ‘this is what all the writers before me have done,’ the less possibility you see, the less potential, the less opportunity you have, and the less creative you’re going to be thinking about your business.

I have a feeling when you write books, you don’t just read books that are just like the books you’re writing, right? We read all sorts of different things. We read them, we read different fields, we read different genres.

It’s the same thing with business. The more you expose yourself to the different kinds of questions different business owners ask, the better you’ll be able to approach your own business.

Joanna: I totally agree. That’s what I enjoy about your podcast. You interview a lot of different people from different industries, and like you’ve got one, I’ve got one I haven’t listened to yet on a print product person who’s investing in all physical product.

I have a digital-only print-on-demand type business. And I’m like, ‘That’s going to challenge me.’ I’m saving it for a moment where I need to be challenged. But it is really interesting to do that.

Also, one of the things that I got from the book, so I’m a goal setter. I mean, January, as we’re talking doing the interview, and I’m like, ‘I have loads of goals, and I blog my goals, and I’m very goalie,’ but you talk about process in the book, and the importance of process.

I’m actually really terrible at doing process documents and stuff, even though I was a business consultant and that’s what I used to do. That may be where the resistance is, to be honest.

How can going through our processes and honing our processes actually lead us to success?

Tara: I see goals and process as being two sides of the same coin. You can’t have goals without process, and process without goals is just busy work, right? And that’s one of the reasons we resist process so much is that it’s not connected to goals that we care about.

Process is incredibly important to me, even though I’m not an operations person. My actual operations person would very much like to slap my wrist on a daily basis for me not using Asana, and not documenting my work. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t think in terms of process.

I think maybe that’s the first place that we need to start is documentation, super duper important; figuring out what works and repeating that, making it a replicable process, super important. But the first thing we need to do is recognize that we have a process, and that recognizing that process is how we start making forward progress toward our goal.

All that really means is starting to pay attention to the work that you do in a new way. What are the questions that you ask yourself every time you start a new book? What are the questions that you ask yourself every time you go to market a new book? How do you put together an outline for a book? How do you write the first chapter?

There are certain things, most, 99% of the time, that you do exactly the same way each time. But if we’re not paying attention to that, it’s very easy to miss it. I used to miss it all the time, and until I started paying attention to it more, I couldn’t recognize that, ‘Oh, I already have a system.’

I think we have this issue with thinking about process and systems in terms of something that we need to create. One thing I’ve learned from the brilliant Natasha Vorompiova, who is a systems wizard, is that systems are not created, they are recognized and documented.

So, we already have a system. Accept that, love it, breathe it in, you already have that system there, the process is already there.

The goal then is to recognize it and start documenting it when you do. So like I said, that first step is really recognizing it. But, on the flip side of that then, if we want to look a little bit more closely at goals, it’s incredibly important that when you set a goal, you also start to recognize what processes go into creating that goal.

So just a completely random and outside of business example of this. Last year, I set a goal for myself to be able to do 10 unassisted pull-ups in a row. So bang them out, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And at the beginning of the year, I couldn’t do a single pull up. I did my first pull up last January, and then I was like, ‘I’m going to do 10 of these.’

Early on in the year, what I did was I went through my usual, I’m a rock climber, a boulderer. So I would go through my bouldering workout basically. I’d climb, climb, climb, and then I’d try and do a pull-up. And I would do one, and then maybe the next month I’d be able to do two. And maybe the next month, I’d be able to do three.

And I was like, ‘This is great. I’m going to get to 10 in no time.’ Well, of course, we know that’s not how that works.

What happened? I plateaued. And what I realized is that I didn’t actually have a process for getting to those 10 pull ups. And when we’re talking about strength training, strength training is always a process. There’s a process to how you approach those strength goals, and it’s called a training program.

So what did I do? I started a training program that was specific to pull-ups, and it took me through almost a little bit of a counter-intuitive workout for working up to those 10 pull-ups. And I worked on that program in the second half of the year, and before I knew it, come December, I don’t know when I actually hit it, it was like December 15, I was like, ‘I’m going to see if I can do it, today.’

And I hopped on the bar. Boom. Knocked out those 10 pull ups. Did it the next week and did it again.

But I had to have a process behind actually getting there, or else I was just wishing that it was going to happen. Like I said, you’ve got to recognize the process that exists or a process that you can adopt, that helps you get to that goal. And you have to tie that process to your goals, and your goals have to be tied to a process.

So it has to be two sides of the same coin, they have to go work hand in hand, or else one is always going to suffer at the expense of the other.

Joanna: I like that, and of course, authors are great at wishing things would happen.

Tara: Right. So are entrepreneurs.

Joanna: Good point. Everyone’s like, ‘I just start a business, put a website up, but I’ve got a million dollars.’

Tara: Yeah. No.

Joanna: I really like that. Now, you’ve put out some blog posts in the last year or so, which I loved, about you and your audience getting sick of the perpetual launch cycle. And you’re very authentic, your voice, you are authentic and I love this post that you talk about this.

I know many authors listening feel the same way. Because launching a book, similar to launching a digital product, or a coaching thing or whatever, is similar.

And at the moment in the author community, it’s very much Amazon advertising is the big thing, and so there’s this kind of perpetual launch cycle.

What do you think we need to do if we want to build a long term sustainable pipeline without having to do this nightmare launch thing all the time?

Tara: I could talk about this all day long. But I will try and keep it, not brief, but I will try to not go off on 100 different tangents here.

First of all, you’ve got to recognize that business is a long game. It’s a long game, period. And if you’re doing things that make it difficult to stay in it for the long game, and I think that that perpetual launch cycle is one of those things that makes it hard to stay in it for the long game, you’ve got to recognize that you need to make a change.

Even if you feel like it’s working right now, you got to ask yourself, is this still going to be working five years from now? Am I still going to be working five years from now? And actually, I was thinking about this on the treadmill this morning, so forgive the fitness example again, but I’m going to give it.

I was thinking about heart rate training specifically. When I started running, I thought the goal was to run as fast as I could and for as long as I could, and then like, eventually I would get faster and I could do that for longer.

That’s not actually how running works. That’s a really good way to get injured though, and get sidelined for months, which is what happened. Then I discovered heart rate training, and the goal of heart rate training is to keep your heart rate in a particular zone, that actually feels pretty easy.

For me, that’s about 155 beats per minute. Yes, it’s cardio exercise, but it’s not high intensity, it’s not HIIT training, it’s not intervals, it’s just, I’m in the state that my body can stay in for 45 minutes, an hour, two hours, longer, which is pretty cool.

And so with heart rate training, you learn how to do that for longer, and longer, and longer. And as you do it for longer, your heart rate actually even starts to come down from there. So like an ultra marathoner that I know, his heart rate goals are like to stay below 140 as he’s running 100 miles at a time.

I started thinking about how we approach business, and I think very often, we approach business like it’s HIIT training, high-intensity interval training, where our goal is to go all out, and then we rest. And then we go all out and then we rest.

And we don’t think that it’s working, we don’t think that it’s doing what we need it to do, unless we’re in an intense period of, ‘Yes, I’m going to launch this book to as many people as possible.’ But that, to me, is not good for the long game.

You’re going to get burnt out, you’re going to get injured, and things are going to start to fall apart. And instead, I would like to think about my business as how can I keep this momentum, and still honoring seasonality, still honoring different enrollment periods, and maybe there are different sales promotions. But what does that long haul burn look like in my business?

And so that’s what I’ve started to think about in terms of how we set up a marketing strategy to make this really work. Okay, so then what does that actually look like? Yes, Tara, that sounds good. I want to keep my heart rate down. Awesome. But what does that actually look like?

Last week, I released an interview with a Facebook ad strategist named Amanda Bond, and the big question that we really wanted to answer is, is it still possible to make money with Facebook ads? And what I’m hearing from you is that also Amazon ads, Google ad, whatever it is, is it still possible to make money with digital advertising?

What she has identified with all of the data that she has from running campaigns is that yes, these things can still work. But the way we’ve been approaching them is all wrong.

We’ve been trying to squeeze our audiences into these launches, into these big promotions, into this launch cycle in our business, instead of having that steady burn of relationship building, just regular good content that’s going out, of nurturing people along, of allowing them to find their way in the work that we do and get really comfortable with our brands, and then to be there when they’re ready for whatever we have to offer.

I know for me personally, this is absolutely something that I have experienced and something that I needed to move away from a few years ago. I was absolutely squeezing my audience through launches, through enrollment periods, through campaigns. And I was getting diminishing returns on it.

So luckily I said, ‘What am I going to do about this?’ I started re-engaging with my audience in a much more human way. Asking them to write back, asking them to DM me, actually having conversations with people instead of hoping that they would jump from lead magnet, to webinar, to purchase.

Not surprisingly, I have a much better relationship with my audience now. And so now, when I release something, like a new book, or when we open enrollment on the network, people are way more likely to jump on that, because they’ve experienced things that feel really good to them. They know where it fits.

They know why it applies to them, that it has context. And so context building, and relationship building, and not putting up false boundaries and walls between us and our audience. I think that’s really how you start to break out of that launch cycle and find that long game of marketing and business ownership that we really need to be in if we’re going to be making this work for more than a couple of years.

Joanna: I love that. And also, it’s not just about the audience, it’s also about us. And it can get, as you said, the whole burnout and almost the stagnation we talked about, the boredom even, with some of the same processes over and again.

I might be wrong, but I think your fitness journey kind of really went up a notch probably around the time you were making these decisions. And as you said, you’re a climber now, you’re running, all kinds of things. You are hiking around the world and being amazing with your husband and your daughter.

I wondered, because since we’ve talked, I co-wrote a book called ‘The Healthy Writer’ with a medical doctor. So I love hearing about this, and people are like, ‘Oh, well, I don’t have enough time.’

<h3

Tara: In every possible way. So first off, I have lots of fitness metaphors that I can use to explain business things, which I’m sure doesn’t appeal to everyone. That’s totally fine, but the people it appeals to is awesome.

But that aside, first off, I know with my fitness practice that when I start the day with a workout, my whole workday is better. I’m starting with an hour, an hour and a half of something that I control.

Even if it’s 15 minutes, I am there, I am showing up, I am 100% present because I have to be. If I’m not present, I could get hurt. It’s not fun if I’m not 100% there. So starting the day in that way has been a huge change for me. It’s helped me understand my approach to process, it’s helped me understand my approach to goals. There is so much synergy and overlap between fitness and business.

And really the reason that I got into fitness in the first place, two years ago now, was when I really started at least thinking about it, was I looked around at the entrepreneurs around me, I looked at my immediate network, I looked at people who had businesses that kind of represented the ideal of what I wanted to have, the kinds of companies that I wanted to build.

I looked at all these people and they were crossfitters, they were climbers, they were runners, they were weightlifters. Didn’t all mean that they looked super buff or that they were super thin, or all the things that we associate with fitness. Instead, I think their brain was the thing.

That was getting that effect of their daily or weekly fitness practice. And so I said, ‘Okay, well, if all these people have this thing in common, maybe I should get this a try too because I want to be like them.’

I want to have that kind of discipline, I want to have that kind of mental fortitude. And so just little bit by little bit, I fit it in at the beginning of every day, and over time, the workouts got longer, they got harder, I tried to do new things, and I just loved it. I love every minute of it still.

There is no workout I don’t look forward to anymore, and I truly believe that that has helped me change the way I look at my business, it’s helped me change the way I look at my working style, like the work that I do on a daily basis, it’s given me mental clarity.

It has taught me so many things about the concept of discipline and mental fortitude. And my perspective on those things has changed as a result of my fitness practice. So I’m not sure if I’m answering your original question or not, but fitness has become this non-negotiable that allows me to show up for my business, and my audience, and my team in a way that I was not able to show up before.

Joanna: And after all that it also feels good.

Tara: Yes, it does feel good.

Joanna: Happy times. And I love that you go hiking with your family and you put pictures of that on Instagram and stuff. We’ll say where people can find you in a minute.

But just one more question about your business. You were last on the show as Tara Gentile, you have had a business which had a different name. You’ve rebranded a lot in a personal way and a business way in the last few years.

So many authors go through this, because they might start writing under a new pen name, so almost like starting from scratch.

What have you learned from rebranding about the best way to do it and the bad ways to do it?

Tara: I have definitely learned a lot.

First off, there’s no such thing as over communication. You cannot tell people too much that you’re making a change. It is impossible. That means you tell the story over and over again, it means you go on brilliant podcasts and you let other people ask you about it and you tell the story over and over again.

It means you send out more emails than you think that you could possibly send out, letting people know that things are changing. It means that you talk to as many people as you can as many times as you can to get that changed, even started.

And guess what? I’m still talking about things that have been over for years. So it is another long game, and that you cannot over communicate.

I think that another thing that’s really important is having a very clear reason why you’re making a change, and a very clear story behind it.

When I announced that I was going from Tara Gentile to Tara McMullin, I wrote a big long post about why that change was important to me. Gentile was my ex-husband’s last name. I had all sorts of baggage…no, I shouldn’t say I had baggage around that, but there were all sorts of negative associations with that time in my life.

The only reason I still had that name and hadn’t gone back to my maiden name was because of my business. And I decided that it was more important to me at that time to make this change than it was to hold on to this past business reputation or maybe cause some moment some short term confusion.

I wrote that out and I told that story in a Medium post. And unsurprisingly, as any wedding announcement is going to get, it got a lot of attention. There was lots of applause on the Medium post, and that allowed me to start creating that foundation for the change before it even actually happened.

And so now, we’re going through this rebranding process again, and I’m doing the same thing, I’m thinking about, like, what is the real reason why we’ve made this change? How can I start telling that story even before we made the change?

I’ve spent all of January really seeding this idea so that when it actually happens, when I make that announcement, people are like, ‘Oh, of course, that’s what you’re doing.’

For the people that we let in on the secret first, that’s exactly the reaction that they had, and the more and more we build up to it, I think, it will not surprise me if in the next day or two, because we’re recording this before the change has actually happened or before the announcement’s actually been made, if someone says, ‘Hey, are you going to make a change?’ And I’ll be like, ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

That’s my goal. I think that it’s very tempting anytime you do a rebrand, a relaunch, a renaming, to think that you have to pull back the curtain all at once, very dramatically, and be like, ‘All right, we’re here now.’

I don’t actually think that’s the right way to do it. I don’t think that’s the best way to do it. I think you want to lay that groundwork first, start telling the story first, and then make the announcement so that it feels really inevitable.

And then like I said, over communicate, over communicate, over communicate about that change, and be prepared to do it for years, because that’s been my experience every time I make a change. It is years down the line for it to really feel like it was final and permanent and people get it.

Joanna: I also think that another important lesson is that you’ve done this a number of times. I started out as Joanna Penn, and then I split into JF Penn for my fiction, and I’m starting another podcast, and another website, and everything.

So, we do these things, and you and I have been doing it long enough that we’re not scared of it. There’s a lot of work to be done, but we’re like, ‘Okay, we know we’ll get there.’ So that’s actually quite a big thing, too, I think.

Tara: I completely agree. It can be scary, and intimidating, and a little overwhelming any time you make a big change. But I think realizing that business is change, business is evolution.

Businesses that try and stay the course without changing tend to be the businesses that don’t last very long, or maybe they’ll last for 20 years and then all of a sudden, their market dries up and they go out of business.

I think we’ve seen that actually a lot in the last 10, 15 years here in the 21st century. Those 20th century businesses that resisted change for so long, they don’t exist anymore, even though they used to be behemoths.

I love change. I love evolution, probably to a flaw. But yes, I think that embracing that evolution and allowing it to show you what that right next step is, even if it’s a scary thing like rebranding, or renaming, or stepping out with a new name, I think that’s really important.

Joanna: And talking of change, so tell us about the ‘What Works’ network and how ‘Creative Listening’ might find that useful.

Tara: The ‘What Works’ network is a community of small business owners who are coming together to talk about what works, and what’s not working, and what might work.

Basically, our philosophy is that what works in a small business is going to be different for every small business. Sure, there are some basic things that most of us anyway, have in common, or that might be best practices. But beyond that, we are largely finding our own way.

I think that here in 2019, a lot of small business owners have been sold a bill of goods, saying this is the right way to do ads, this is the right way to write a book, this is the right way to market, this, that, or the other thing, and I don’t believe those things are true.

I believe, sure, that might be a good way to do those things, but it’s going to be a little bit different for every single business.

And so what we really like to do is recognize and elevate the resourcefulness, and the problem solving, and the decision making that each entrepreneur brings to the table, and give them the space to gather the information that they need to really make use of that resourcefulness, and decision making, and creative problem solving.

That’s what our community is all about. It’s essentially like a mini social network, where you can connect with people, have these kinds of conversations, have a lot of back and forth. We host virtual events on a monthly basis, things like virtual conferences, business owner roundtables, expert Q&As, and all sorts of opportunities to just get people connecting, and again, talking about what works.

It’s this really easy to access, accessible place for people to hang out and get, if not answers to the questions that they have, the information that they need to find their own answers.

Joanna: And I’d say it’s definitely for people who do want to run a better business.

Tara: Yes.

Joanna: So if you’re listening and that’s you, then check that out, and also the ‘What Works Podcast,’ which is fantastic.

Where else can people find you and everything you do online?

Tara: You can find the ‘What Works’ network and the podcast at explorewhatworks.com, and you can find me on an almost daily basis on Instagram.

Instagram is my main social hub at this point here in this world of social media here today in January 2019. Who knows what it might be two years from now? But you can find me there.

I’m @Tara_McMullin. I post to my stories, I post to the feed, I answer DMs. So if you want to connect with me a little bit more personally, Instagram is the place to go.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Tara. That was great.

Tara: Thank you.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Writers and creatives know we need to be present on social media – and it’s no surprise that many of us are introverts.

So, how do we reconcile being introverted and being active on social media? In today’s article, Ella Barnard gives us some tips.

First, keep in mind that while extroverts like attention, introverts can be amazing at engaging with people on social media, especially when they have the right mindset and tools. Introverts are great listeners, they think before they speak, they are great observers, and they are compassionate leaders.

As an introvert on social media, you can bring all those qualities to your interactions with people. You will stay on the right topic which is the books and readers. You can be genuine, thoughtful, curious, and caring. You just need to know how to express it.

Why is it so important to be engaged with people on social media? Because it’s a key part of building your indie author platform. You don’t have a huge marketing team putting your book all over the internet.

But that’s okay because there are benefits to having direct access to your potential readers on social media. It’s where your readers:

• spend time
• chat about what they are reading
• go to get recommendations

And it’s where you get to interact with them for free! In one friendly interaction, people can go from stranger to friend, or from random customer to your customer.

But knowing all that doesn’t do any good if engaging with strangers is a challenge for you. And if you’re an introvert, you know how difficult it can be to put yourself out there.

First, take some of the pressure off.

You don’t have to BFF everyone on the internet. It’s okay to start with baby steps. Make one comment. Meet one new reader friend. Celebrate and acknowledge your progress.

Here are some ways that introverts can easily start interacting and building relationships with their ideal readers and fellow authors on social media:

Where to Start

1. Join genre-themed Facebook groups. Groups are hot right now. They get a lot of engagement and have a lot of people interacting with each other.

They’re great for introverts because, unlike a Facebook Page, the pressure of producing content doesn’t fall solely on you. They’re a great place to lurk and see what’s happening with the fans of your genre.

2. Show up as a person. A big resistance for many indie authors is they don’t want to come across on social media as salesy or sleazy. Which makes sense.

For introverts and extroverts alike, being too salesy feels gross. That’s why when it’s time to interact with readers online, put your “sales” hat away and show up in the groups as a regular person, or better yet, as a fellow fan of the genre.

3. Uplevel your “Like,” by leaving a short comment. Instead of clicking “thumbs up,” “heart” or “wow” emojis, uplevel your response and leave a short comment.

It can be something as simple as “This is great!” or “I love this,” or actually typing out, “Wow!” The couple of seconds it takes to actually type a response pay back dividends over time.

I have a friend who leaves simple comments like, “Thanks!” and “You too!” and he gets exponentially more engagement on his posts because people know that he cares enough to type a real response. This is great for introverts because you don’t actually have to come up with interesting comments. You just have to type out the words instead of clicking and emoji.

4. Comment with a gif. People LOVE gifs! Again, instead of just clicking the “like” button, take a few seconds to choose a pertinent (or funny) gif.

For introverts, this is awesome because you don’t even really have to say anything. Just post a gif as a comment.

What to Post

These are the most effective strategies and they’re great for introverts because they put the focus where it should be, on the readers. It’s not about you or your book. It’s about the other people in the group–your potential readers.

Here are some simple ways to give amazing value without giving too much of yourself:

1. Recommend books (not your own). Readers love book recommendations. They’re always looking for new authors and good stories. So help them out with a simple recommendation.

I’m not talking about lengthy, in-depth reviews here. A screenshot or image of the book cover and some brief text is enough, “Hey! I just read this book and loved it. It has dragons!”

This is great for introverts because the bulk of the process is reading the book! Yes! Another excuse to buy and read more books, “I needed it for my social media!”

2. Post subject- or genre-related games and memes. You know those predictive text posts? They’re super fun, but minimal effort to find and post.

Go to Pinterest and search for “Facebook games” or “reading memes.” That’s right. You don’t have to make them up yourself. You can post someone else’s game, easy peasy. Just make sure they are related to books, reading, or your genre.

3. Start conversations with a question. Don’t want to talk about yourself? Great! Be interested in everyone else.

In Facebook groups dedicated to your genre, ask simple open-ended questions. My favorite conversation starter is “What is your favorite [your genre] book?”

Asking questions works well for introverts because you don’t have to talk about yourself. Instead, you create a space for your potential readers to talk about themselves.

4. Keep asking questions. Be curious. When someone comments on your post or replies to your comment, ask a follow-up question. Let the focus stay on them.

All you have to do is be interested in who they are. That should be natural; you’re writers. Observing and learning people is a big part of what you do. If you are engaging back and forth, and run out of questions, fall back on some of the tips from above, leave a short comment or a gif.

Like anything, engaging with readers on social media gets easier with practice. The more you do it, the more natural it will feel. Especially as strangers turn into friends, readers, and fans. It takes time, but not as much time as you think.

Keep in mind, they’re probably introverts too. And you already know you have something in common–your shared passion for books!

Are you an introvert who’s active on social media? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Ella Barnard hosts the Author Like a Boss podcast. She helps authors who are ready to jump into self-publishing so they can quit their job and make a living with their writing. It’s hard work. It isn’t sexy, but it’s doable. And it’s easier with friends.

She coaches indie authors in her Author Boss Academy. To find out more, or sign up for a free training, go to authorlikeaboss.com.